Click here to read Ian Hargreaves (Professor of Journalism), David Kershaw (head of M&C Saatchi), and Clive Stafford-Smith (Director of Reprieve) on how their experience of fatherhood differs from that of their fathers
To the hundred or so guests at the UK Nordic Baltic summit, held during late January in the achingly trendy surroundings of the Whitechapel Gallery, the distinctiveness of Cameron’s conservatism became abundantly clear. While his government pursues a traditional right-of-centre plan for state retrenchment, the prime minister used an informal day of workshops to discuss a policy that many in his party would consider suspiciously progressive. Along with green energy and innovation, one of the key themes chosen for discussion among the nine premiers and a variety of entrepreneurs, think tank experts and technologists was gender equality and work-family balance.
Days earlier, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg had announced that the coalition would implement the Labour government’s plans to increase paternity leave, and consider a more ambitious package of entitlements to be introduced in 2015. From April, fathers will be allowed to share part of their partner’s parental leave, so that working mothers and fathers can divide up parenting duties more equally. As Clegg put it, the current laws, under which men can take a maximum of two weeks and women up to a year, “marginalise men and patronise women.” In future, if a mother chooses to go back to work early, the father will be entitled to take up to 26 weeks’ additional leave—and claim the mother’s remaining statutory pay.
Although Cameron and Clegg have spoken before about the importance of family-friendly working—and indeed both have taken their allotted paternity leave—this was still a surprising move. An avowedly pro-business government committed to reducing red tape found itself being attacked by the Institute of Directors and the British Chambers of Commerce, whose director-general demanded to know “how is an employer expected to plan and arrange cover with this fully-flexible system?”
A more philosophical objection could be mounted here too. Coalition ministers are fond of accusing the last government of social engineering—but isn’t legislating to encourage fathers to take more parental leave open to the same criticism? It’s not as if men have marched on the streets to demand more time with their children; a 2009 survey found that nearly half of fathers don’t even take the two weeks’ paid leave every new dad has been entitled to since 2003. So is this a top-down political effort to force social change—and a doomed one, at that?
*****
Not necessarily. A look at social trends over the last few decades reveals a more complicated picture of attitudes towards parenting. Research by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission reveals that almost nine out of ten fathers now say they would take more leave if there was more generous provision to do so. And despite Britain being near the bottom of the European league table for parental leave and compensation, the household division of labour has shifted dramatically—and is continuing to shift. The daily average time spent on childcare by fathers has grown by a staggering 800 per cent, from 15 minutes in the 1970s to two hours a day in the late 1990s. The ratio of time spent on average by women and men on domestic work has shifted from 4:1 in the 1960s to less than 2:1 by the mid-2000s. In 2008, a British Social Attitudes survey reported that the number of men who agreed that it is the man’s role to earn money while the women stays at home was at an all-time low of 17 per cent.
Such trends look set to continue. Research last year found that 50 per cent of men wanted to slow down their careers to leave more space for their families, and a survey of teenagers found both boys and girls wanted to balance work and family in their future lives. Meanwhile, research by the insurance company Aviva found that 6 per cent of fathers—about 600,000 men—now consider themselves to be their child’s primary carer, a figure which has increased throughout the past decade and is still rising. Undoubtedly, such fathers deserve to be supported in the same way that mothers who look after children are.
More broadly, helping fathers to be carers seems to be good for both men and society as a whole. A study by Lancaster University Management School found that fathers who work flexibly are happier, healthier and better motivated in their jobs. In countries such as Sweden, where fathers have enjoyed greater work flexibility for some time, there is also evidence of improvements in family relations and couple stability. Mothers without support or jobs are more likely to suffer from depression, and research also links better outcomes for children—including stronger peer relationships and fewer behavioural problems—with higher levels of engagement by their fathers.
So the desire among fathers to take a more active role in parenting—and the benefits of encouraging them to—are obvious. But with a flat economy and high levels of job insecurity, how many men are going to take up the government’s (optional and low paid) offer of paternity leave? In short, are the plans likely to make any real difference for most working parents?
It’s worth looking at countries where similar initiatives have worked. Sweden was the first country to give fathers paid time off; now, out of the overall provision of 16 months at virtually full pay, two must be used by the “minority parent,” which still overwhelmingly means dad. And Swedish Social Democrats are demanding a doubling of non-transferable leave for each parent to four months. What the Scandinavians have come to understand is that for fathers to take up their entitlement requires not just good wage compensation but an element of arm-twisting. In Norway, for example, fewer than one in 20 men took up their leave until what was effectively a fathers’ leave quota was introduced in the early 1990s; now the figure is nine out of ten.
Perhaps the strongest case for helping fathers is that it improves the economic opportunities of women. The Icelandic model—in which each parent gets three months’ flexible paid leave and both parents can share an additional three months—recently proved its worth when the country reported the lowest gender pay gap in the world. Little surprise that in Britain, where there has been no such generous provision, women who work full-time earn over 15 per cent less than their male equivalents. Or that, as is all too well-known, women are under-represented in the highest ranks of business and the professions, and over-represented in lower-paid careers that are more compatible with caring roles. Such an imbalance has a knock-on effect for the economy: if many women—and some men—are not in jobs that make best use of their talents, there is an attendant loss of productivity. This may explain why the CBI, as the more progressive voice of employers, backs the coalition’s plans.
Yet do they go far enough? The majority of British parents say that decisions about who gives up work to care for a child are based on financial considerations. Since the current two weeks of paternity leave are paid at a flat rate well below average earnings, it’s not surprising that men are more likely to take annual rather than paternity leave after a child is born. Unfortunately, the same problem lies in the parental leave reforms coming into force in April: nearly four out of five men earn more than their partners, and many will still face unaffordable losses of income if they elect to take time off.
An even more pressing issue is the social-class gap in fathering—something that these measures may, in the short term at least, exacerbate. While some employers are already going beyond the law to support men in their caring roles, the beneficiaries are likely to be felt more in the higher ranks of the labour market. It is hard to see how fathers in low-wage jobs will feel similarly able to take advantage of the new shared, sometimes unpaid, parental leave. Moreover, for one in eight children the issue is not seeing more of their fathers but knowing them at all. These children are overwhelmingly concentrated among Britain’s poorest families. It is not clear that Scandinavian-style family-friendly policies do anything to reduce social inequality, or whether they chiefly benefit the better off.
The public narrative around single-mother families tends to be disparaging and punitive: focusing on the pathologies of teenage mums and feckless fathers. But while single motherhood may be the norm in some neighbourhoods, the lack of reasonably well-paid employment for non-graduate men is also a key factor. Young men have little to tempt them into the formal economy and may conclude that, since the benefits system plays the role of provider, they have little to offer the mother of the child. And because parents know their overall income from benefit will fall if they move in together, they have little incentive to build a life together once their baby arrives.
*****
The government needs to take all of this into account if it hopes to spark real change. Nick Clegg’s longer-term plans are ambitious: he’d like the government to consider whether fathers should be allowed to step in six weeks after a child is born, if the mother returns to work. There is also talk of allowing parents to take leave in chunks rather than in one long stretch; and, most importantly, of introducing a “use it or lose it” approach which offers fathers a non-transferable period of leave within ten weeks of the birth.
If the state starts treating parents as having equal rights and responsibilities for childcare, it would be going with the grain of the choices being made by mothers and fathers. Most of us continue to have a bundle of attributes we associate with the words and “mum” and “dad.” But, in time, the links between roles and genders are likely to become more complex and less fixed.
After I wrote about these issues on my blog, several men contacted me to describe how being a stay-at-home father had changed the way they thought about themselves and what mattered in life. One commented that he never would have thought he would be an advocate for stay-at-home-dads, but that after three years caring for his son he wouldn’t have changed a thing. “There was a moment when I had a go at my other half for pinching my hand cream—at that moment I realised the role reversal was probably complete.” Another’s experience showed how it is not just male chauvinism that inhibits fathers: “As a father of a wee one (coming up for two in April), I am very proud to be a ‘modern’ dad. However, the antenatal experience was an eye opener for me: I was systematically banned from the antenatal classes as men could be offputting to the mothers.”
As the evidence clearly shows, these men are growing in number—and their voices deserve to be heard. Those who would cast the idea of longer paternity leave as unwanted social engineering miss the point: the more pertinent criticism is that the latest reform does not go far enough. Granted, it may at first be only relatively well-off men (if any) who gain from it. But social trends tend to flow down the class hierarchy and, as more men choose engaged fatherhood, we must stop seeing it as a burden from which poor young men are fleeing—and instead explore how to give them the support to be great dads.
What men want
Statutory paternity pay (and maternity pay after the first six weeks) is 90 per cent of the employee’s average weekly earnings, or £124.88, whichever is lower. Under the coalition’s new rules, a man on the median male wage would lose 77 per cent of his weekly income if he chose to take time off—and any leave he takes nine months after the baby is born will be unpaid
In 2009, 45 per cent of new fathers told the Equality and Human Rights Commission that they did not take any paternity leave
Some 88 per cent said they would do so if they were offered more money
Five out of six men do not believe that mothers should stay at home while they go out to work
To the hundred or so guests at the UK Nordic Baltic summit, held during late January in the achingly trendy surroundings of the Whitechapel Gallery, the distinctiveness of Cameron’s conservatism became abundantly clear. While his government pursues a traditional right-of-centre plan for state retrenchment, the prime minister used an informal day of workshops to discuss a policy that many in his party would consider suspiciously progressive. Along with green energy and innovation, one of the key themes chosen for discussion among the nine premiers and a variety of entrepreneurs, think tank experts and technologists was gender equality and work-family balance.
Days earlier, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg had announced that the coalition would implement the Labour government’s plans to increase paternity leave, and consider a more ambitious package of entitlements to be introduced in 2015. From April, fathers will be allowed to share part of their partner’s parental leave, so that working mothers and fathers can divide up parenting duties more equally. As Clegg put it, the current laws, under which men can take a maximum of two weeks and women up to a year, “marginalise men and patronise women.” In future, if a mother chooses to go back to work early, the father will be entitled to take up to 26 weeks’ additional leave—and claim the mother’s remaining statutory pay.
Although Cameron and Clegg have spoken before about the importance of family-friendly working—and indeed both have taken their allotted paternity leave—this was still a surprising move. An avowedly pro-business government committed to reducing red tape found itself being attacked by the Institute of Directors and the British Chambers of Commerce, whose director-general demanded to know “how is an employer expected to plan and arrange cover with this fully-flexible system?”
A more philosophical objection could be mounted here too. Coalition ministers are fond of accusing the last government of social engineering—but isn’t legislating to encourage fathers to take more parental leave open to the same criticism? It’s not as if men have marched on the streets to demand more time with their children; a 2009 survey found that nearly half of fathers don’t even take the two weeks’ paid leave every new dad has been entitled to since 2003. So is this a top-down political effort to force social change—and a doomed one, at that?
*****
Not necessarily. A look at social trends over the last few decades reveals a more complicated picture of attitudes towards parenting. Research by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission reveals that almost nine out of ten fathers now say they would take more leave if there was more generous provision to do so. And despite Britain being near the bottom of the European league table for parental leave and compensation, the household division of labour has shifted dramatically—and is continuing to shift. The daily average time spent on childcare by fathers has grown by a staggering 800 per cent, from 15 minutes in the 1970s to two hours a day in the late 1990s. The ratio of time spent on average by women and men on domestic work has shifted from 4:1 in the 1960s to less than 2:1 by the mid-2000s. In 2008, a British Social Attitudes survey reported that the number of men who agreed that it is the man’s role to earn money while the women stays at home was at an all-time low of 17 per cent.
Such trends look set to continue. Research last year found that 50 per cent of men wanted to slow down their careers to leave more space for their families, and a survey of teenagers found both boys and girls wanted to balance work and family in their future lives. Meanwhile, research by the insurance company Aviva found that 6 per cent of fathers—about 600,000 men—now consider themselves to be their child’s primary carer, a figure which has increased throughout the past decade and is still rising. Undoubtedly, such fathers deserve to be supported in the same way that mothers who look after children are.
More broadly, helping fathers to be carers seems to be good for both men and society as a whole. A study by Lancaster University Management School found that fathers who work flexibly are happier, healthier and better motivated in their jobs. In countries such as Sweden, where fathers have enjoyed greater work flexibility for some time, there is also evidence of improvements in family relations and couple stability. Mothers without support or jobs are more likely to suffer from depression, and research also links better outcomes for children—including stronger peer relationships and fewer behavioural problems—with higher levels of engagement by their fathers.
So the desire among fathers to take a more active role in parenting—and the benefits of encouraging them to—are obvious. But with a flat economy and high levels of job insecurity, how many men are going to take up the government’s (optional and low paid) offer of paternity leave? In short, are the plans likely to make any real difference for most working parents?
It’s worth looking at countries where similar initiatives have worked. Sweden was the first country to give fathers paid time off; now, out of the overall provision of 16 months at virtually full pay, two must be used by the “minority parent,” which still overwhelmingly means dad. And Swedish Social Democrats are demanding a doubling of non-transferable leave for each parent to four months. What the Scandinavians have come to understand is that for fathers to take up their entitlement requires not just good wage compensation but an element of arm-twisting. In Norway, for example, fewer than one in 20 men took up their leave until what was effectively a fathers’ leave quota was introduced in the early 1990s; now the figure is nine out of ten.
Perhaps the strongest case for helping fathers is that it improves the economic opportunities of women. The Icelandic model—in which each parent gets three months’ flexible paid leave and both parents can share an additional three months—recently proved its worth when the country reported the lowest gender pay gap in the world. Little surprise that in Britain, where there has been no such generous provision, women who work full-time earn over 15 per cent less than their male equivalents. Or that, as is all too well-known, women are under-represented in the highest ranks of business and the professions, and over-represented in lower-paid careers that are more compatible with caring roles. Such an imbalance has a knock-on effect for the economy: if many women—and some men—are not in jobs that make best use of their talents, there is an attendant loss of productivity. This may explain why the CBI, as the more progressive voice of employers, backs the coalition’s plans.
Yet do they go far enough? The majority of British parents say that decisions about who gives up work to care for a child are based on financial considerations. Since the current two weeks of paternity leave are paid at a flat rate well below average earnings, it’s not surprising that men are more likely to take annual rather than paternity leave after a child is born. Unfortunately, the same problem lies in the parental leave reforms coming into force in April: nearly four out of five men earn more than their partners, and many will still face unaffordable losses of income if they elect to take time off.
An even more pressing issue is the social-class gap in fathering—something that these measures may, in the short term at least, exacerbate. While some employers are already going beyond the law to support men in their caring roles, the beneficiaries are likely to be felt more in the higher ranks of the labour market. It is hard to see how fathers in low-wage jobs will feel similarly able to take advantage of the new shared, sometimes unpaid, parental leave. Moreover, for one in eight children the issue is not seeing more of their fathers but knowing them at all. These children are overwhelmingly concentrated among Britain’s poorest families. It is not clear that Scandinavian-style family-friendly policies do anything to reduce social inequality, or whether they chiefly benefit the better off.
The public narrative around single-mother families tends to be disparaging and punitive: focusing on the pathologies of teenage mums and feckless fathers. But while single motherhood may be the norm in some neighbourhoods, the lack of reasonably well-paid employment for non-graduate men is also a key factor. Young men have little to tempt them into the formal economy and may conclude that, since the benefits system plays the role of provider, they have little to offer the mother of the child. And because parents know their overall income from benefit will fall if they move in together, they have little incentive to build a life together once their baby arrives.
*****
The government needs to take all of this into account if it hopes to spark real change. Nick Clegg’s longer-term plans are ambitious: he’d like the government to consider whether fathers should be allowed to step in six weeks after a child is born, if the mother returns to work. There is also talk of allowing parents to take leave in chunks rather than in one long stretch; and, most importantly, of introducing a “use it or lose it” approach which offers fathers a non-transferable period of leave within ten weeks of the birth.
If the state starts treating parents as having equal rights and responsibilities for childcare, it would be going with the grain of the choices being made by mothers and fathers. Most of us continue to have a bundle of attributes we associate with the words and “mum” and “dad.” But, in time, the links between roles and genders are likely to become more complex and less fixed.
After I wrote about these issues on my blog, several men contacted me to describe how being a stay-at-home father had changed the way they thought about themselves and what mattered in life. One commented that he never would have thought he would be an advocate for stay-at-home-dads, but that after three years caring for his son he wouldn’t have changed a thing. “There was a moment when I had a go at my other half for pinching my hand cream—at that moment I realised the role reversal was probably complete.” Another’s experience showed how it is not just male chauvinism that inhibits fathers: “As a father of a wee one (coming up for two in April), I am very proud to be a ‘modern’ dad. However, the antenatal experience was an eye opener for me: I was systematically banned from the antenatal classes as men could be offputting to the mothers.”
As the evidence clearly shows, these men are growing in number—and their voices deserve to be heard. Those who would cast the idea of longer paternity leave as unwanted social engineering miss the point: the more pertinent criticism is that the latest reform does not go far enough. Granted, it may at first be only relatively well-off men (if any) who gain from it. But social trends tend to flow down the class hierarchy and, as more men choose engaged fatherhood, we must stop seeing it as a burden from which poor young men are fleeing—and instead explore how to give them the support to be great dads.
What men want
Statutory paternity pay (and maternity pay after the first six weeks) is 90 per cent of the employee’s average weekly earnings, or £124.88, whichever is lower. Under the coalition’s new rules, a man on the median male wage would lose 77 per cent of his weekly income if he chose to take time off—and any leave he takes nine months after the baby is born will be unpaid
In 2009, 45 per cent of new fathers told the Equality and Human Rights Commission that they did not take any paternity leave
Some 88 per cent said they would do so if they were offered more money
Five out of six men do not believe that mothers should stay at home while they go out to work
