The Case for Mandatory Paternity Leave

-- By MichaelBerkovits - 05 Apr 2008

Paternity leave, unknown for much of the last century and still rare today, serves several functions. For employers, it can be a coveted benefit to dangle in attracting superior talent. For those interested in more cohesive family life, it is a means of ensuring that more children grow up with involved fathers. For the women's movement, paternity leave functions as a way of counteracting the traditional female monopoly on child-rearing and that monopoly's contribution to the scarcity of women in power positions in the economy.

Women remain underrepresented in positions of power, in significant part because of continued expectations - by men, women, and employers - that women are far more likely to interrupt their careers to raise children. So long as women, including well-educated women, continue to interrupt their careers to raise children in vastly larger numbers than men, positions of economic power will continue to diverge along gender lines. One way to work toward eliminating this sex-based difference, of course, is to equalize male and female pay, on the assumption that for some women, the decision to take time off to raise children is an economic one premised on the father's higher salary. While equal pay for equal work is a worthy goal, however, a major part of the problem involves unequal pay for unequal work: more men occupy powerful positions that come with more remuneration. While an old boys' network surely accounts for much of this state of affairs, some is attributable to the fact that so many women interrupt their careers in order to raise children. It is quite likely that women bearing the brunt of the child-rearing burden is both a cause and an effect of the paucity of women in powerful roles in society.

Maternity Leave: A Partial Solution

The rise of maternity leave, its ultimate enshrinement in law, and the increased availability of paid maternity leave has surely allowed some women to forge successful careers who would not have chosen to do so under the older system, which tended to harshly penalize women for merely being pregnant by, for example, firing them. Maternity leave refers to an employer policy that allows a mother to return to her job after she has taken time off for pregnancy or infant childcare; the leave may be paid or unpaid. Since The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA), most large employers are required under federal law to offer at least 12 weeks of unpaid leave. Employers often compete for the most generous maternity leave programs, sometimes offering paid leave for lengthy periods, in an effort to attract and retain the best female talent, though only 8% of American employees (male and female) have the option of taking paid parental leave.

Even paid maternity leave programs, however, do not solve the female underrepresentation problem. First, among firms who have leave policies only because they are required to do so under the FMLA, some will discriminate against female hires because of the likelihood that they will take advantage of the firm's leave policies and hence be less worthwhile investments. Second, even at firms with generous maternity leave programs, women surely fear the risk - an accurate worry, no doubt - that taking a lengthy break mid-career will retard one's rate of career advancement, if not precluding promotion entirely.

Paternity Leave: One Step Better

Maternity leave programs help mitigate the female underrepresentation problem by incentivizing some women to seek out careers that would have previously been viewed as non-family friendly. Paternity leave programs, in contrast, can mitigate the underrepresentation problem by ensuring that more men take career breaks in order to help raise children. The more men take paternity leave, the less parental leave becomes is a distinctly female issue, and the less it will operate to exclude women from privileged positions in society.

Paternity leave, once nonexistent, has gradually become more common. The FMLA treats male and female parents symmetrically: employers covered under the FMLA must offer at least twelve weeks of unpaid leave to new fathers as well as new mothers. However, while many employers go above and beyond the FMLA-required minimum limits for female employees, the same is not true for male employees. For example, among the Institute for Women's Policy Research "Working Mother 100 Best Companies" - a set of employers that one would expect to be particularly friendly toward family leave issues - 93% offered paid maternity leave, while only 35% offered paid paternity leave. None of these employers offered more than six weeks paid leave for new fathers, while nearly 50% did so for new mothers. Another study, conducted in 2005, found that 54% of employers offered some paid leave to new mothers, while only 12% offered (any) paid leave to new fathers. So long as paternity leave programs (PLPs) remain less generous than their maternity counterparts (MLPs), men will not find leave as attractive an option as do women.

However, it is likely that even if PLPs were both universal and as generous as MLPs, men would still be less likely than women to take time off. For example, in Sweden, where employers are required to offer sixteen months paid leave at 80% salary (subsidized by the government), to be split as a couple sees fit, men only take about 20% of the available leave. The statistic might be even more skewed if not for the fact that each parent is required to take a portion of the available leave time.

The explanation cannot be that husbands earn more than their wives, because either parent earns (nearly) his or her entire salary while on leave. The reasons, then, must be the standard cultural ones: women are expected to raise children, whether because of beliefs about their superior parenting skills or lingering prejudice about their overall unsuitability for the workforce. Also, whether explicitly or not, it is clear that employers are likely to reserve coveted promotions for the most demonstrably committed employees. So long as most managerial positions go to males, men cannot afford to take themselves out of the running for these positions by taking advantage of paternity leave, even when it is available. Something more than a mere continuation of the current trend for offering paternity leave is necessary.