The Problem With Splitting Parental Leave Down the Middle
European countries’ attempts to get dads to take more paternity leave have had unintended consequences, and sparked debate about the fairest way to divide leave between mothers and fathers.
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Updated at 4:55 p.m. ET on June 20, 2023
In 2018, when the Norwegian government announced plans to increase fathers’ parental leave by five weeks, many Norwegians were thrilled. Nina Mikkelson, a mother whose then-1-year-old was still nursing, wasn’t one of them. In Norway, paid parental leave is divided into three parts: some reserved for the mother, some for the father, and a third portion that can be used by either parent. Increasing the father’s share meant cutting down the sharable portion, effectively reducing the amount of leave available to mothers by more than a month. And there was talk among some government officials of going further, getting rid of the third discretionary bucket altogether.
Mikkelson posted about her frustrations in a breastfeeding-support Facebook group and found them shared by a number of other women. So she created a new group devoted to protesting the father quota, called “Permisjonen Burde Foreldre Fordele,” or “Leave Should Be Shared by Parents,” reflecting the group’s primary goal: that every family be able to divide their leave as they see fit. The group became active in the comment sections of articles reporting on the reform. After the policy went into effect, the press took interest and the movement against the father quota gained notoriety under a simplified name: Permisjonsopprøret—“Leave Rebellion.”
Paid parental leave has a long history in Europe. Its original purpose was to protect the health of both mother and child. But over the past few decades, encouraging fathers to take leave has become a priority in many countries. The goal is to promote “gender equality in the labor market through promoting gender equality in the division of household work,” Libertad González, an associate professor of economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, told me. In regions all over the world, mothers are more likely than fathers to leave their jobs or reduce their hours at some point after having kids, which significantly reduces their lifetime earnings. The hope is that if more fathers take leave, employers will be less likely to discriminate against women in hiring and promotions, and men will contribute more at home, freeing up mothers to give more time and energy to work.
The problem is that getting dads to take paternity leave is quite difficult. Making parental leave gender neutral is not enough: In the European countries (as well as in Canada and Australia) where leave is shared or transferable between parents, it’s overwhelmingly taken by mothers. The issue is not necessarily that fathers don’t want to take leave. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many fear professional consequences for doing so, and strong cultural norms still reinforce the idea that women should be primary caregivers, González told me. Many countries have started giving parents little choice in the matter, reserving some amount of leave specifically for fathers on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. The so-called father quota acts as a “progressive lever” that encourages families to break from the traditional mold, González said. Norway is the birthplace of this approach. The country converted its maternity leave to gender-neutral parental leave, most of which could be split between parents as desired, in 1978. But few fathers took any, so in 1993, Norway implemented four weeks of paid parental leave just for dads—and within a few years, most dads were taking it. Sweden did the same two years later, and both countries have expanded their father quotas over time. Many other countries have since followed suit.
But there’s little consensus on how much leave ought to be reserved for fathers. Some groups believe that all leave ought to be equally and nontransferably divided between parents. Only through what advocates call “co-responsibility” of care, the argument goes, can modern societies ever hope to achieve real gender equality. The European Union put out a directive that came into effect last year requiring all of its member states to provide both mothers and fathers with four months each of parental leave, two months of which must be paid and nontransferrable. But though equalizing parental leave seems like a straightforward win for gender equality at home and at work, reserving leave for fathers is not without trade-offs. By design, it leaves couples little choice in how to divvy up their leave, which can pose challenges—mostly for women. Not everyone is on board with such a rigid approach.
The Nordic region has become a model of gender equality for the rest of Europe for good reasons, Ann-Zofie Duvander, a demography professor at Stockholm University and an expert on fathers’ use of parental leave, told me. Norway, Sweden, and Iceland all have very high rates of female labor-force participation, which has been true since before the father quota was implemented. But the quota has likely improved gender equality in the labor market in other direct and indirect ways. Teasing out the degree to which it is responsible for improving women’s career advancement and earnings is tricky—its impact likely manifests gradually and works in conjunction with other family policies—but from Duvander’s perspective, the father quota is undeniably having an effect. If you can’t see that, “you’re living in another reality,” she said.
Elsewhere, however, the intended benefits of paternity leave have been slow to materialize. Spain implemented a two-week father quota in 2007 and has since expanded it to put mothers and fathers on equal footing; as of 2021, both dads and moms get 16 weeks of fully paid and nontransferable leave. González, who has been closely tracking Spain’s leave reform, told me that in a few ways, it’s been a remarkable success. A solid majority of fathers are taking their leave, and since the quota was put in place, Spanish fathers have been doing more child care, both during their leave and after. What’s more, children whose dads were eligible for longer paternity leave have more gender-egalitarian attitudes toward the organization of family life than kids whose fathers had access to only a very short leave.
But at least so far, the expansion of paternity leave hasn’t had much of a lasting effect on women’s employment. Mothers are still far more likely to take unpaid leave or work part-time after their paid leave is up. Meanwhile, “men are taking the leave and then they’re going back to work at the same pace as before,” González told me. “We see no big impact in terms of gender gaps and labor-market outcomes at a societal level.” And there may have been some unintended consequences: The paternity leave did seem to help equalize employment outcomes within a subset of couples, but those couples also went on to have fewer kids overall and divorce at higher rates.
Expanding the father quota doesn’t necessarily make life easier for mothers. Not all men take the leave reserved for them. This is especially true in countries where leave is poorly paid, and in those with more traditional gender norms. But even in the highly gender-egalitarian Nordic countries where leave is well compensated, a nontrivial portion of men don’t use it. The ones who don’t are usually those with the least education and income. Increasing paternity leave does nothing to help a mother whose partner won’t take it, and could actively make her life harder if it comes at the expense of leave she might otherwise take.
Even in cases where a father is willing and able to take some leave, some mothers would prefer to take that time themselves, in many cases because they are still recovering from childbirth or still nursing. In Spain, some mothers resent the government’s decision to devote public resources to expanding paternity leave when they feel like they don’t have enough leave themselves. A group of feminist mothers called the Asociación Petra Maternidades Feministas has argued, among other things, that the government ought to prioritize lengthening the paid leave available to mothers to enable them to breastfeed exclusively for six months, as the World Health Organization recommends.
In Norway, where mothers have up to about seven months of fully paid leave, the women of Leave Rebellion feel this results in too little time to make the transition from breastfeeding to bottles and pumping or formula and solids. “The last couple of weeks of your leave … will be very, very stressful,” Marthe Lilleborge, a founding member of the group, told me. Some women work jobs where pumping or taking breaks to nurse is not possible or practical. Parents can extend their time off with unpaid leave—something a rising number of Norwegian women are doing—but lose some employee benefits, such as pension contributions. A survey undertaken in 2021 to investigate the rise in Norwegian mothers taking unpaid leave found that, on average, fathers are content with a quota of 15 weeks—women say it should be shortened to 11. Duvander told me that people seem mostly happy with the father quota in Sweden—on average, men there actually take more leave than is earmarked for them—but that could have something to do with the fact that leave there is so generous: Even with three months reserved for fathers, mothers are able to take more than a year if they choose. The longer the leave, the more likely women will be willing to share it, Duvander said.
Ensuring both that all birth mothers feel their needs are met and that fathers and mothers take leave in equal measure would likely require giving both parents a lot of leave, which may be out of reach for governments with limited budgets—but not everyone agrees that a perfect 50–50 split of leave ought to be the goal. The women of Leave Rebellion believe that there are plenty of reasonable explanations for why women tend to claim more leave after the birth of a child than fathers: Birthing mothers have very specific needs and responsibilities during the months after a child is born that fathers and non-birthing parents don’t. The experience of the newborn period, like pregnancy or childbirth itself, is inherently unequal. Leaving the choice of how to split up parental leave to each couple and allowing for the possibility of a gender-unequal division is, in their view, the equitable approach. If taking more time out of formal employment to care for children puts mothers at an economic disadvantage, then the government should focus on overhauling the economic system to better value and support caregiving, and going after employers who discriminate against those who do that caregiving. “Don’t go after the babies and the mothers,” Lilleborge told me.
In that sense, the father quota has become a battleground for feminists with differing visions of equality. Mikkelson suspects that although Leave Rebellion failed to reverse Norway’s 2018 leave reform, it seems to have successfully quelled momentum toward splitting Norway’s parental leave down the middle. But in Norway and elsewhere, the father quota will likely continue to divide mothers.
This article has been updated to more accurately reflect Duvander’s perspective on the father quota and to clarify leave compensation in Nordic countries.