This Father’s Day, Give the Gift of Paid Parental Leave and Make Sure He Takes It
Blog Post
Photo by DICSON on Unsplash
June 17, 2021
I was working on my doctorate in Chicago when my daughter was born in 1997. My partner was the main breadwinner, and I stayed home to care for our daughter after my partner’s short, unpaid maternity leave. I enjoyed that year as a stay-at-home father, but I knew it was an anomaly. Back then 5 percent of men in the U.S. were stay-at-home fathers; today it’s about 7 percent. While many mothers dream about stay-at-home fathers — and kudos to those families for whom it makes sense — it’s not how most of us live.
My stint as full-time dad was over when graduate school ended and a job with travel beckoned. Then we did what millions of households with children do; we muddled through with a mixture of in-home help and expensive day-care. My partner did more of the care work on average, and it was stressful, especially for her.
Globally women do more than three times as much of the daily child care as men do. With all the efforts to promote women’s equal pay and work, we’re still far from equality — 136 years away, according to the World Economic Forum. The top of the list for why women’s pay is less than men: the unequal care burden. A study by the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that prior to the pandemic, 42 percent of women said their unpaid care work responsibilities left them unable to do paid work compared to 6 percent of men.
About a third of heterosexual couples in Europe and North America say they have achieved equality in the home when it comes to care work. But the rate of change is far too slow both in wealthier countries and poorer ones. Based on calculations that colleagues and I carried out using surveys from the International Labour Organization, at the current rate of change the world is at least 92 years away from achieving equality in care work, meaning that men and women share child care and housework equally on a global scale.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been tragic and brutal — in terms of our health, our health systems, the global economy and women’s employment. And it has also shifted how we think about care. Surveys carried out by the UN with women and men in 47 countries affirm that as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns, men have been carrying out more hands-on care work than at any time in recent history. Women have still shouldered more of the load during COVID-19, and faced a greater share of job losses, but the uptake in men’s care of children deserves attention.
The lesson from COVID-19 is this: men generally do a greater share of the care work when external forces and conditions obligate us to do it — that is when external forces and life circumstances make us do it. In my case it was the reality of my partner’s higher income, which we needed for our household, while I finished graduate school. For millions of men during COVID-19, they participated more in child care because they were forced to be at home, and their children were out of school.
There is no shortage of blogs and websites for mothers offering advice, community, and solidarity. It doesn’t take long to find pleas for help and complaints when it comes to their male partners or husbands: That we don’t do our share, that we don’t appreciate the mental load women take on. All that is true. But if we want systemic change in achieving equality at home and work, it’s got to be more than individual men showing up. We need systemic solutions that bake equality into our workplaces, our childcare, our federal and state policies.
First and foremost, we need fully paid, non-transferable leave for all parents, at least 16 weeks long, and we need incentives in the workplace for men to take their share. Currently 115 countries have paid guaranteed leave for mothers while 71 have paid leave for fathers. The U.S. is not yet part of either list. Of countries that do provide paid leave, the average number of days available for mothers is 98; for fathers, it is 5.
The Scandinavian countries have made the biggest advances in offering equal, paid leave, but even there men don’t use the full time available to them, while women nearly always do. A study my organization, Promundo, carried out in 2019 across 13 higher-income countries, including in Scandinavia, found that even in countries where leave is normalized and incomes are relatively stable, households worry that men’s careers and incomes will suffer if he takes his full leave.
Some countries offer extra incentives for men to take their full share of leave. A few workplaces, like Volvo, offer leave and make it the default for employees; rather than asking an employee how much parental leave they plan to use, they presume the employee will take the full available amount. Other workplaces have learned that if they want men to use leave, they have to change the workplace culture — supporting all workers before, during and after leave, offering flexible working options after leave and having senior male company leaders take their leave.
In addition to paid leave, we need national care plans, like the one found in Uruguay, that combine paid leave with subsidized child care, cash payments to lower-income families to pay for in-home care, along with a subsidy that allows workers to go back to work part-time after taking leave, but receive a full-time salary.
We also need to get creative about engaging men from birth and early childhood onward, ensuring that they’re full partners from the beginning of a child’s life. Brazil created a National Men’s Prenatal Health protocol to make it the norm across health centers for men to be present, with the woman’s consent of course, throughout the pregnancy and childbirth process. As a result of the program, 75 percent of men accompany their pregnant partners in the consultation room for at least one prenatal visit, and two-thirds of men are present birth — a huge increase from previous decades. Again the lesson learned is changing systems, not just individual men.
We need to start this systemic change with our children. UNICEF finds that worldwide girls do three and half times more daily care work compared to boys. A study last year by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and Promundo found that of the 25 most-watched shows by boys ages 7 to 13 in the United States, few showed men in caregiving at all and even fewer showed men as competent caregivers. Boys need messages at home, at school, and in the media to see child care and household work as men’s work too.
Finally, we need all politicians, and particularly male politicians to advance the cause of child care, paid leave, and care equality. Generally the care agenda has been considered to be a ‘women’s agenda’, appropriately acknowledging that women have faced the biggest burden. However, we need to share this load and catalyze the change together. We need to see male politicians being visible and vocal on care policies, including leave policies, and making a point of doing their share of care work at home. It’s embarrassing that even in congresses and parliaments across the world, it is women legislators who bear the policy load.
This Fathers Day, keep in mind this: the fact that we as men are not doing our share is more than than just a problem of individual men. Of course, men and fathers need to do our part. But along with insisting that Dad make dinner, ask him if he knows how his congressperson voted on family leave.