'Gender Equality' - But Not For Daddy
ResPublica's Sandra Gruescu, on equal rights and responsibilities for fathers
The Government recently announced that fathers will get a much longer paternity leave from April 2011 onwards, with the new regulations applying to children born after that date. Fathers will have a legal right to take the place of the mother at home for the last three months of her statutory nine-month maternity break. They will be eligible during that three-month paternity leave to statutory government pay of £123 a week. This is on the condition that the mother returns to work, meaning it would not be possible for the mother to stay on unpaid leave and the father on paid leave at the same time. That is a shame: sharing would be so much more fun.
Fathers would then be allowed to take an additional unpaid three months off, in effect providing families with 12 months of parental leave. Mothers are paid for 39 weeks, fathers for 12 weeks. No equal rights here; when it comes to 'gender equality,' fathers in the UK do badly. Currently, they can only claim two weeks paternity leave on £123 per week. Mothers can get up to nine months. Even when you deduct the two months or so for a mother to recover from birth and settle with the baby, the difference in leave entitlement is still stark.
If the mother earns more than the father, it makes economic sense for the family if they swap places for months 7 to 9 of baby's first year. Of course – as is ever so often –- this new law will be working against a Government (and World Health Organisation) recommendation on breast-feeding, which is supposed to last for more than 6 months. So why not add the three month paid leave for the father to the 9 month for the mother, giving her enough time to wean the baby and then daddy can take over? Because it is too expensive? If so, prepare to cut down baby's milk supply then.
Do fathers want this? Well, some of them yes, some of them no, and a third group needs to be nudged. Countries, such as Iceland, Sweden and Denmark where family policy is based on gender equality have introduced so-called ‘daddy months' on a ‘use it or lose it' basis. They are reserved for the fathers to make his right stronger. And take-up is high: 85 to 90 percent of all fathers exercise their rights. By the way, the saying that paternity leave take up in the Nordic countries increases during elk hunt season (or the world championship) is a myth, not confirmed by the data.
Even in Germany, which used to have very traditional view on the roles within a family, the introduction in 2007 of two daddy months has increased uptake from a tiny 3 percent to 25 percent and rising. Mind you, pay is generous for all parents taking leave: 2/3 of net salary up to a maximum of 1800 Euros - and this is per month.
There is a lot of talk about a “fatherless” society, lone parents, long working hours, parental responsibility rules are biased towards the mother, especially if parents are unmarried. If society wants fathers to be more responsible and to be more involved with the up bringing of their children, perhaps it has to pay more attention to giving them equal rights too?
If it becomes the norm that fathers go on paternity leave – although with such poor pay and discrimination in the job market (yes, fathers who leave work on time to pick up their children suffer this too) this is unlikely – they will need job protection before and during this period. Certainly they should be given the same rights as mothers that they should not suffer a detriment or dismissal for taking paternity leave. Otherwise they might get fired once the employer hears the happy news.