It’s Father’s Day today so, after five (enraging) instalments of our Motherhood Penalty series, Part Six looks at how men could be part of the change – and an expert says dedicated paid partner leave is the biggest step in killing the motherhood penalty. Also, this is what working women really, really want, a survey says…
When Carl and his partner Kirsty had a baby, he took only one (unpaid) week off, while Kirsty was the primary caregiver until their son was one and started childcare part-time. Carl says, looking back, he wished he’d taken much more time off to care for the baby. “I know Kirsty did all that hard work, and I’m grateful to her for it, but man, I missed out on special time with my son. I worked 8.30 til 5.30 so only really saw him much in the weekends. And Kirsty was struggling a bit, so it would have taken some pressure off her.”
Why didn’t he take parental leave? (Technically, women can transfer some parental leave to their partner.) “Honestly, I didn’t even know that men could take it. I didn’t know anyone who had done that, so I actually didn’t even think of it as an option. Certainly my employer didn’t ask if I wanted to do that.”
Other dads would have liked to take parental leave, if one or more of the following applied: a) they knew it was an option, b) their workplace suggested it, and c) they could afford it. These wouldn’t be problems (or would be much smaller ones) if there was dedicated paid partner leave on offer. As in, separate from and unaffected by the mother’s leave. Some call it ‘the father quota’.
Steven and his Swedish wife moved from Wellington to Sweden before having their first baby, partly to take advantage of the following policy. Swedish parents are entitled to 480 days (yes, really) of paid parental leave. Each parent has 90 days exclusively reserved for them, while the remaining 300 days can be shared.
Steven and his wife took 240 days each. “We know lots of couples who have done the same thing – splitting it down the middle. When you know you have 90 days [reserved for each parent], you get used to the idea of ‘even Stevens’.” That’s a pun on his name, and a metaphor for equality.
Steven looked after their baby for nearly eight months, beginning when he was six months old and weaned. “I wouldn’t have swapped that time for the world. I would have missed out on incredible moments including his first steps. When I’m out and about, I see so many men with pushchairs.”
Over in Norway, fathers can receive their full salary for 15 weeks, or 80% of their usual pay for 19 weeks.
It’s not just the Scandinavian countries doing well. You can see a map and global ranking for the number of days of paternity leave provided by 108 countries. Iceland? 180. Spain? 112. Portugal? 35. Austria? 30. Nepal? 21. Equtorial Guinea? 9. Ethiopia? 3.
New Zealand? Not on the chart, left uncoloured on the map. Kinda embarrassing and friggin infuriating.
Someone passionate about this issue is Tania Domett, founding director of Cogo, a research agency which delivers insights, research and programme evaluation across the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. She’s also one-third of Project Gender, which is centred on benefiting women and bringing about social change through research, campaigns and real-world solutions.
I asked Tania for her thoughts on New Zealand’s Primary Carer Leave for the primary caregiver. Though it’s technically transferable from the mother to the father, there’s a “false gender neutrality” at play, Tania says. “Some would argue ‘of course men can take it’. But the way the policy is designed, there are barriers to overcome. The leave is tied to the women’s employment and is hers, unless she transfers it. So it’s inherent in the policy that it’s a woman’s role to be the default caregiver.” Fewer than one percent of New Zealand men take transferred parental leave. Wow.
“Effectively it’s not parental leave, it’s maternity leave,” Tania says. “If most New Zealanders were told this policy is paid maternity leave, they’d be jumping up and down saying ‘that’s really sexist and discriminatory’, right? But if you look at how the policy actually works and is implemented, it absolutely is sexist and discriminatory.”
Tania wrote a master’s thesis looking at the politics of work-life balance as a policy framework. “Now work-life balance is more commonly referred to as flexible working. Part of my investigation was the truth of the claim that ‘flexible working is a silver bullet for gender equity. Is it in fact the lever that enables women to access paid work and better financial security?’. I found it was not the silver bullet.”
“One of the main research findings was that, while flexible working allows women better access to paid work, it’s a Band-aid remedy: it affirms women’s role as being responsible for caregiving and being that default parent. Dedicated paid partner leave, however, is the transformative remedy that would help shift that gender division of paid work and unpaid caregiving work. In my view having no dedicated paid partner leave is the biggest input to the motherhood penalty”.
She wants to clarify something. “There’s been a deliberate move to stop calling it ‘paternity leave’ and call it ‘paid partner leave’ to be inclusive of partnerships that don’t involve a man. But it’s most commonly men who would use paid partner leave, as the (terrible phrase) ‘non-birthing parent’.” In New Zealand, there’s no paid partner’s leave. In fact, ‘partner’s leave’ is only up to two weeks off work unpaid, FFS.
I tell Tania that Carl didn’t even know he could take parental leave transferred by his partner. That’s common, Tania says. “I saw a friend on the weekend who has a full-on job. She said that, when she was pregnant with her daughter, it didn’t occur to either her or her husband that he could be the one to stay at home. After someone told her about it [transferring parental leave], she asked her husband what he thought. He cried and said ‘I’d love to’.” And he did.
We need more men to know they can ask for this, helping normalise it. “It’s often hard for men to ask for parental leave, because they’re stepping outside traditional gender norms. They’re not seen as the default caregiver. But let’s be honest: there’s nothing innate about women’s ability to look after babies [and toddlers]. Men also have these skills.” With babies, dads can use formula or pumped breastmilk.
Often women don’t transfer parental leave because the man earns more. “Exactly, most of the time it’s the economically rational decision. Currently, you really only see stay-at-home dads where the woman is the greater earner – so it’s even more important to annihilate the gender pay gap. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation, right? But, if we have more women in the workforce – because the blokes are looking after the kids – we’d have more women in leadership positions, and this would reduce the gender pay gap.” That’s been dropping, but 5.2% is still 5.2% too much.
Paid partner leave does reduce the gender wage gap. According to the Centre for Progressive Policy, OECD data analysis suggests that countries with more than six weeks of paid paternity leave have a four-percentage-point smaller gender wage gap than countries with less than six weeks.
“Also,” Tania says, “there’s research showing that sharing the parental leave means families are healthier psychologically. It improves the mental health of men, children do better, there are lower divorce rates.”
“Some people would say, ‘we just need to normalise men doing this, and make it easier to do’, whereas I don’t think that’s enough. I believe we need legislative and policy change. I think policies like they have in the Scandinavian countries – basically, dads have to ‘use it or lose it’ – are what’s required here, because our system is still so weighted in favour of the status quo.”
Tania was a founding member of the Gender Justice Collective, an independent, non-profit network of feminist organisations and individuals. Before the 2020 election, the collective ran the YouChoose survey which heard from over 3500 women, wāhine, trans, intersex and non-binary people about what they need from our political parties. The top-rated solution to “support women to balance their caring responsibilities with other things in their life” was “paid parental leave granted to both parents, i.e. each gets their own entitlement” – with 73% rating it as very important and a further 20% as important. It even trumped “more government funding for childcare” (and we know how pressing that is, capsulenz.com/be/the-staggering-cost-of-childcare-in-aotearoa). “We know this is what New Zealand women want,” says Tania.
I texted some of my mum friends asking about how much they and their family would have benefited from paid partner leave. Their responses included “we so needed this as a family”, “FFS, 108 countries have this and we don’t?’, “I’m moving to Sweden”, “that would have helped with my mental health”, “maybe I could have got that promotion”, and “can we please start a campaign to make this happen?”.
Does Tania think a New Zealand government will introduce paid partner leave? “It’s possibly not politically palatable at the moment but I’m hopeful. We’ve been lobbying the current and previous governments. But as advocates for this, we’re not getting paid and there’s a limit to what we can achieve. It needs an investment to create an advocacy campaign of the necessary scale.”
“The dream scenario for me is that a philanthropic foundation realises this is incredibly important for gender equity, the New Zealand economy, and for the health of whānau and Aotearoa – and that they fund advocates to deliver a campaign. I and others would dearly love to do a campaign on this, including focusing on the wonderful men already sharing the unpaid care work.”
The good news? “There are some shifts happening here and there, particularly with large corporates offering policies supporting men to be fathers.” Sometimes it’s financial support; sometimes it’s a culture of support.
“I tell employers I work with that it’s not enough just to have a policy [about fathers taking parental leave] on your website. You have to really, really promote it to men. You have to communicate that it’s desirable, it’s socially acceptable, it’s the expectation in your workplace that fathers take parental leave and that you’ll help them do that. I also tell employers that not only will this benefit men in the workplace, it will also benefit women.”
If both parents take time out from their careers, Tania says, the financial penalty is shared evenly, rather than the system “systematically punishing a group of New Zealanders: mothers. That entrenches inequity and stifles economic innovation”.
In June, a Financial Times story called ‘Rise of Dad Allies Helps Shift Childcare Burden’ described a rally organised by The Dad Shift – a group of men, dads and other parents campaigning for better paternity leave in the U.K. They’re asking lawmakers for longer and higher-paid paternity leave; it’s currently only two weeks. (Only five percent of employed fathers there take up shared parental leave.)
The Dad Shift campaign is supported by different non-profit organisations, including Pregnant Then Screwed (which is working to end the motherhood penalty), The Fatherhood Institute (which is working to build a society that supports involved fathers), and Parenting Out Loud (which is supporting employers to build workplace cultures where dads can be ‘loud and proud’ about their caring responsibilities).
I mention this campaign to Tania. “Well, let’s do something like that here!” she says.
Anyone?
In the meantime, we can start these conversations, help normalise them, and prompt the men in our lives to have them too.
Email us at hello@capsule.com if you have any thoughts!
