A headline grabbing survey this week suggested that men are reluctant to take shared parental leave, or SPL – which is now one year old.
The My Family Care seemed to claim that only 1% of new fathers took up the benefit, yet a number of sharp-eyed observers noticed that this was actually misleading – it means 1% of men in the whole workforce, not of new dads.
As reward specialist Adam Nuckley pointed out in a blog on LinkedIn, this is damaging because it gives the impression SPL is a benefit that’s unpopular and not worthwhile. In fact, if we extrapolate Office for National Statistics figures on men in the workplace and the numbers of births, he says, that figure is likely to be more like 20%.
The survey adds that more women than men feel it could be career damaging for their partners, which compounds the assumption that ‘men don’t take leave for babies’, driving us ever further away from the positive intention of the legislation, which was to help new mothers return to work and to give them support during those important early weeks.
Men will take parental leave if it becomes normalised, and to become normalised it needs role models. Sweden, for example, offers a generous 16-month parental leave which can be taken by either mothers or fathers, with two months of that set aside for dads (with plans to introduce a third).
This is a ‘use it or lose it’ system where mothers and fathers are each required to take three months’ leave, or lose them. The remaining 10 months are divided however the parents wish. Fathers are a frequent feature of parent groups and coffee shops rather than being an exception.
And while having a fifth of the male workforce taking up the new right is positive, it could still be better. Many more men in My Family Care’s survey expressed an interest in taking SPL than those who actually did, meaning that with future children they may reconsider, or for those who had not started families yet, they could become a trailblazer.
The ramifications of sharing leave are about so much more than who changes nappies – more equal rights level out career prospects when parents return to work, and make it easier if one parent earns more than another to plan financially during the early months of a child’s life. Knowing the other parent is at home, rather than a childminder or nanny, can also ease the difficult transition back to work for a new mother.
So while the statistics may not be as transparent as they first appear, the message is still the same. If more men take SPL, neither party has to disappear from the workforce unless they want to, and both can return to work knowing the excitement and challenge of having a new baby has been shared.