Facing the challenges of shared parental leave

Posted on 6th November, 2024

Shared parental leave (SPL), introduced in the UK in 2015, allows a mother to transfer part of her maternity leave to her partner. Despite being available to all new parents in employment throughout the UK, a 2023 evaluation found that only around 5 per cent of fathers are taking SPL.

To mark the publication of Caring is Sharing? Couples navigating parental leave at the transition to parenthood by Katherine Twamley, we are proud to share an extract exploring the competing pressures that prevent couples from taking up shared parental leave, and looking in detail at study participants Rita and Riley, and the impact of ‘greedy work’ on their SPL choices. Here the author reflects on her interview with study participants Rita and Riley, and the impact of ‘greedy work’ on their SPL choices.

Riley and Rita are advertising executives, working in the same company and at the same level at the time of Rita’s pregnancy. On the face of it, they would seem to be in an ideal situation to share leave. However, they pretty quickly decided that Rita would take all her leave, in a ‘gut decision’. When I probed them a bit further on their reasoning, Riley told me the following:

I would love to take some time off but again, it’s a very tough decision to take, not least because Rita will have already taken time off, and as a woman, they [employers] have patience for you to take that time off. But that does impact your career. If we have another child, Rita will probably have to take off a couple of months, so somehow it makes sense that one of us stays more career-focused than the other one, who will be more child-focused. That sounds awful but …

Riley, Interview 1

For Riley, only one person can take leave, because of the expected impact on career earnings and progression. That women’s maternity leave impacts on their careers is well evidenced (Cukrowska-Torzewska & Matysiak, 2020). Since Rita will ‘obviously’ want to take several months’ leave, and moreover to recover from the pregnancy and birth, the impact on her career is taken for granted. From his perspective, it ‘makes sense’ that all career penalties be focused on one career – Rita’s. It is interesting nonetheless that he added ‘That sounds awful but …’, indicating a recognition that traditional divisions of paid and unpaid work go against popular discourses of gender equality within couple relationships (Faircloth, 2021; Jamieson, 2011; Twamley, 2014). Here we see how parental leave decisions are negotiated in dialogue with real and imagined others (Burkitt, 2012; Holmes et al., 2021) and their expected reactions to couples’ leave plans, but in concert with (perceived) structural constraints. Fear of repercussions for men’s careers was one of the most common responses in the survey on the question of why participants were not sharing leave; it has moreover been observed in multiple contexts beyond the UK, which indicates the pervasive nature of such concerns (Samtleben et al., 2019).

This idea that ‘role specialisation’ is necessary was not uncommon; it actually emerged most forcefully in later interviews as participants began to consider how to manage the demands of paid and unpaid work after the leave period (we will return to this in chapter 6). Fundamental to this perspective is a view of paid work as precarious and very demanding (as much as the intensive demands of parenting, which I discuss further in the next section). Participants described working in high-pressure contexts which necessitated long working hours to keep on top of their workloads and especially for career progression. Goldin (2021) argues that such ‘greedy work’ is a key driver in the role specialisation of earner and carer within couples. Greedy work is embedded in cultural ideals which value professional achievements over personal needs; it is most commonly found in white-collar jobs and professions, and it is at its ‘greediest’ in high-stress, high-demand sectors such as finance, law and technology. The glorification of overwork, the pressure to conform to high-performance expectations and the lack of institutional support for work–life balance contribute to the prevalence of this phenomenon (Goldin, 2021; T. A. Sullivan, 2014).

The ‘patience’ that Riley said employers show as regards women’s take-up of leave underlies an understanding of personal and family life as a hindrance to employers, who ‘patiently’ accept limited incursions into the work sphere. In this context, SPL is felt as risky for Riley and other participants, conscious of the potential repercussions on their career. Riley appeared to internalise what Acker calls the ideal worker norm here: a hypothetical worker ‘who exists only for the job’ without allowing any other commitments to intrude on their work (1990:149). Such workers typically perceive long work hours as legitimate (Byun & Won, 2020; Williams et al., 2013) and therefore place indirect limits on fathers’ leave take-up (their own and other’s) (Haas & Hwang, 2019). This was the case with Riley, not only in his avoidance of SPL, but also in his take-up of paternity leave. When Rita went into labour, Riley explained, he was asked to forgo his paternity leave until a later time as his manager didn’t want him to take 10 days off in a row; the manager suggested Riley took annual leave instead – two days a week for three weeks – and delayed his paternity leave until work was more settled:

He [Riley’s manager] didn’t directly say ‘Don’t take paternity leave’, but he did say that it would be better if I took it later. I get on really well with him, so I could have said ‘No, I want to take it now’, but I’m lucky how well we get on and we had this difficult project so I agreed and it was fine. I’ll take the paternity leave maybe later in the year.

Riley, Interview 2

It is striking that Riley describes himself as ‘lucky’ despite the pressure from his manager not to take paternity leave. Such seeming gratitude to employers was observed in other fathers, who also told me that they were ‘lucky’ their employers facilitated time off during their partner’s pregnancy, for example, or in the generally positive reaction to the request for paternity leave, despite the fact that it is a legal right for fathers. The gratitude signals a socio-political narrative of individual responsibility for care and family (rather than a shared societal one).

About the Author

This is an excerpt from Caring Is Sharing? Couples navigating parental leave at the transition to parenthood by Katherine Twamley.

Katherine Twamley is Professor of Sociology at the UCL Social Research Institute.