A piece in today's New York Times has an interesting suggestion for an Obama executive order: adding family leave and parental benefits to federal grants. As we've seen in lots of research, the big challenge facing women in the sciences appears to be balancing child care responsibilities with work, so anything that improves matters is bound to help.

It's probably most important to implement such things at the postdoc level, since the median age for first PI grants is likely well past peak child bearing years. (The median age for a first R01 is about 42 and has been rising steadily for decades) I had an NSF postdoc back in the early 90's, and not only did it not include any parental leave / benefits, it explicitly excluded any vacation days(!). Definitely not family friendly stuff.

Of course, there are costs to such things - if your postdocs leave for a month or two, you likely have to arrange for someone to take over their experiments. Given the financial pressure that the NIH is under, I can't see a lot of PIs being very excited about this, but I think it's both sensible and the right thing to do.