Jenifer DukeWhen Travis CI first started in February 2012 with 5 male Founders, they didn’t put much thought into where the next employee would live and certainly didn’t think about policies like vacation or conference attendance, least of all maternity/paternity leave. We’re now in our 4th year and currently have 12 male and 11 female Builders (that’s what we call employees), 8 of whom are living in the US (initially, our American employees were hired as contractors due our company being in Germany, but to us they’re all employees). As our company has grown over the years and we’ve increased our US coverage, we’ve had the challenge of finding a balance between the German and American startup work culture. At the same time, with 3 female employees being pregnant at the beginning of the year, all of whom we hired knowing they were already pregnant, we needed to figure out what, if anything, we were offering for maternity leave. In Germany the maternity laws are quite generous with 14 months of paid leave being covered by the government. One of our employees was covered by this. The other two were employees based in the US and while we try to offer the same benefits to our American employees as we do to the German ones, we didn’t have anything in place for parental leave.
Justine Arreche
