Some people believe that mothers will always have more care responsibility for children than fathers because of nature. But the reality is that, until we remove ALL the barriers to sharing, particularly in the workplace, we cannot know what parents would freely choose.
We studied what is happening in Sweden, where most fathers (88%) take a lot of leave, which is well paid, averaging 91 days. In addition, there is a right to reduce working hours to part-time until the time the child goes to school – this applies equally to mothers and fathers.
Despite all this, in Sweden less than half of mothers work full-time after having a baby, while 93% of men work full-time. This is far from equal.
My colleague, Linda Haas, and I decided to look at what influences the decisions of fathers in work. We have been conducting surveys of companies since 1993. Most recently, we surveyed 173 private Swedish companies with over 100 employees.
Two thirds of these companies reported that only 1% of fathers were using their right to reduce outs. Only 5% of the companies reported that over 20% fathers were using the right.
We then asked if the number of fathers using the right to work part-time was increasing over time. Only 1/5th of the companies said yes, but all but one reported that the change was very small.
Finally we asked if there was a senior managerial role model for taking the right to reduced hours. Only 12% of the companies said yes.
We found very little support for fathers’ work-life integration, though it was a little greater in companies with a higher proportion of women in their workforce.
Family friendly policies are still regarded as benefits mainly for women. Research from abroad in US shows that fathers who reduce hours are likely to trigger harsher character judgments on them than mothers do when they ask for the same.
So the male norm of full-time employment remains strong even in Sweden, the country that leads the world on the uptake of parental leave by fathers.
We then looked beyond the employers to government and the unions. We found little political interest on their part in promoting part-time work by men. Their focus is just getting women back into full-time work.
The demand from fathers for reduced hours is not very high either. Whilst fathers communicate highly levels of work-life stress, only 18% said they would like shorter hours in a 2010 survey. We carried out case-studies of several companies. We found a strong culture of co-worker loyalty and mutual support when taking leave, and we found that fathers took less leave than they wanted to because they did not want to inconvenience workmates.
To change this culture, everyone needs to do things differently.
Employers need to ensure that there are senior role models working flexibly so that more junior men feel they have permission. Employers have to make support for fatherhood very visible to demonstrate it is “normal” for men to balance work and care like women do. Flexible work should not be seen as something only for women.
Unions should do more to support the caring of male employees, rather than just focus on getting women back to work – indeed, more women could return to work if men did this.
Fathers themselves need to be strategic when making the case to their manager to work flexibly. They need to work out in advance with colleagues how their flexibility will not reduce productivity and, indeed, could increase it. Employees are better off presenting a business case to their manager linked to increased productivity, rather than just requesting time off.
Posted on: May 31, 2016
ORIGINAL RESEARCH AND REFERENCES
- Haas L & Hwang CP Is fatherhood becoming more visible at work? Trends in corporate support for fathers taking parental leave in Sweden Fathering 7, 303-321 (2009) doi: 10.3149/fth.0703.303
- Haas L & Hwang CP “It’s about time!”: company support for fathers and entitlement to reduced work hours in Sweden Social Politics 23, 142-166 (2015)
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This post was previously published on fatherhood.global under a Creative Commons License.
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