Mother's Day: Top 10 states for working moms

2. Connecticut (A-)

Mike Segar/Reuters/File
Peg Oliveira, left, and her partner Jennifer Vickery celebrate their marriage, holding their daughter Willow, shortly after the two were married outside New Haven City Hall in New Haven, Conn., in 2008. The state's FMLA applies to same-sex couples.

Connecticut's FMLA law allows for 16 weeks off in a 24-month period, instead of 12 weeks in 12 months, which is particularly helpful for maternity leave.

Parenting laws also apply to same-sex couples, since same-sex marriage is legal in Connecticut. Federal FMLA law does not.

Pregnant women protected are under Connecticut’s antidiscrimination law and enjoy flexible use of sick leave. Both public and private sector workplaces offer workplace nursing rights for an unspecified period of time after childbirth. Job-protected medical leave for pregnancy disability is required of businesses with three or more employees.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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