thirteen - The workplace: challenges for fathers and their use of leave

Summary

Introduction

Up to the present day, public gender equality policies have aimed to improve women's situation by giving them rights equal to those of men or supporting positive discrimination. But this has not been sufficient to ensure effective equality between men and women. Indeed, Esping- Andersen (2009) does not hesitate to qualify the movement that began in the twentieth century as an ‘incomplete revolution’. Women are still earning less than men per hour for full-time jobs and they often perform several ‘jobs’: career woman, domestic worker and carer. This creates tensions that weigh on the shoulders of these ‘superwomen’, trying to combine their careers with family life and household chores (Conway, 2003). An enduring unequal division of housework not only makes work–life integration extremely difficult, but may even have a negative impact on the birth rate (Holloway, 2010, p.178).

Should future public policies designed to achieve genuine gender equality be aimed not at women, but at men? In an arena such as work–family balance, it may well be a prerequisite for gender equality. According to the OECD, the involvement of fathers is not only essential to the welfare of the family, but it has an impact on the perception of workplaces regarding female employees and wage inequality:

As long as mothers rather than fathers reduce labour force participation in the presence of children, and make use of parental leave provisions, [there] are of course employers who perceive women as less committed to their career than men, and are therefore less likely to invest in female career opportunities. (OECD, 2007, p.59)

Yet it is not always easy for fathers to take leave from work for family reasons, since this responsibility traditionally belongs to the mother and firms are not always open to fathers’ desires to be more active in sharing family responsibilities. Thus, public policies play a very important role in bringing about change: Paternity Leave and fatheronly Parental Leave become ways to bypass ‘mother gatekeeping’ based on the traditional parental roles (Tremblay and Lazzari Dodeler, 2015). By encouraging fathers to take a break from work, because if they do not take their leave entitlement they will lose it, the state sends a clear message about the importance of the father's role in the family.