Search results

The legislation on shared parental leave that came into force on 1st of December 2014 is aimed at giving working mothers the opportunity to return to work early if they so choose after childbirth to continue with their career and also to give fathers the opportunity to be involved in the lives of their new-born. However, past research has demonstrated a very low uptake on shared parental leave. This paper aims to argue that working parents’ awareness on the existence of the legislation is key to its effectiveness.

A qualitative study approach was adopted to assess the importance of awareness. A sample of 40 eligible working parents were informally interviewed for 10 min to ascertain whether they know about shared parental leave. Participants were recruited at a primary school fair. The 40 parents were workers in different sectors which included care, hospitality, security, education, finance, retail and construction.

The findings indicated that awareness may be one key factor as to why the uptake of shared parental leave was low. It was also evident from the results that employers do not inform eligible employees of the existence of shared parental leave or support and encourage them to take shared parental leave. This paper concludes that to assess the effectiveness of shared parental leave, awareness is key.

The findings of this article are obtained from a limited time interview data. This paper is a basis for a bigger research project particularly on the reasons why mothers may or may not want to share their maternity leave.

Existing research has surveyed some employers and their employees and concluded uptake statistics based on their data. This study demonstrates that more awareness is required which has not been done yet. This research is part of an ongoing project investigating the reasons why mothers may or may not want to share their maternity leave, given that the legislation made mothers “gatekeepers” to the effectiveness of shared parental leave.

The purpose of the study is to research the current state of fathers' involvement in childcare during parental leave and to assess attitudes of Russian population towards possible measures that can expand the use of parental leave by fathers in Russia.

The authors conducted a survey of Russian parents with children under the age of 18 months in 2022. The sample accounts for 1,000 people; the survey covered almost all Russian regions.

The authors found that the ideal workload of fathers is not expected to exceed a third of the total parental workload. Russian parents are not ready to admit dissatisfaction with the existing distribution of workload during parental leave. However, an egalitarian demand for greater involvement of fathers in parental responsibilities is forming, and an interest in transforming the parental leave policy is emerging.

The value of the study consists of assessing the effectiveness of measures that may have a beneficial effect on the use of parental leave by fathers, as well as identifying consequences of the possible introduction of mandatory parental leave for fathers.

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of parental leave use and long-term employment trajectories of parents in Luxembourg based on anonymous administrative records. This is the first systematic analysis of parental leave take-up rates and return rates for Luxembourg using a large and reliable data set.

The authors use highly detailed administrative data to calculate take-up and return rates for parental leave for both men and women working in Luxembourg. To gain deeper insights into the employment trajectories of parents, the authors deploy the visualisation tools of the TraMineR package, which allow the authors to trace developments over time.

The authors estimate take-up rates for parental leave at 72 per cent for mothers and 13 per cent for fathers. The return rates for mothers are 88.4, 99.4 and 70.8 per cent depending on whether they took full-time, part-time or no parental leave. In contrast, over 95 per cent of fathers remain employed following parental leave. The trajectory analysis reveals that the event of birth is a clear turning point for the majority of the female trajectories, but not for the male ones.

The paper contributes to the literature in at least several ways. First, this is the first available paper presenting the situation in Luxembourg using a large and reliable data set. Second, by including fathers in the analysis, the authors contribute to the available knowledge of male use of parental leave, which has been the subject of continued policy efforts in the past decades. Finally, the authors show how parental leave can be analysed using sequence analysis tools and how this method offers additional, holistic insights into work-family patterns over time.

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.

Parental leave in Sweden can be taken both as paid and unpaid leave and often parents mix these forms in a very flexible way. Therefore, multiple methodological issues arise regarding how to most accurately measure leave length. The purpose of this paper is to review the somewhat complex legislation and the possible ways of using parental leave before presenting a successful attempt of a more precise way of measuring leave lengths, including paid and unpaid days, for mothers and fathers.

The study makes use of administrative data for a complete cohort of parents of first born children in 2009 in Sweden. The authors examine what characteristics are associated with the use of paid and unpaid leave for mothers and fathers during the first two years of the child’s life, focusing particularly on how individual and household income is associated with leave patterns.

Among mothers, low income is associated with many paid leave days whereas middle income is associated with most unpaid days. High income mothers use a shorter leave. Among fathers it is the both ends with high and low household income that uses most paid and unpaid leave.

A measure that includes unpaid parental leave will be important to not underestimate the parental leave and to prevent faulty comparisons between groups by gender and by socioeconomic status.

A measure of parental leave including both paid and unpaid leave will also facilitate international comparisons of leave length.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the role of employers in creating employment gaps among women returning to the labor market after parental leaves of different durations.

The authors use a controlled correspondence field experiment that orthogonally manipulates parental leave length and the quality of fictitious female job candidates. The experiment is complemented with a survey among human resource managers.

High-quality candidates receive more interview invitations when applying after a short parental leave, while low-quality (LQ) candidates receive more interview invitations when applying after a typical three years long parental leave. Survey results suggest that the difference in invitations between short and typical leave treatments is driven by a social norm that mothers should stay home with children younger than three. Productivity gains from employing a LQ job applicant with a shorter career break might not be high enough to outweigh the adverse social norm effect.

The presented results point toward the strong effect of prevailing social norms on job search prospects of women returning to the labor market after parental leave.

A correspondence experiment has not been used before to study the relationship between time spent on leave and the labor market prospects of mothers. It also extends research on social norms to the domain of hiring decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize findings on the effects of existing paid parental leave programs on infant mortality rates (IMR) in the USA as an attempt to aid in efforts for the development of a national paid parental leave policy.

Three articles were reviewed to analyze findings on the effects of existing parental leave programs on IMR in the USA.

The results from the three studies analyzed indicate that unpaid parental leave and parental leave with partial wage replacement can reduce IMR in households with college educated, working mothers.

This review is limited due to only having three studies available to synthesize that pertained to the USA. Implications for future research are to examine the effects of fully paid parental leave programs offered by individual organizations on IMR in the USA.

Providing a needs-based income replacement policy to mothers who wish to take parental leave after the birth of a child may be the best policy to decrease IMR for infants from all socioeconomic backgrounds.

The findings in this review will aid in the ongoing efforts to develop a national paid parental leave policy in the USA.

Considers the exclusionary processes arising from the way in which fathers are excluded from childcare activities. Outlines the parental leave provisions in the UK and explores the nature of the assumptions made about fatherhood. Compares the take up of parental leave by both men and women in other European countries. Concludes that whilst the current system supports a balanced work and home life but the significant gender differences in take‐up of parental leave between men and women means that legislation may be making gender division with respect to early childcare more marked rather than reduced.

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.

In this paper, we update and extend “Is There a Glass Ceiling in Sweden?” (Albrecht, Björklund, & Vroman, 2003) by documenting the extent to which the gender log wage gap across the distribution in Sweden has changed over the period 1998–2008. We then examine the Swedish glass ceiling in 2008 in more detail by documenting how it differs for white-collar versus blue-collar workers and for private- versus public-sector workers. We also examine when in the life cycle the glass ceiling effect arises and how this effect develops around the birth of the first child. Finally, we investigate the possible connection between the glass ceiling and the parental leave system in Sweden by linking wage data with data on parental leave from different Swedish registers.