Despite some global efforts to level the playing field for working parents through legislation and employee benefits, fathers in one wealthy nation still don’t have wide access to leave.
Where in the world? The UK has tried to make it easier for more people to juggle work and parenting more, passing in 2014 legislation allowing mothers and fathers who work for the same employer to share up to 50 weeks of parental leave, Bloomberg reported.
The government hoped this legislation would encourage fathers to take on more caregiving responsibilities, but research published this year in the Cambridge Journal of Economics found that only 5% of eligible dads in the UK are taking advantage of the benefit. And it’s negatively affecting the people who do use it, according to research shared with Bloomberg from University College London, King’s Business School, and City St. George’s, University of London. Fathers who took leave experienced saw their hourly pay decrease by 3.5%, while women saw theirs cut by less than 1%.
“Even the gender-neutral policies on flexible working may inadvertently exacerbate gender inequalities in labor force participation by pushing women more into part-time work,” Baowen Xue, a lecturer in social epidemiology and quantitative methods at University College London, told Bloomberg.
Critics of the shared leave policy claim the program is difficult to navigate and littered with red tape, according to Yahoo.
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“Most people in the UK work for SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and it’s just totally unrealistic to expect a pub or gardening business to have the HR capacity needed to get shared parental leave set up,” George Gabriel, co-founder of the Dad Shift said.
Fathers in the UK are still guaranteed just two weeks of leave, on reduced pay, making them less likely to take it, HR Brew previously reported. The UK has been ranked as one of Europe’s worst paternity leave plans; the Princess of Wales has advocated for six months of leave.
Satellite view. Several countries, including Finland, Colombia, and South Korea, have tried to make parental leave more equitable in recent years, especially as birth rates in industrialized countries have fallen. The results have been mixed so far, but Finland, which provides 160 days of paid leave to both parents, has seen some success. The paternity leave rate has doubled since 2022, when the law went into effect.
Sweden expanded paternity leave nearly 50 years ago, with success for employers and new parents, the BBC reported. Amanda Lundeteg, head of Allbright, a business diversity nonprofit, said that companies “are using parental leave as an employer-branding strategy…something that many parents really appreciate when they apply for jobs.”