Employer and Employee Responses to Dobbs V. Jackson

More than a year has passed since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs V. Jackson ruling overturned federal abortion rights. During this period, employers in states making abortion illegal have stepped in to cover out-of-state abortion-related healthcare not available locally. But to what effect?

New findings co-authored by Associate Professor of Management and Organization Evan Starr at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business reveals employers who announced out-of-state abortion travel benefits enjoyed a substantial rise in job seeker interest but suffered a deterioration in employee satisfaction.

Overall, the results “suggest that company-sponsored, out-of-state abortion care policies are unlikely to substitute for state policies sanctioning abortion,” says Starr, whose previous research is cited 60-plus times in the FTC proposal to block noncompete agreements. (Also, his research on nondisclosure agreements and related policy brief spurred the Speak Out Act to curb workplace sexual harassment.)

For his new paper, “We’ve Got You Covered: Employer and Employee Responses to Dobbs v. Jackson,” he collaborated with Indeed Hiring Lab economists Pawel Adrjan, Svenja Gudell, and Allison Shrivastava, plus Emily Nix, assistant professor of finance and business economics at the USC Marshall School of Business, and Jason Sockin, a postdoctoral scholar with IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Berlin.

Starr and his coauthors combined employer data with job search data from Indeed covering 3 billion job seeker clicks on U.S. job postings and 6.5 million company reviews on Glassdoor.

In a ‘Jobs after Dobbs’ article at Indeed Hiring Lab, they summarize the work, including these key points:

• Hundreds of employers announced support for reproductive healthcare, including covering out-of-state employee travel for abortions, following the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court ruling overturning the federal right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade.
• Employers that announced these policies saw an 8% increase in clicks on their job postings compared with similar jobs at similar employers who did not announce a policy.
• Higher job seeker interest was concentrated in Democratic-leaning states and in typically female-dominated jobs in states where abortion became illegal after Dobbs.
• Satisfaction dropped amongst existing employees at the announcing firms, with online ratings of senior management falling 8%, driven by workers in typically male-dominated jobs.
• Announcing firms raised posted wages in job postings by 4% relative to non-announcing firms. The effect was strongest at firms where existing employee job satisfaction fell most.

Read more, including the full study at SSRN: “We’ve Got You Covered: Employer and Employee Responses to Dobbs v. Jackson” and “Jobs after Dobbs: How Public Support for Female Employees Both Helped and Hurt Some Employers After Roe v. Wade Was Overturned,” via Indeed Hiring Lab.