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Bess Adler for the Wall Street Journal Angela Johnson was on maternity leave when she learned KKR had extended its paid leave.
KKR & Co. KKR, -0.97% is undertaking an experiment intended to make high finance more family-friendly.
Last year, the New York-based investment firm began offering new parents an unusually generous package of benefits. As one of the perks, for instance, the firm pays to fly nannies and infants on business trips during the baby’s first year.
Employees and executives say the policy changes are a welcome start toward making it easier for people at KKR to manage family life with the demands of the private-equity business, where extensive travel and workweeks of 70-plus hours are the norm. But the tensions of being a working parent in finance are far from resolved, the firm acknowledges.
Among the company’s goals: to attract and keep more talented women, who make up 18% of the firm’s 510 core investment professionals and about 31% of its personnel overall, and to encourage more fathers to take meaningful parental leave. KKR says the number of female employees has increased about 4% since the start of the year.
At a time when companies like Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +0.13% , Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -0.67% and Credit Suisse Group CS, -0.81% have expanded benefits for new parents, KKR’s offerings are notable. In addition to its flying caregivers, the firm officially recast maternity and paternity leave as gender-neutral “parental leave,” expanded paid leave for primary caregivers to 16 weeks and retained coaches to advise employees going on and returning from leave. The firm also pays shipping costs so that mothers can send breast milk home and even offers unlimited coverage for fertility treatments, a spokeswoman says.
Read the full story on WSJ.com.
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