More than employment policies? Parental leaves, flexible work and fathers’ participation in unpaid care work

ABSTRACT

This article explores two policy pathways – parental leave and flexible work –as complementary policy interventions aimed at promoting gender equality in unpaid care and household work. Drawing on Canadian data from the 2021 International Familydemic Survey, we examine the relationship between fathers’ previous use of parental leave, and current use of flexible work arrangements (flextime and remote work), and their involvement in unpaid care work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings support the following three arguments: First, in numerous countries, including Canada, where socially exclusive policy designs can limit fathers’ take up of parental leave, flexible work arrangements can provide additional opportunities to increase fathering involvement beyond the early months of parenting. Second, our data indicate that unpaid care work sharing is enhanced by fathers’ parental leaves and flexible working; however, fathers who have taken parental leave report dividing a wider set of household work and care tasks with their partners. Third, although their policy designs, aims, and legislation architectures differ in Canada, we maintain that parental leaves and flexible work arrangements are both more than employment policies; they are care/work policies that enact ‘social care’ and ‘democratic care’, and support gender equality and work-family justice goals.

KEYWORDS:

• Direct and indirect care work
• Fathers
• Flexible work arrangements
• Parental leave
• Work-family justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See Chung (2022) for a discussion of how the EU Directive falls short of protecting workers, and how other national policies, such as Finland’s, may offer a better model.

2 The International Familydemic Survey team was led by Anna Kurowska and the core team included in alphatical order: Andrea Doucet, Ann-Zofie Duvander, Cassandra Engeman, Sylvia Fuller, Shirley Gatenio Gabel, Raffaele Guetto, Gayle Kaufman, Anna Matysiak, Richard J. Petts, Thordis Reimer, and Daniele Vignoli.

3 In the following analysis, we refer to parents as the users and potential beneficiaries of flexible work arrangements and parental leave. However, we acknowledge that such policies are needed by all workers, not just parents (O’Connor & Cech, 2018). Indeed, evidence suggests that the stigma associated with using flexible work arrangements may be reduced when such policies are made widely available to all workers (Chung, 2022; Kelly & Moen, 2020).

4 See, for example, Angus Reid, ‘How we poll’. Available at https://angusreid.org/how-we-poll-ari/

5 The Canadian Familydemic survey team was led by Sylvia Fuller and Andrea Doucet and included varied contributions from the co-authors of this paper, Kim de Laat and Alyssa Gerhardt, and members of the Reimagining Care/Work Policies project, who assisted with piloting, adapting the survey for diverse Canadian families, and data cleaning – Karen Foster, Eva Jewell, Donna Lero, Sophie Mathieu, and Melissa Milkie; students Manlin Cai, Jessica Falk, Rachel McLay, Siqi Qin, and Christina Treleaven; and Project Manager, Jennifer Turner.

6 There were several measures taken by the survey company during the data collection process to mitigate non-response bias. The first was the use of quota sampling to reduce the effects of variable response rates by region, as well as additional quotas to ensure a diverse sample (including racial and ethnic diversity, LGTBQ+, and income groups). Other measures were implemented to alleviate survey fatigue and burden, and to engage respondents with the aim of yielding higher response rates.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through the Canada Research Chairs Program [grant number 231901-2018, PI Andrea Doucet] and the Partnership Program [grant number 895-2020-1011, PI Andrea Doucet]; by the Mitacs Accelerate Program [funding reference numbers FR70102 & FR82746]; and the Vanier Institute of the Family.

Notes on contributors

Kim de Laat

Kim de Laat is an Assistant Professor of Organization and Human Behaviour at the University of Waterloo’s Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business. As a sociologist of work and culture, she is interested in how culture and work design shape inequality and uncertainty in organizational contexts. Her research examines the unintended consequences of social policies aimed at reducing workplace inequalities. Her work appears in such outlets as Cultural Sociology, ILR Review, Poetics, Socio-Economic Review, and Work and Occupations, among others, as well as in op-eds for the Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, and Policy Options.

Andrea Doucet

Andrea Doucet is a Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work, and Care, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Brock University and Adjunct Research Professor in Sociology at Carleton University and the University of Victoria. She has published widely on care/work practices and responsibilities, fathering, parental leave policies, feminist and ecological onto-epistemologies, narrative analysis, research ethics, and genealogies of concepts. Her work has appeared in journals such as Community, Work and Family; Journal of Marriage and Family; the Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Sciences; Sex Roles; Journal of Family Theory and Review; Sociology, and Qualitative Sociology and in expert handbooks on fathering, parental leave, and methodologies and epistemologies. She is the Project Director and Principal Investigator of the SSHRC Partnership programme, Reimagining Care/Work Policies, and Co-Coordinator of the International Network of Leave Policies and Research.

Alyssa Gerhardt

Alyssa Gerhardt is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. She is a mixed-methods researcher specializing in Economic Sociology and studying personal debt in Atlantic Canada. Alyssa has been involved in several different regional and national studies and works as a research associate/supervisor with the Rural Futures Research Centre at Dalhousie. Her other research interests include, the Sociology of Work and Labour Studies, Food Insecurity, and Rural Sociology.