All Things Parental Leave
In which I take shots at Natal Gazing
I posted a piece last week in which I review a lot of the summaries and takes from the family journalist Stephanie H. Murray of Family Stuff. One thing I touched on looked at implications of parental leave policies, and a debate about optimal policy. My personal preferred policy would be for parental leave allowance to be issued per child, with complete autonomy from the couple to split the leave as they desire. Darby Saxbe and Stephanie H. Murray offered their critiques of this view, suggesting that there should be some mandating from the state for fathers to take a certain amount of the leave. I’ve also had conversations with a couple of people lately who maintain that the state should mandate greater leave to be used only by mothers (which is still the default in most of the world, given that maternity leave tends to be greater). I will now defend my outlandish view that couples should be given the choice to do what works best for them!
I will build my case primarily in response to the critiques offered by Saxbe and Murray. For ease, I’ll group their takes, but be clear I’m not saying both of them take any given view, just that at least one of them raised it! The reasons for mandating a given amount of paternity leave run:
P1: Paternal involvement is good for a) supporting the mother, and b) instilling paternal virtues. P2: Paternity leave will increase paternal involvement.
[Related to the above,] P1: A culture of greater paternal involvement is good [for the above benefits]. P2: Paternity leave will increase paternal involvement.
P1: Parental leave taken more by women biases hiring penalties towards women.
P1: Parental leave taken more by women biases promotions towards men.
To clear some stuff up, I agree that parental leave that couples choose how to split will, on average, by taken more by mothers, in part because of average differences in preference and in part because of biological constraints. I also agree that paternal involvement with child rearing is a good thing! Paternal involvement helps mothers, helps marital and parent-child relationships, and, I agree, is good for the overall flourishing for the guy. But it’s worth examining each of these particular arguments for whether this translates to an optimal policy of mandated paternity leave.
There are a couple of data points to think that mandating paternity leave can have adverse effects. In a post dropped just today, Stephanie H. Murray references a recent study finding that mandating that a section of parental leave is taken by men resulted in a drop of the proportion of couples satisfied with the split of parental leave from around 9 in 10 to around 5 in 10 (which Saxbe insisted to be not a ‘disaster’—I wonder at what level of satisfaction drop she would call it a disaster).
Another indicator of preferences is behaviour and intentions. If fertility and fertility intentions go down after increased mandates, that’s an indication that those mandates aren’t great for parents and prospective parents. And they can! In Spain, mandated paternity leave led to reduced fertility 6 years out, likely in part due to fall in desired fertility on the part of men (although not in Norway or the US1). There is also a possible negative effect on marital stability according to one Swedish study, although it looks like there was no effect in Norway.2
Saxbe has pointed to a Korean study finding large positive effects on fertility from a mandated paternity leave, but overlooked that this was a company policy. We can’t extrapolate what will work as a government policy for what worked on a company level! Plausibly, a company going out of its way to carve out paternity leave might also be a company in which men feel supported and even lauded for taking paternity leave, whereas those taking paternity leave due to a government mandate may worry about career penalties and other workplace awkwardness. After all, in Spain, state-mandated paternity leave reduced fertility, whilst it didn’t seem to have a fertility effect in Norway or the US.
Why might career penalties be particularly important for guys? Well, it is true that guys doing ok financially is a big predictor of good family outcomes. When married guys have growing financial health, the divorce risk goes down (for women, the long run effect is zero (there’s a timing effect of divorces going up in the short run)). Divorce doesn’t just happen! Divorce risk is sensitive to male financial health because good marital vibes are sensitive to whether the dude is making a financial contribution to the household. Of course, I am talking about averages etc etc. But this is the situation on average nonetheless. And some of that may change with culture, but this relationship holds in egalitarian Sweden (see linked study), so a good chunk of this is likely due to somewhat deep-rooted preferences and behaviours.
I think the other aspect is also about preferences: different people have different preferences about how much time they spend at home doing stuff at home. In some families, the guy might want to be home in evenings and weekends, but value going to work. This doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t support for the mother either, since many do cultivate extended family (and/or other) support infrastructure. For some families, they will take full use of the option to split/share leave, or for the father to take the lion’s share of the work. But I think that we shouldn’t mandate from where couples trade their time for care and money.
So far, I’ve suggested that the hiring penalties for fathers and potential fathers could in particular have adverse effects for families. I’ve also mentioned that, for some couples they will be able to take leave when there is a lot of support for the mother. But I also want to focus on another, perhaps sneaky, effect from making parental leave split at the couple’s discretion: it makes it easier for fathers who do take the leave to avoid penalties. If, when hiring, the probability of a guy taking a sustained leave is reasonably low, then the employer risk of leave-related disruption will remain low and there will probably be less of a hiring/promotion penalty. This may therefore be more advantageous for fathers and prospective fathers who would like to stay at home than disadvantaging all men likely to become fathers relative to men who do not appear likely to become fathers.
Finally, I am sceptical that simply mandating paternity leave would significantly shift culture to make fathers more involved. Additional leave frees up time. I’ve heard of stories of guys in Japan and South Korea using paternity leave they get to go on holiday! Policy doesn’t automatically achieve its intended ends! I’m not completely stuck in the mud on this, and obviously many will use the spare time to help out more. But I’m just saying that the effect size is going to be a lot smaller than many help.
I’ve also glossed past this, but giving couples freedom in how they use parental leave also gives the potential in some families for fathers to take the greater share of the work, as the Morrissey family does. This is unlikely to be the average family, but I think it’s reasonable to let each family work out what works for them.
So far, I think I’ve given a reasonable shot at highlighting likely adverse effects on general family outcomes from mandating that amounts of parental leave are taken by fathers. I’ve suggested that a good takeaway at this point would be to expand parental leave in a completely gender-neutral way, allowing couples to chose what works for them.
One additional question I have at this moment is that I wonder what would persuade Saxbe and similar commentators to give couples choice rather than mandating it for men. I have great respect for Saxbe, and she is listed as a senior advisor for the Centre for Family and Education, my labour of love. In an exchange with Saxbe, she dismissed the Spain study as only looking at a change in desired births, and she acknowledged it when I pointed out that it looked at both desired and actual births, but it did not seem to move the conviction that mandating paternity leave must be good. Today, she queried Murray’s description of a finding that a paternity leave mandate being a ‘disaster’ on the basis that the results, which included (as mentioned) 4 in 10 couples going from satisfied with their parental leave to believing that the mother should take more leave, could not be accurately described as a disaster. If I were forced to speculate on the motivation behind the conviction in paternity leave mandates, I would think that it is driven more by a conviction that anything that gets guys more involved is a good, regardless of the evidence of effects varying family to family and often being adverse when forced. I take the seemingly controversial position that we should look at the evidence on these things and be open to changing our minds based on how things actually end up affecting families!
Cools et al. (2015), Dahl et al. (2014), Kotsadam and Finseraas (2011) and Bartel et al. (2018).
Avdic and Karimi (2019), Dahl et al. (2014) and Cools et al. (2015)
