Next week a new parental leave policy goes into effect in the UK, extending the length of leave for up to 50 weeks after the birth or adoption of a baby, with 39 of the 50 weeks subsidised. After the first two weeks, a mother in a two-earner family can transfer all or some of the remaining weeks to the father, allowing her to go back to work earlier and him to stay home longer than in the past.
As someone living in the US, where there is no guaranteed paid leave for mothers, let alone fathers, it’s tempting to look at the UK policies and say “count your blessings”. But as a researcher who has studied how men’s secondary role at home and women’s second-class role at work are mutually reinforcing, I believe there is good reason to ask for more than is currently on offer.
For one thing, fathers are only eligible for leave if their wives are also employed outside the home. The pay rates for male leave-takers are also pegged too low, making the financial penalty for paternal leave-taking prohibitively high for many families. And as long as the leave is transferable, the experience of other countries suggests that in most families the mother will still use the bulk of it. Only when countries combine generous pay replacement with a use-it-or-lose-it quota for men does fathers’ participation rise significantly.
Some might say that if a couple really want the mother to take the entire leave, we should respect that choice. But when women first won the right to apply for jobs and promotions that were formerly reserved for men, many hesitated to take full advantage of the new opportunities. Only with active encouragement and recruitment, including the establishment of quotas, did women gain the confidence and experience to take on new challenges at work.
Men are in a similar position today when it comes to exercising their rights and obligations in the family. Many of them hesitate to claim family responsibilities traditionally associated with women, fearing they’ll be penalised if they deviate from traditionally masculine roles. In this regard they are right. Studies show that men who take family leave are more likely to be harassed at work, face a greater risk of being demoted, and earn significantly less than other male employees over the long run. No wonder so few men take family leave in countries that fail to make care-giving a social norm for fathers as well as mothers.
But recent research also suggests that once some fathers are induced to take paternity leave, others will follow suit. In Norway, for example, researchers found that having just one person in a workplace or family take leave increased the chance that a co-worker would also do so by 11% and that a brother would do so by 15%.
Furthermore, the experience of taking leave changes men’s behaviour even after they return to work, altering the division of labour at home and at work for years to come. Sociologist Ankita Patnaik found that after Quebec increased parental leave benefits and established a use it or lose it five-week quota for fathers in 2006, men’s take-up rates increased by 250%. By 2010, 80% of eligible men were using the leave, and the duration of their leaves had increased by 150%. Even after exhausting their leave, these fathers kept doing more cooking and shopping, while their partners increased their paid labour. A study of the impact of one “daddy quota” reform in Norway found that couples who bore their last child just after the reform were 50% more likely to share laundry duties than those who had their last child just before the reform. Not surprisingly, they also reported fewer conflicts over housework.
The longer the leave, the greater its impact. In Sweden, fathers who take longer leaves than average remain more involved in childcare and household work than fathers who take shorter leaves.
Just as every generation of working women has passed on more egalitarian values to their children, each generation of involved fathers will do the same. Young men were much more likely to share housework and childcare with their partner if they saw their fathers doing so when they were children. And daughters of hands-on fathers are less likely to be channelled into traditional gender roles at home. In Norway, girls born after the paternity leave reform were assigned fewer household chores as teenagers – many years after their fathers had returned to work – than their counterparts born just before it.
There is already ample research showing that workplaces function better when women are integrated into positions of responsibility, but it also appears that families run more smoothly when men are integrated into household responsibilities. In the UK, Sweden, and the Netherlands, couples in which fathers are more involved in childcare have a lower rate of divorce than couples where the man is less involved. Throughout the Nordic countries, men who take parental leave are less likely to dissolve their unions. In the United States, where low-income cohabiting couples with children tend to have very unstable relationships, a father’s involvement in childcare lowers the risk of dissolution and slightly increases the chance that a couple will marry at some point.
There is even evidence to suggest that recent upturns in fertility in several European countries are associated with increases in the contribution of fathers to childcare and core domestic chores. Working women who see their partner spend time in primary childcare after the birth of a child are more likely to consider having a second child.
The first stage of the gender revolution, which involved integrating women more fully into the public sphere, destabilised traditional male-female relationships. But, as Brown University demographer Frances Goldscheider argues, the next stage, which involves integrating men more fully into the private sphere, may actually strengthen family relationships.
As for those diehards who think that the erosion of traditional gender roles is emasculating men and creating women who put their work life above their love life, a new US study shows just the opposite. In marriages formed since the 1990s, couples who share household work more equally tend to have more sex and to rate their sex lives and marital happiness higher than couples who cling to a more rigid division of labour. If that doesn’t motivate a man to take paid leave when it’s offered, well maybe he just isn’t “man enough” to handle a modern family.
