Last week, I did a deep dive into Washington’s parental leave program and found that nearly 40 percent of Washingtonian women between the ages of eighteen and forty-five are ineligible for benefits because they fail to meet the program’s work history requirements. But Washington is not an outlier in this regard. All twelve state parental leave programs have work history requirements that exclude a huge percentage of women from benefits.

The table below contains a list of the work history requirements for each of the twelve states. States express work history requirements in terms of hours worked, days worked, weeks worked, and earnings, with some states using more than one of these measures.