Cure.fit Launches Gender-Neutral Parental Leave Program
Cure.fit, India’s leading health, and fitness organization announced the launch of its gender-neutral parental leave program for employees. This is an update on the existing maternity and paternity policy of 6 months and would further expand the program to cover non-binary parents.
With this launch, employees who are opting for parenthood through natural birth, surrogacy, or adoption will be eligible to avail of the parental break, regardless of their gender.
The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act 2017 prescribes a maternity break of 26 weeks. If a woman adopts a child under the age of 3 months, then she is eligible for a leave of 12 weeks. Central government employees can avail of paternity leaves for up to 15 days, but no formal policy is in place for employees in the private sector. The leave program from Cure.fit strikingly differs in terms of equalizing the benefits for all parents. This break is a paid leave of 6 months and is followed up with flexible working models for those who’d like to opt for a longer break.
There are monthly check-ins by the team and project members, should the employee choose to get updates on their projects. This is designed to provide an option for the employee to be engaged with the organization during the break and smoothen the learning curve on their return. Once the employee is back, they can choose to continue the previous project that they were working on or be mapped to new projects. The program also addresses the commonly quoted pain point of decelerated careers during parental breaks, by not altering the employee appraisal cycles.
Ankit Gupta, Head of Product & Engineering at the organization said, “One of the core values at Cure.fit is ‘doing the right thing’. In an era, where we’re collectively on a journey to remove labels and enable all individuals to discover their best selves and be better every day, this program organically seemed like the right thing to do. The program empowers our employees to design a life best suited to their aspirations and eliminates bias”.
