Law360 (July 15, 2020, 6:20 PM EDT) -- The U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau wants to hear from the public on how existing state- and employer-provided paid family leave programs and their accessibility — or lack thereof — affect women and their families, according to a request for information issued Wednesday.

The Women's Bureau will open a 60-day comment period starting Thursday, it said in the RFI. The goal: to identify the most effective practices related to eligibility requirements, costs, administrative models and access to information in the programs.

In particular, the bureau is interested in hearing from employers, employees and other interested parties about their experiences with paid leave programs for employees of different income levels and employers of varying sizes, according to Women's Bureau Director Laurie Todd-Smith.

Todd-Smith said in a statement Wednesday that "expanding workplace flexibility has long been a priority" for the bureau.

"Paid leave may also be valuable in enhancing the upward mobility of women workers and the well-being of American families," she said.

A number of studies have linked paid family leave to increases in a mother's likelihood of being employed after childbirth, women's participation in the labor force and women's wage earnings and work hours, the bureau said in the RFI.

Access to paid leave, however, is mainly concentrated among high-skilled and highly compensated industries, it said.

In 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that just 18% of private sector workers in the U.S. had access to paid family leave through their employers, per the RFI.

The bureau pointed to a DOL report from 2012 that found that 59% of all workers had access to unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires covered employers to provide eligible employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave for specific family and medical reasons.

Specifically, the Women's Bureau said it wants to learn more about the benefits and costs of paid leave, the unique needs of workers and employers in regard to paid time off for care obligations, barriers to access, features of existing programs that work well and features that do not work well.

Comments can be submitted online or via mail, the bureau said.

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.

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