This blog post is based on an article published in the Journal of Social Policy by Simon N. Chapman, Sanni Kotimäki, Satu Helske, and Anna Erika Hägglund.
Well-compensated, flexible, and non-transferable parental leave for fathers is increasingly viewed as an important policy tool for furthering equality within families. Despite this drive towards equality in caregiving responsibilities, fathers do not necessarily make use of their full leave entitlement. Decisions on whether to take leave and how long to remain on leave depend on individual preferences, family characteristics, and social norms within-partnerships and at work. Most typically, fathers’ leave-taking has been investigated in terms of characteristics of individuals and partnerships, such as income, employment status, and education of both parents, or through small-scale interviews and surveys about what promotes or dissuades fathers from taking leave. Yet, though the decision to take leave is an intensely personal one, leave is often taken from a workplace, and therefore workplaces may influence leave-taking.
In our new article, we explore variation in the uptake of the father’s quota – leave earmarked for fathers that cannot be taken while the mother is on parental leave – by different structural characteristics of private-sector workplaces in Finland: gender wage gap, sex ratio, wage competition, and the educational level of individuals in each workplace.
Why Might Workplace Characteristics Matter?
Leave-taking may act as a signal of shifting work-life priorities, with leave-taking fathers seen by employers as violating the so-called ‘ideal worker norm’ of commitment to the workplace, e.g. working longer hours or being able to take on unexpected tasks. Prior research has indicated that fathers may be penalised for taking parental leave more than mothers due to differences in expectations for men and women. Fathers may also refrain from taking leave if they are in a competitive workplace, either due to fear of falling behind colleagues, or from the risk of losing ground while they are away. Workplace education level may be important too. At an individual level, uptake is found to be lower among those with only primary and secondary education, while those with university-level education are often associated with more gender-egalitarian views. Workplace norms may, therefore, differ based on the educational composition of colleagues, affecting individuals’ perceptions of the career risks of taking leave and consequently their decision to take quota leave or not.
Workplace Structures Are Less Influential Than Expected
Despite the expectation that leave-taking may differ by the extent a workplace is gendered, we did not find any influence on the uptake of father’s quota from either sex ratio or the gender wage gap after accounting for fathers’ selection into workplaces. This is particularly surprising, as female-dominated workplaces are expected to be better structured around employees taking family leaves – it is an accepted and often expected norm for women to take long leaves – and those workplaces with a low or absent gender wage gap should in theory be most accepting of norm violations. The lack of association between father’s quota uptake and gendered structures could be due to any number of reasons and could differ between workplacese, from the best-case scenario that lack of employer experience in handling leave (e.g. in workplaces with few women) is not an issue, to slightly more concerning scenarios from an equality perspective, e.g. structures in place for enabling mothers to easily take leave are not extended to fathers.
Similarly, we did not find wage dispersion – our measure of ‘competitiveness’ that shows whether there are big differences in the wages of people working in the same occupation at a workplace – to affect the likelihood of taking father’s quota. This was the case even when taking into account whether the father was ‘ahead’ or ‘behind’ colleagues in wages. While the short-term effect of leave on household finances has been cited as a barrier in interviews in earlier research, it appears that this is independent of the workplace situation.
We did find that the educational level of the workplace was important, but only for some fathers: those with tertiary-level education working with mostly non-university educated colleagues had a lower likelihood of taking father’s quota than those working with university educated colleagues. There was no indication that lower-educated fathers conformed to workplace norms (under the assumption that the norm is set to some extent by the majority educational group). Why might it operate in one direction and not the other? We suspect it could simply reflect differences in occupations – those more highly educated than most of their colleagues may be in supervisory positions or are less replaceable, whilst those who are lower-educated than the majority of colleagues may be in a position that is not affected by the prevailing norm due to lack of exposure to this norm.
Implications for policy and practice
The policy implication arising from these results is that targeting these broader workplace structural characteristics such as high gender segregation is unlikely to affect the usage of father quota leave (in the private sector at least; very small workplaces were also omitted based on data availability). Instead, it may be that the immediate working environment is most important and may therefore be a potential avenue to target for increasing uptake and improving equality in caregiving. These influences could include – but are not limited to – close colleagues taking father leave and demonstrating no consequences for leave-taking, or having supportive management to reduce the fear of a negative employer response.
Reference
Chapman, Simon N., Sanni Kotimäki, Satu Helske, and Anna Erika Hägglund. 2026. “Support or Suppress: Father’s Parental Leave Uptake in the Private-Sector Workplace Context in Finland.” Journal of Social Policy: 1–17. doi: 10.1017/S0047279426101287.
About the Authors
Simon N. Chapman is Senior Researcher in the INVEST Research Flagship Centre, University of Turku, Finland.
Sanni Kotimäki is University Lecturer in the INVEST Research Flagship Centre, University of Turku, Finland.
Satu Helske is Senior Research Fellow in the INVEST Research Flagship Centre, University of Turku, Finland.
Anna Hägglund is Postdoctoral Researcher in the INVEST Research Flagship Centre, University of Turku, Finland.
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