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The purpose of this paper is to report on the use and content of written guidance produced by mental health services in England and Wales describing hospital leave for informally admitted patients.

Guidance on leave was requested from National Health Service (NHS) mental health trusts in England and health boards in Wales (n = 61) using a Freedom of Information submission. Data were analysed using content analysis.

In total, 32 organisations had a leave policy for informal patients. Policies varied considerably in content and quality. The content of policies was not supported by research evidence. Organisations appeared to have developed their policies by either adapting or copying the guidance on section 17 leave outlined in the Mental Health Act Codes of Practice for England and Wales (Department of Health, 2016; Welsh Government, 2016). Definitions of important terms, for example, leave and hospital premises, were either absent or poorly defined. Finally, some organisations appeared to be operating pseudo-legal coercive contracts to prevent informal patients from leaving hospital wards.

Research should be undertaken to explore the impact of local policies on the informal patient’s right to life and liberty.

All NHS organisations need to develop an evidence-based policy to facilitate the informal patient’s right to take leave. A set of national standards that organisations are required to comply with would help to standardise the content of leave policies.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to examine the use and content of local policies describing how informal patients can take leave from hospital.

This article explores the patterns and dynamics of parenting-related leave policy reforms in the European former socialist countries (EFSCs). It sheds light on the development pattern of their leave policies and their potential to reproduce, impede, or transform traditional gender norms in employment and care.

The article provides a historical comparative analysis of leave policy developments in 21 EFSCs in the 1970–2018 period. It systematically explores continuity and changes in leave policy design − generosity (leave duration and benefits level) and fathers' entitlements to leaves − as well as policy concerns and gender-equality-related implications.

Following the state-socialist commitment to gender equality, the EFSCs introduced childcare/parental leaves early. Nevertheless, they developed mother-centered leaves of equality-impeding character, in that they did not promote gender equality. The divergence of EFSCs' leave policies intensified in the period of transition from socialism to capitalism, as competing priorities and inter-related policy concerns – such as re-traditionalization, fertility incentives, gender equality, and labor market participation – influenced policy design. Leave policies of the EFSCs that joined the EU gradually transformed towards more gender-equal ones. Nonetheless, the progress has been slow, and only three countries can be classified as having equality-transforming leaves (Slovenia, Lithuania, and Romania).

This article extends existent comparative studies on maternity/paternity/parental leaves, exploring the region that has been overlooked by such research. It provides valuable insights into the implications of intersectional dimensions of leave design as well as competing priorities and concerns embedded in it. It points to the methodological complexity of evaluating the development of parental leave policies in a cross-country perspective.

Using evidence drawn from case studies in four companies in the Scottish financial sector, this paper examines how both statutory and company family leave policies are operated by line managers. This paper considers the extent of line managers’ knowledge of statutory and company family leave policies and finds that their knowledge, particularly of statutory measures, is often wanting. In exploring the reasons for this situation, training on statutory and company family leave policies was found to be extremely limited and although support from human resource professionals was provided, line managers only referred to them in exceptional circumstances. This situation has clear implications both for consistency of operation of these policies and for the role of human resource professionals in ensuring that statutory and company provisions are effectively put into practice.

This paper aims to examine the international challenges of fitting fathers into work‐family policies at a time of global economic turbulence.

The paper's design is a comparative policy analysis approach using international working time, paternity, maternity and parental leave data from selected rich, middle and poorer income nations. Leave policies are examined in relation to the place of fathers in the work‐family policy mix between 2010 and 2011.

Short well‐compensated paternity leave provision is emerging in poorer and middle income countries but none offer the range of father‐targeted parental leave innovation observed in some richer nations. A comparison of leave policy changes effecting fathers between 2010 and 2011 showed resilience in face of economic downturn particularly in European countries.

Global data on fathers' working hours, paternity leave and men's access to parental leave are difficult to access and more effort in data standardisation is required to build on this study.

Inter‐governmental bodies play an important role in the promotion of father‐friendly employment measures even in countries with strong male breadwinner cultures.

This policy analysis extends scholarship on how societies promote and regulate cultural constructions of fatherhood in families and in the workplace. It suggests that drivers to fit fathers into work‐family policies are mixed and do not easily map on to country classifications or policy regimes.

The purpose of this paper is to review the development of leave policies in Europe, both at a regional and national level, and to consider what future directions such policies might take to meet changing conditions and emerging needs.

The paper draws on the work of an international network that the authors founded in 2004, which brings together experts on leave policy from over 40 countries, and in particular on an annual review of national leave policies conducted by network members.

The article presents developments in European legislation on leave policy stretching from 1883 to the present day, and outlines the extent of leave policies in European countries and the wide variations in the design of these policies. It suggests that future directions in leave policy need to address the relationship between this and other policy areas; the need for a life course perspective to leave policy, getting beyond parental leave; and that leave should turn away from being considered an employment benefit towards becoming a universal right to care.

The paper provides a concise overview of leave policy in the global region where leave policies began and are today most developed, at both a regional and national level. It is also intended to stimulate debate about the future directions that leave policy might take.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the rhetorical strategies women use as they debate the efficacy of maternity leave policies in the USA and how these strategies reify the public/private divide.

Using rhetorical analysis, the characteristics of women's discussion are examined in an online forum.

Participants rely on two primary strategies: “public” strategies (e.g. employing facts, logic, statistics) for most of their discussion; and “private” strategies (e.g. relating personal experiences) as a strategy of last resort when the public strategies fail. Further, their personal recountings lack detail and ultimately limit the ability to strengthen the posters' arguments.

While this paper focuses on a US context, the approach lends itself well to examining the cultural assumptions underpinning specific policies and extending the study of the complexities of the assumed public/private divide in additional settings.

The paper suggests that in order to advance arguments for or against change in a cultural climate that so clearly divides the public and the private, women will need to invest more of their personal experiences to argue more effectively the impact of a social policy on their lives.

This study uses online texts as the focus of analysis and in doing so examines the rich, authentic interaction of women from a variety of organizational backgrounds.

Paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers has fed countless debates. Four years after the implementation of a new parental leave policy in Quebec, this paper aims to assess how parental leave is perceived in the workplace.

Using data from employee surveys carried out in a municipal police service, the paper employs analysis of variance techniques to compare the perception of parental leave within two groups of respondents: those who had gone on parental leave and those who had not.

The findings highlight significant differences between the perceptions of parental leave entertained by the respondents who have taken it up and those who have not yet experienced parental leave.

Analysing these differences has produced extremely interesting findings: adopting a public policy is not sufficient; organisations need to make employees feel supported in taking parental leave if they really want the policy to achieve the targeted results.

Paid parental leave is relatively new in Europe and almost non‐existent in North America and few studies have been carried out to measure their perception in the workplace. This research shows how important it is to follow the use of the policy to make sure that it does not have negative impacts for those who use it.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how women academics experience academic motherhood in the USA and Finland, how they time their pregnancy in an academic career, and the ways in which the different policy environments and academic opportunity structures in each country shape the management of academic work and care work during maternity leave.

Data collection involved a snowball, convenience sample of semi-structured, long interviews with 67 academic mothers, 33 in Finland and 34 in the USA. Recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed for emerging themes.

In both countries, women academics made fertility decisions by carefully deliberating their access to maternity leave, age-related concerns and the perception of job security. In Finland, the insecurity of fixed-term contracts and intensification of the ideal worker norm shaped fertility decisions and leave activities despite generous work-family policies. The US mothers’ timing of pregnancy was influenced by concerns of age-related infertility more than career risks. Women in both countries felt pressure to maintain presence at work even while they were on leave.

The paper addresses a paucity of comparative studies about motherhood (and parenthood) in the academe, an increasingly central question for today’s academic workforce.

This research article explores several questions about assessing the impacts of fathers' parental leave take up and gender equality. We ask: How does the conceptual and contextual specificity of care and equality shape what we focus on, and how, when we study parental leave policies and their impacts? What and how are we measuring?

The article is based on a longitudinal qualitative research study on families with fathers who had taken parental leave in two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Québec), which included interviews with 26 couples in the first stage (25 mother/father couples and one father/father couple) and with nine couples a decade later. Guided by Margaret Somers' historical sociology of concept formation, we explore the concepts of care and equality (and their histories, networks, and narratives) and how they are taken up in parental leave research. We also draw on insights from three feminist scholars who have made major contributions to theoretical intersections between care, work, equality, social protection policies, and care deficits: Nancy Fraser, Joan Williams, and Martha Fineman.

The relationship between fathers' leave-taking and gender equality impacts is a complex, non-linear entanglement shaped by the specificities of state and employment policies and by how these structure parental eligibility for leave benefits, financial dimensions of leave-taking (including wage replacement rates for benefits), childcare possibilities/limitations and related financial dimensions for families, masculine work norms in workplaces, and intersections of gender and social class. Overall, we found that maximizing both parental leave time and family income in order to sustain good care for their children (through paid and unpaid leave time, followed by limited and expensive childcare services) was articulated as a more immediate concern to parents than were issues of gender equality. Our research supports the need to draw closer connections between parental leave, childcare, and workplace policies to better understand how these all shape parental leave decisions and practices and possible gender equality outcomes.

The article is based on a small and fairly homogenous Canadian research sample and thus calls for more research to be done on diverse families, with attention to possible conceptual diversity arising from these sites.

This research calls for greater attention to: the genealogies of, and relations between, the concepts of care, equality, and subjectivity that guide parental leave research and policy; to the historical specificity of models like the Universal Caregiver model; and to the need for new models and conceptual configurations that can guide research on care, equality, and parental leave policies in current global contexts of neoliberal capitalism.

We call for a move toward thinking about care, not only as care time, but as responsibilities, which can be partly assessed through the stories people tell about how they negotiate and navigate care, domestic work, and paid work responsibilities in specific contexts and conditions across time. We also advocate for gender equality concepts that attend to how families navigate restrictive parental leave and childcare policies and how broader socio-economic inequalities arise partly from state policies underpinned by a concept of liberal autonomous subjects rather than relational subjects who face moments of vulnerability and inter-dependence across the life course.