In December of last year, the Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) launched a call for written evidence on paternity and shared parental leave (SPL) to examine options for reform. This reform is sorely needed: Just 5% of eligible parents take SPL in the UK (Department for Business and Trade, 2023). But my research (Twamley, 2024), coincidentally published just one month before the call for evidence, demonstrates the potential of parents’ shared leave to shift ingrained gendered patterns of paid and unpaid work. Caring is Sharing? explores why and how mixed-sex couples make decisions around parental leave at the transition to parenthood, and how these decisions shape their work and family care practices during and after the leave period. It does this through a longitudinal qualitative comparative analysis of mixed-sex parent couples who do and do not share parental leave after the birth of their first child. In the book, I argue that the UK poses a ‘hostile environment’ to the gendered sharing of care, of which SPL is one yawning example.

In this brief outline, I will focus on some of the key factors which make SPL so undesirable (or unattainable) to many couples and suggest ways forward for a less hostile SPL environment in the UK.

Parental leave, or more precisely maternity leave, which was introduced in the UK in 1973, figures in normative visions of the transition to parenthood in ways that men’s extended leave does not. The predicted and normative transitional pathway to motherhood in the UK is through a long solo maternity leave, and for fathers the short two weeks of paternity leave. As a historical norm it ties in with available narratives on the primacy of the mother in young babies’ lives and reinforces the idea of the maternity leave period as morally belonging to the mother. This is further enshrined in the make-up of SPL, which functions through a maternity leave transfer mechanism whereby the mother must go through administrative procedures in order to give part of her leave to the father of the child. Thus, some couples in this study did not discuss sharing leave at all, but just assumed that the mother would take all the leave. Even when mothers did encourage their partners to take SPL, some men expressed reluctance to ‘take her leave’. Colleagues and friends reinforced this assumption, creating a narrative of risk around ‘stealing’ a mother’s leave or admonishing men for taking ‘too much  leave’ from work. These created a moralised context for parents to navigate, without peers to model how leave could be arranged differently. Then sharing leave was perceived as ‘risky’ – to parents’ perceptions of appropriate parenthood and family, but also to the intimate couple relationship, potentially creating extra stresses when couple intimacy is under most pressure.

Additionally, from pregnancy right through to participants’ plans for the future, ‘greedy work’ (Goldin, 2021) loomed large in the everyday lives of participants discouraging the sharing of leave. Greedy workplaces penalise those who work part-time or use flexible work policies, and disproportionately reward those who put themselves entirely at the disposal of their employers (Goldin, 2021). In the first round of interviews, before the babies had even been born, greedy work shaped the decisions that participants made about SPL. They told me that only one career could realistically be supported in the household, and since parental leave was likely to be (more) detrimental to men’s careers (and men’s careers expected to be more successful), men should forgo SPL. These decisions were of course also embedded in gendered ideas of the appropriate roles of mothers and fathers.

Yet, some parents did choose to share leave, despite the unfavourable circumstances of SPL.  What was clear is that such parents had to have multiple favourable factors which encouraged them to consider SPL, including a higher earning mother and well-paid SPL for the father. These insights feed into the key recommendations for how SPL can be improved:

  1. Improve eligibility for and access to parental leave. As uncovered in the survey conducted as part of this study, around a third of parents are not even eligible for SPL (Twamley & Schober, 2019). There are a number of reasons for this, including the timing of pregnancy in relation to employees changing jobs, one partner being out of employment, and parents being self-employed or on zero-hour contracts. It stands to reason that greater access to leave is necessary if we wish more parents to take SPL. However, another important aspect of eligibility relates to who ‘owns’ the leave. SPL as it currently stands functions through a maternity leave transfer mechanism, which acts as a barrier to take-up in multiple ways. An individual right to leave which will be lost if not taken, sometimes called a ‘daddy quota’, would be less likely to be perceived in this way. This means extending paternity leave and introducing fathers’ parental leave.
  2. Increase the remuneration for SPL. The relationship between earnings and leave take-up was observed not to be straightforward in this study. Higher remuneration will not act as a magic bullet, but in combination with a ‘daddy quota’ it would signal broader social support for men’s leave uptake, which many felt was lacking in the current context.

These recommendations are in line with best practice as observed in international contexts with much higher rates of shared leave.

References

Katherine Twamley is Professor of Sociology at the Social Research Institute at UCL. She chairs the UCL Sociology Network – the cross-university group for sociologists at UCL – and is an editorial board member of The Sociological Review and an editor of the Routledge Sociological Futures Book series. Katherine’s research focuses on gender, love and intimacy, social policy, and families, with a particular interest in international comparative and longitudinal research. She is author of ‘Caring is Sharing? Couples navigating parental leave at the transition to parenthood’ (UCL Press, 2024) and ‘Love, marriage and intimacy among Gujarati Indians: A Suitable Match’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) which was shortlisted for the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Award. To hear more about Katherine’s research on the sociology of intimacy, you can listen to a podcast as part of the Uncommon Sense Podcast series.