The invisible gap between public policy and company practices in supporting fatherhood: the Italian case

ABSTRACT

Work and family reconciliation is a key issue for many countries; in Italy, it is also an important and crucial challenge. Though initially considered a predominantly female issue impacting the maternal employment rate, the importance of fathers in the family domain is now widely acknowledged in policy discourses (such as leave policies). However, an emphasis on ‘fathers’ rights’ has not yet produced the expected improvements in term of men’s sharing care responsibilities and fathers’ involvement in children’s lives. This paper first describes the legislative context along with data on the use of leaves by employed parents. Then three company case studies in the North of Italy are presented and analysed, where both managers and fathers were interviewed to understand the facilitators and barriers for fathers’ leave-taking within companies.

RESUMEN

La re-conciliación entre familia y trabajo es una cuestión clave en muchos países. En Italia es además un importante y crucial desafío. A pesar que al comienzo ha sido considerada una cuestión predominantemente femenina que tenía repercusión en la tasa de empleo de las madres, la importancia de la presencia de los padres en familia es hoy ampliamente reconocida en los discursos políticos (como, por ejemplo, los permisos parentales). Sin embargo, el énfasis sobre los ‘derechos de los padres’ no ha todavía producido las mejoras esperada en términos de condivisión de las responsabilidades de cura e implicación en la vida de los hijos. En primer lugar, este articulo describe el contexto legislativo y los datos sobre el utilizo de los permisos de los padres trabajadores. En segundo lugar, presenta y analiza tres casos de tres empresas del norte de Italia, donde directivos - padres han sido entrevistados para entender cuales son los elementos facilitadores y las barreras que los padres que piden permisos encuentran en la empresa.

KEYWORDS:

• Work
• family
• fathers
• leaves
• company

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• trabajo
• familia
• padres
• permisos
• empresa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maria Letizia Bosoni, Ph.D. in Sociology, is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, Catholic University of Milan (Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes). She is a member of the Family Studies and Research University Centre (Catholic University of Milan) and of the Oxford Network of European Fatherhood Researchers (ONEFaR). Her research interests concern work/family reconciliation, fatherhood and the male identity, company welfare, family policies and services, work and family stress and well-being.

Sara Mazzucchelli, Ph.D. in Sociology, is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Psychology of the Catholic University of Milan (Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes). She is a member of the Family Studies and Research University Centre (Catholic University of Milan), the International Network on Leave Policies and Research, the Oxford Network of European Fatherhood Researchers (ONEFaR) and the European Sociological Association RN13 Board (Sociology of Families and Intimate lives). Her research interests concern work/family reconciliation, company welfare, family policies and services, the transition to motherhood as well as leave (maternity, paternity, parental) and interconnections between parental employment and early childhood services.

ORCID

Maria Letizia Bosoni http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1381-0454

Sara Mazzucchelli http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0121-6199

Notes

1 The methodology for discourses analysis used was developed in France since the 1980s (Ghiglione, Beauvois, Chabrol, & Trognon, 1980): through systematic and objective procedures made by the researcher for decrypting the content, it aims to achieve the indicators (signs, indexes, thematic areas and isotopies) then arranged also graphically, in order to see areas and connection between them. T-LAB software (http://tlab.it/en/presentation.php) is an all-in-one set of linguistic and statistical tools for content analysis and text mining; it uses a kind of text-driven automatic approach which allows meaningful patterns of words and themes to emerge by text segmentation, automatic lemmatization and key-term selection. Various measures and several analysis methods can be applied: co-occurrence analysis; thematic analysis; and comparative analysis.