Paternity Leave In The U.S. Is Abysmal — And It’s Hurting Women

11:00 am, June 16th | by Amy Tennery

If there’s one common complaint we (and by “we,” I of course mean “insufferable hippie champions of women’s lib”) hear it’s this: What about the guys?

What about the guys, indeed. Men also face gender stereotyping. Men face pressures that women don’t face — because they’re men. And on a certain (selfish?) level we need things to change for men in the workplace to reach certain improvements for us.

And, since it’s (almost) Father’s Day, let’s start with one of the more stubborn issues for men in the workplace: Paternity leave. Men don’t take it — and we really need them to.

On the surface, the laws surrounding paternity leave and maternity leave are basically identical in the U.S., which we might as well refer to as The Barren Wasteland Of Parental Leave Rights. As it stands, there’s only one law guaranteeing time off for new mothers and fathers, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. For the record, it doesn’t offer any paid leave, and it only guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid time off for workers who’ve spent at least a year at a business with 50 or more people. Oh, goody. So while a lot of businesses offer paid parental leave, this is really more of a “perk.”

But studies show that when offered paid leave when a new kid pops into the picture, men typically don’t take it. Why? It all boils down to fear, as Randall Turner, vice president of the National Fatherhood Initiative told Family Education. “It is rare for us to find a father who is brave enough to take paternity leave. They really feel that there might be repercussions after they come back to work.” In other words, this is a man-made problem.

Sure, there’s a cultural impetus here that effects men and women equally. The U.S., as a whole, has an addiction to work — our typical workweek is a Red Bull-fueled hellscape compared to the rest of the industrialized world. And women are just as susceptible to vultures usurping their roles when they take leave as men are. But you’re kidding yourself if you think that men don’t face a greater stigma for taking time off than women do when a new kid arrives. Women are “expected” to take parental leave in ways that men just aren’t.

And this is, in fact, as big a problem for women as it is for men.

Consider Sweden, a pioneer in parental leave rights: In 1974, it was the first to recognize the importance of men’s parental leave, by changing the term “maternity leave” to “parental leave” — a move that, as the Women’s Law Project put it, “laid the groundwork to make a world of difference for working mothers in Sweden.” By 1995, Sweden instituted a law setting aside one month of the year-long parental leave for specifically dads in heterosexual partnerships — if the father didn’t take that month, the whole family’s parental leave would be docked down to 11 months. Families would be penalized if the father didn’t take a month off work.

Prior to the legal parental leave changes in Sweden, guys who took paternity leave were referred to as “velvet dads,” according to the New York Times, a term that’s just as derogatory as it sounds. And Bengt Westerberg, the deputy prime minister credited with pioneering the 1995 law, explained to the Times that focusing on getting guys to take time off has been vastly beneficial to women. “I always thought if we made it easier for women to work, families would eventually choose a more equal division of parental leave by themselves,” he explained. And he was right. Today the vast majority of men in Sweden take parental leave — and the country is among the most egalitarian in the world. (And its workplaces reflect that.)

Let’s do as the Swedes do. Clearly very little is changing culturally, so it’s time to make laws in the U.S. that guarantee paid leave for the dudes. Oh, and maybe a couple days off for the ladies, while you’re at it.

TAGS: paternity leave US

Kaitlyn Cocuzzo

News flash to men. There is nothing more attractive to a woman, than a man who is good with, and loving toward children, especially really little ones. Please take the time to be with your babies, its so worth it.
http://twitter.com/LauraDonovanUA Laura Donovan

Absolutely.
http://www.wordflow.webs.com/ Invisible_Jester89

That’s a great idea! So much focus is on Women’s issues (as it should be) that sometimes Men’s issues get swept under the carpet. We hear so much about Breast Cancer, and less about Prostate Cancer, for example. Both diseases are devastating, and both are gender-specific, yet we hear more about the former than the latter. That’s not fair, either, and I’d say it’s just as unfair to the guys as many issues are to gals. Nobody should feel intimidated by social roles or feel pressured to work until overstressed just because of the reproductive organs they possess. That includes men, too. It’s just as wrong to tell a man to “be a man” and keep working to the point of stress when he has a new child and is already stressed by that fact as it is to expect a woman to take a day of maternity leave because she is a woman and it’s expected that she’ll need rest, even if she WANTS to go back to work. Men get just as stressed out by new babies as women do, and if anything they get MORE stressed out about providing for their families than women do, because society expects them to be the “breadwinner”. They’re supposed to be the ones bringing the money home and being the strong figure of familial support. I can’t even imagine how difficult that must be, fearing repercussions or ridicule if you need a break for parental leave, because society expects me, as a woman, to need it.

All people, men, women, and children, deserve to have society accept them for who they are, not for their gender roles. The image of the MANLY!male breadwinner who never cries or tires is just as outdated as the idea of the FEMININE!woman who is a matron baking cookies for her average of 2.5 kids and does all the housework. The United States needs a gender role upheaval, and it needs it now.

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