(Hat tip to startledoctopus.)
Great news from South Korea!
The number of fathers taking time off work to take care of their children is increasing as parental leave becomes accepted in Korea. According to the Ministry of Employment and Labor on Wednesday, 819 male salaried workers took paternity leave last year, up 63 percent from 502 in 2009.
In the first quarter of this year, 273 men took the leave, up 86 percent from the corresponding period of last year. If the trend continues, the figure is expected to surpass 1,000 this year.
Paternal leave is a core masculist issue. It allows men to bond with their children in early life, making an equal contribution to the process of raising the child. It’s an excellent first step for creating a culture in which it is expected that both men and women will make equal career sacrifices for their children. Making that culture is both a masculist and a feminist issue: for masculists, it battles the idea of men as “success objects” and makes men more likely to get custody in contested divorce cases; for feminists, it eliminates one of the major causes of the gender pay gap.
A culture where men are expected to take paternal leave is a culture in which the contributions of fathers to child-rearing are valued.
Congratulations to South Korea!
About ozyfrantz
I often see maternity leave as a comeback to the earnings difference. “Women are objectively less valuable to employers because of maternity leave”. While I think that is probably a load of bullshoot, I have frequently thought that if that *was* the case, then equal paternity leave was the obvious fair patch.
I can’t respect any employer who would consider maternity leave an adequate reason to offer a lower wage to a female employee. That just seems stupid. “You might at one point in the future have a legitimate medical reason to need to take a break from work, therefore, I am going to pay you less”? In that case men should be paid less because they’re significantly more likely to wind up in an accident.
Well, this seems like one of those rare “everybody wins” news items. Yay!
Sorry for the text wall.
superglucose: Note that this is from a Norwegian perspective. Any earnings difference caused by the prevalence and length of maternity leaves over paternity leaves is not because the employer offers lower salary to the female employee. A comission here could only find minute differences between the salary offered/given to men and women in the same positions in the same companies.
What unfortunately often occurs is that when an female employee comes back after let’s say 9 months maternity leave then her original position may often be either defunct or already filled (by the person replacing her while she was on leave). Then she’s at risk for either being in practice side-tracked or demoted (put into another position with less room for promotions) and she has in any case lost almost 1 year of seniority/experience. When men were discouraged from taking paternity leaves they normally wouldn’t take one and did have a continuous career track and build-up of seniority/experience. A more equal division of the parental leave between men and women should then level this particular part of the playing field.
However, a largely gender segregated labour market together combined with the unavoidable fact that replacing people who are on leave costs money will cause that sectors/companies with mostly female employees won’t be able to offer their employees as high a wage as sectors/companies with mostly male employees since their cost is higher. The fact that women in Norway have 9.1% sick days compared with men’s 5,8% also factors in.
Sources: http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/06/02/sykefratot_en/
http://www.pes.org/en/blogs/zitas-blog/why-do-women-earn-less-men-lessons-learnt-norwegian-equal-pay-commission
I work in the IT sector and one company got a lot of flack in the press a few years back. When either mother or father are on a parental leave the state will pay 80% of their salary. However, there is a ceiling on this and many working as consultants in the IT sector earn more than this ceiling. This means that they perhaps only will get let’s say 60% of their salary while they’re on leave. Many companies offer the difference between the ceiling and 80% as a perk. This one company only offered that perk to female workers for two reasons: a) The majority of their workers are men so it would be too expensive to offer it to all the men as well. b) If they offered that to men as well then more men would take longer paternity leave and that would cause staff shortage.
The tendencies that men earns more than the woman in a relationship ensures that there is a negative impact on the family unit’s economy the longer paternal leave a man takes (men and women can share the leave as they see fit within some boundaries) unless the employer offers such a perk. The government has also tried to fix this by reserving a increasingly larger part of the parental leave for the fathers (10 out of 48 weeks now).
TL;DR That’s not why maternity leave affects the pay gap. It’s the interrupts in the woman’s career as well as the combination of maternity leave and a gender segregated labour market where some sectors are pre-dominately women and some are pre-dominatel men.
A few years ago I saw some interesting research on this topic for Sweden, which suggested that despite the increasing incidence of men taking parental leave (at the moment two parents get 480 days in total, technically 240 each, but only 60 are reserved for either parent, while the rest can be shared), the salary development for a woman still counted on her becoming a mother and staying home at some time, while that was not true for men.
The way this showed in statistics of salary development was that a woman’s salary over time was not poorly affected by taking parental leave (they generally had a slow increase in salary over time). For men, however, making the decision to stay at home to the extent women traditionally does meant a clear negative break in salary development (they had a high increase over time in salary before the decision to stay at home, after which it had a worse slope than for women).
I don’t have the book with me right here, so I don’t know if that was true for individual women and men or for women- and men-dominated occupations.
We have parental leave provisions here in New Zealand, but the gender pay gap often means that men do not/are financially unable to take the time off on the compensation amount available (a bit like @Tamen’s restrictions in terms of salary caps). Most budgets are built around a two-earner family.
I’m all for fathers taking a role in bringing up and bonding with their children, but not at the expense of the mother, who may be forced back into a working role before she or her family are prepared for it. The ideal (as far as I’m concerned) would be for BOTH parents to …. parent until such time as THEY feel ready to take up the (different) challenges of paid employment.
With the Global Recession, I’ve also seen an increase in men being available to fill primary parenting roles.
I’m thrilled with the idea of paternity leave being an option for men; it would be good for everyone at home and at work. But to play devil’s advocate, reframe the “lifetime earnings” conflict as not working mothers v. working fathers but as working parents v. working non-parents. If I, a childless adult woman work continuously for my employer, gaining experience and putting in the hours for a year while a mother takes 6, 9 or 12 months to have a baby, why should she expect to be promoted and rewarded monetarily equally to me? Of course I don’t think she should be fired or demoted, but I also don’t think it should be a surprise if my career moves faster.
Likewise, if my childless husband doesn’t come in late, leave early and take “work at home” days”, shouldn’t he get the promotion? It may sound as if I’m anti-family. I’m not – I’m glad workplaces are becoming more flexible for taking care of little humans. But I do feel a sense of entitlement coming from some parents. A mother’s reward is the pitter-patter of little feet. My reward is mo’ money.
You’re career of course should be 6-9-12 months further than the person taking a 6-9-12 monts leave. I don’t think anyone has ever suggested anything else and I don’t pick up that sense of entitlement coming from parent (although I’ll disclose here that I am a parent so there’s that).
The existense of a pay gap between women with children and childless women sure do support the framing that this is really a matter of working parents vs. working non-parents. However, since women are much more likely to take longer parental leave than men this also translate into a pay difference between women and men.
My view is that I as a man should have the option to take parental leave to the same extent as women does without being unduly punished for that because I am a man (see AndersH comment above on how men’s salary rate had a worse slope after parental leave than for women after parental leave).
It goes without saying that if one’s focus is to earn more money then having a child will impede that depending on how much parental leave you take an how much of the child-rearing you leave to the other parent. It is a question of prioritizing and I think one should be able to make that decision individually and as a couple (parents) without feeling constrained by gender (roles).
@Pinkgirl: I think it has to do with what society sees as “acceptable” reasons for pausing work. Having children is acceptable, because family is, collectively, important.
Another acceptable reason is disability. If someone gets injured such that they can’t work, it’s cruel to penalize them for that.
I posted this (excerpt) on Feminist Critics and I think it applies here too. Basically I’m agreeing with pinkgirl545 on what she call “entitlement”. but I will try an add my own take as well.
What’s wrong with having an identity that is first and foremost a parent? What’s wrong with sacrificing work to prioritize family?
Why it is assumed that parents who do choose to juggle both (family and work) should not pay a ‘parenting penalty’ at their work? As in, “Joanne, it’s too bad you had to leave early from the meeting on Friday. I hope your child feels better. We all here understand how hard it can be to juggle being a parent and a worker. But it was unfortunate that you weren’t able to meet with our most important client. We lost the deal.”
Why is it assumed that parents who do choose to juggle both (family and work) should not also pay a ‘worker penalty’ at home? As in, “Joanne Joanne, little Billy said his first words today! He said, “nanna, nanna” I’m so sorry you missed it. I understand how important that meeting was. It must be tough having to juggle work and family.”
Why do some parents who choose to juggle both work and family assume they can have the best of both worlds without making any sacrifices to either?
It would be interesting so to see some of thos statistics on the salary development for stay at home-men vs the same development for women. According to the interview made on the Explore West Sweden-blog (http://www.explorewestsweden.com/?p=1450#more-1450), Sweden seems like the paradise for paternity leave, but salary stats might nuance that image.