(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!
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.
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… Read more »
@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.
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
Well, this seems like one of those rare “everybody wins” news items. Yay!
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.
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.