Facebook has just announced that starting today, all 12,000 of its employees around the world, regardless of gender or position in the company, are entitled to four months of paid baby leave. The new policy will not affect the social media giant's existing maternity leave.
Lori Matloff Goler, the company's head of Human Resources, broke the news in an official Facebook post.
"Our approach to benefits at Facebook is to support our employees and the people who matter most to them." She wrote. "We want to be there for our people at all stages of life, and in particular we strive to be a leading place to work for families. An important part of this is offering paid parental or 'baby' leave."
The new universal parental leave is a huge win for same-sex couples and new fathers that work at Facebook.
In the announcement, Goler reasoned that, "For too long, paid baby leave has been granted only to a mother who is giving birth. We believe that fathers and mothers alike deserve the same level of support when they are starting and growing a family, regardless of how they define family."
Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chairman and CEO, will be one of the first employees to avail of the new parental leave. In his own Facebook post last week, he said he would be taking two months off to be his wife Priscilla, who is carrying the couple's first child.
"Studies show that when working parents take time to be with their newborns, outcomes are better for the children and families," he wrote in his Facebook post. "This is a very personal decision, and I've decided to take two months of paternity leave when our daughter arrives."
Facebook joins a growing list of tech companies making the move to full paternity leave such as Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Netlix and Spotify.
