From 1 January 2011, Australian families in which a mother was in the paid workforce before the birth or adoption of a baby may be eligible for a new Australian Government-funded Paid Parental Leave (PPL) scheme. The scheme provides eligible parents with up to 18 weeks of Parental Leave Pay, paid at the National Minimum Wage, following the birth of a child.

The Australian Government seeks to achieve three main objectives in introducing the scheme:

• to enhance the health of babies and mothers, and the development of children, by enabling working mothers to spend longer at home with their newborn children
• to facilitate women’s labour force participation
• to encourage gender equity and improve the balance of family and work life in Australian families.

An independent evaluation of the PPL scheme was completed over four phases between 2010 and 2014. This phase 4 evaluation assessed progress towards the ‘ultimate’ outcomes of the initial PPL Scheme. These outcomes relate to women’s workforce participation, mothers’ and babies’ health and wellbeing, gender equity, and work-life balance. This report compares outcomes and experiences of mothers before and after the introduction of PPL to assess progress towards these ultimate outcomes.

Phase 4 uses data from the following sources:

• BaMS (Baseline Mothers Survey) – a pre-PPL survey, conducted in Phase 1.
• FaWCS (Family and Work Cohort Study) – a post-PPL survey of mothers who gave birth in October or November 2011 and who were granted PLP or were granted the Baby Bonus and probably were eligible for PLP.
• Pre-PPL in-depth interview study of mothers who gave birth in October or November 2009 and would have been eligible for PPL had it existed at the time.
• Post-PPL in-depth interview study of PPL eligible mothers who gave birth in October or November 2011. This study also focused on mothers in groups of special policy interest: single mothers, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander mothers, mothers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and mothers employed on casual contracts or self-employed before the birth.

One of the key findings of the evaluation was that PPL had a clear effect on delaying mothers’ return to work up to about six months after the birth of their baby, and then slightly increasing their probability of returning to work before the baby’s first birthday. An indication of the size of the effect is provided by estimates of the proportion of mothers who had returned to work in matched pre- and post-PPL survey samples of mothers.