Supporting Men and Women to Share Unpaid Caring: The Most Powerful Way to Increase Women’s Economic Empowerment? Part I- The Global North

Sponsored by the Women and Equalities Committee of the United Kingdom House of Commons, this session proposed that if more governments offered paid paternity leave, the burden of child/elderly-care could shift, in turn creating more equal partnerships between men and women. Panelist Monika Queisser from Germany’s Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) presented statistics collected from all over the globe that helped quantify the problem; gender gaps undoubtedly widen as children enter the picture. Not surprisingly, once a woman has a child, she spends more time performing unpaid care work (around three times more than her male partner) and less time in the paid workforce. Countries such as Norway (recently found to be the happiest country in the world) and Sweden have been able to combat this trajectory by offering 14 weeks of paternity leave that is non-transferrable and highly compensated. Studies show that not only does this redistribute the responsibilities of household unpaid care work, but also improves father-child relations.

Interestingly enough, although Korea and Japan offer the most paid paternity leave of all countries studied by Germany’s OECD, father’s in these countries take the least amount of time off. Yiping Cai, panelist and Executive Committee Member of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) of China, explained that this is a result of existing patriarchal norms that dominate most of the Asian continent. Men who chose to take advantage of paternity leave are often ridiculed by peers when they return to work, their masculinity challenged. In China, very few provinces have implemented paternity leave as family dynamics shift with the relaxation of the (highly gendered) one-child law. These stigmas are slowly being addressed in mainstream media, with Chinese soap operas and commercials incorporating sensitive, involved father figures. However, Yiping’s concerns are more about what these fathers are doing during unpaid leave. Citing both personal experience as well as media sources, Yiping claims that many men in China are both uncomfortable and unequipped when it comes to childcare, oftentimes spending their paid time off playing video-games or watching TV instead of attending to their children. She suggests child-rearing instruction be incorporated into public education curricula (for both genders), starting at a young age, to curb this issue. Panelists all agreed that fathers’ unease with the duties of unpaid care spans across many nations and that education initiatives addressing this would benefit societies hoping to empower women within the home and in the workplace.

Image Source: http://www.oecd.org/gender/data/length-of-maternity-leave-parental-leave-and-paid-father-specific-leave.htm