Written submission from the Fawcett Society (FWP0053)

1. The Fawcett Society is the UK’s leading charity campaigning for gender equality and women’s rights at work, at home, and in public life.
2. Our vision is a society in which the choices you can make and the control you have over your own life are no longer determined by your gender.
3. We publish authoritative research to educate, inform and lead the debate; we bring together politicians, academics, grassroots activists and wider civil society to develop innovative, practical policy solutions and we campaign with women and men to make change happen.
4. Fawcett’s vision is for a Britain where care for children is more equally shared between fathers and mothers, leading to a more equal home life and greater equality in the labour market. We want to see an end to the constraints that current leave structures place on the choices open to mothers and fathers when it comes to caring for their children. We want to see leave entitlements which recognise the role and responsibility of fathers on equal terms with the role and responsibility of mothers.
5. It is important to state that our vision for leave goes beyond the role of fathers in their children’s first years. We want to see maternal health both during pregnancy and after birth, including breastfeeding and post-natal depression, supported by leave entitlements and workplace practices. Pregnancy discrimination needs to be consigned to history by improved employer practice and enforcement of the law. We want to see fathers supported to be as likely as mothers to benefit from flexible working and parental leave, and we want flexibility at work to become the norm.
6. The inequality that fathers face in the workplace is an impediment to gender equality, men and women’s work-life balance, and the welfare of children. A key shared aspiration of the Government and the Fawcett Society, closing the gender pay gap, cannot be achieved without reform to help men better balance paid work and care.
7. Whilst Fawcett welcomed the introduction of Shared Parental Leave, there remains more to be done to ensure the parental leave system delivers for mothers, fathers, and children.[1]
8. The current system of Shared Parental Leave (SPL) cannot meet its stated goal of “encouraging shared parenting from the earliest stages of pregnancy”[2] or give fathers the flexibility they want between work and home. Fawcett recommends that SPL be replaced with a system of non-transferable leave paid at equal replacement rates for fathers, also known as a “father’s quota” or “daddy months”, and that this is combined with a push towards more quality flexible working and part-time work for fathers.

Quality Flexible Working For Fathers

9. Quality flexible working benefits both employers and employees. Formats such as flexi-time, reduced hours, remote working, staggered hours, compressed hours, and term time working, if paid at a good hourly rate, allow workers to balance skilled paid work with their responsibilities at home.
10. 61% of people who are able to take flexible working report feeling positive about its impact on their performance, while over 30% feel that it neither improved nor damaged their performance. Likewise, 45% and 43% of managers who have approved flexible working feel respectively positive or neutral about flexible working impact on their team’s performance.[3]
11. However, Timewise find that though 46% of people in the UK want flexible working, only 8.7% of advertised jobs at £20k FTE or above in the UK are advertised as flexible, creating a bottleneck on talent, productivity, and job satisfaction.[4]
12. Recent research by the IFS shows that the numbers of men on low weekly incomes in part-time work have increased from 1 in 20 in 1994 to 1 in 5 in 2014, while less than 1 in 20 medium and high earning men are working part-time.[5] An inadequate supply of well-paid part-time work is increasingly not just an issue of wellbeing or limited to women but a wasting of father’s and men’s talents and skills.

What Leave Do Fathers Want?

13. Original research by Fawcett shows that whilst fathers want the freedom and flexibility to spend time with their children, Britain’s parental leave policy does not enable them to do this. The gap between men’s stated preferences about caring for their children, and the amount of time that the evidence suggests they do or will take up under the incentives in the current system, is so wide that Fawcett considers it unfair to fathers.
14. Fawcett published Striking the Balance, a report on parents, work, and care, in March 2016.[6] Drawing on a survey of 2,376 parents of children under 18, the aim was to find out what the British public thought about the division between men and women of unpaid work in the home.The results found that many fathers are unhappy with their current working arrangements given their caring responsibilities for their children, and there is majority support in the country for reform.
15. Fawcett found that it is not just mothers, but all parents who look for flexible working. When thinking about their career choices, 79% of mums think about whether a job is likely to allow them to balance work and family, as do 72% of dads.
16. Whilst 50% of fathers feel that their workplace supports dads who take time off work to care for children, 35% of fathers do not – much higher than the proportion of the general population (25%) and mothers (26%) who think fathers are not supported.
17. 68% of people overall believe that men who take time off work to look after a baby should be entitled to the same pay and amount of leave as women.[7] Only 17% of people disagree. Men and women are nearly as likely to agree with this statement: 67% of men support the proposal, compared to 70% of women. Support is even higher amongst parents, with 71% agreeing. Mothers and fathers are equally likely to support equal leave and pay.
18. Research by Opinion Matters for BIS in 2015 identified that 56% of men believe care of children in the home should be shared equally, and only 19% view it as a mother’s responsibility. 40% of men would ‘definitely’ and 45% of men would ‘probably’ consider taking shared parental leave if they had a child, with 60% of them saying they think it would allow them to form a closer bond with their child and 44% saying it would feel fairer to share care responsibilities.[8]

What Leave Do Fathers Currently Get?

19. Fathers are entitled to two weeks’ Paternity Leave around the birth of their child, paid at a low replacement rate of £139.58 a week or 90% of their average weekly earnings, whichever is lower.
20. Unlike mothers, who can access the Maternity Allowance if they do not qualify for Statutory Maternity Pay, self-employed or irregularly employed fathers do not have a supplementary benefit if they cannot access Statutory Paternity Pay, which is a concerning loophole. They do not at present have any financial support for even a short period of paternity leave.
21. If the mother ends her Maternity Leave and Maternity Pay/Allowance, the family can then choose to start the current system of Shared Parental Leave and Pay. Any remaining weeks from the 52 of leave or 39 of pay can be shared between parents, paid at the same low replacement rate. as Paternity Pay.
22. Available data on the enhanced paternity leave and pay provided by respondents’ employers dates back to The Fourth Work-Life Balance Employee Survey in 2014.[9] That data showed 27% of employers offering enhanced leave, and 17% offering enhanced pay. The latter is similar to the 13% (covering 35% of the workforce) which offered enhanced maternity leave. Enhanced paternity pay covered on average only 2.4 weeks, while enhanced maternity pay covered on average 21 weeks – unless this picture has changed, employer enhancements are more likely to incentivise against men taking more parental leave.

What Leave Do Fathers Currently Take?

23. Fawcett’s Striking the Balance survey data shows that historically, under the old systems including Additional Paternity Pay, few fathers took more than a minimal amount of leave. While 54% of mothers took 6 months or more of leave, 75% of fathers (64% of those with children under 18) took off two weeks or fewer. Fathers may feel supported in taking off one to five days (33% of all fathers take this amount of time off) or six to fourteen days (45%) as allocated to them under paternity leave, but even the 50% of fathers who do feel their workplaces support dads who take time off work are rarely taking off more than two weeks at birth.
24. That this has repercussions can be shown by the fact that men want more time to share work at home. 41% of fathers feel they do not have enough time off at the birth of their child, compared to 36% of mothers. 80% of dads who feel they did not have enough time took four weeks or fewer.
25. The lack of support fathers feel at work has an impact on productivity. 38% of fathers lie to their boss to take time off to spend with their children, compared to 28% of mothers, and 12% of dads say they lie often. This particularly affects younger parents who are more likely to have younger children, as it increases to 43% of parents aged 18-34, compared to 16% of 55+ parents. Further, a staggering 67% of London dads admit they lie to their boss to spend time with their children, compared to 38% of fathers across the entire UK.
26. Evidence of the take-up of the current Shared Parental Leave and Pay offer is limited. The Government’s own impact assessment prior to introduction estimated take-up at between 4% and 8%. A HMRC freedom of information response suggests that 3,000 parents, or approximately 6% of the 52,000 fathers taking paternity leave in a comparable period, took up the offer in the first three months of 2016.[10] The evidence strongly suggests that Shared Parental Leave as currently constituted will not result in a significant change in favour of equality in the sharing of care.
27. Fawcett’s research and other evidence shows that there is a yawning gap between what fathers want in terms of time off to care for children, and what they are constrained to do in practice. Arguments such as “if fathers wanted to take more time off to care for their children, they would take time off under Shared Parental Leave” fail to acknowledge how financially unattractive Shared Parental Leave is to most couples. This leads to in the first stage inequality at the expense of men who have an unfairly low allocation of leave relative to women, and in the second stage inequality for mothers later in life who do the lion’s share of unpaid care work in the home.

Benefits Of Equal Sharing of Leave

28. Everyone – fathers, mothers, children, and businesses -  benefits from a more equal sharing of work in the home.
29. As noted above, fathers in Britain want to spend more time with their children. They would benefit firstly from having their stated preferences met more closely.
30. Greater equality in the sharing of leave leads to a fairer division of child rearing work once the leave period is finished. Evidence from Sweden indicates that fathers who take longer periods of parental leave are more closely involved with unpaid work at home. Fathers and mothers reported more equal sharing of care later in the child’s when longer periods of leave were initially taken – for example, 60% of mothers whose partner took a short period of leave said they always stayed at home when the child was sick, while 28% of mothers whose partners took a long period of leave said the same.[11] Likewise, a UK study found that fathers who took any paternity leave are 25% more likely to change diapers, 19% more likely to feed the baby, and 19% more likely to get up at night when the child is age 8 months to 12 months, and a study of US fathers (who do not have a statutory right to paternity leave, but often enjoy it through their employment contracts) found a similar effect.[12][13]
31. Time survey data from Quebec (which has a father’s quota) shows that the introduction of the father’s quota makes the division of labour more equal within the household. Fathers who take leave spend 37 minutes longer in non-market work per day, representing a 23% increase from baseline. Fathers taking leave under the quota is also associated with improved economic outcomes for mothers, who spend 79 minutes longer physically at the workplace (44% increase from baseline), and are 5.4 percentage points more likely to be employed full-time (a 7% increase from baseline), compared to mothers who experienced their last birth prior to the father’s quota, reducing staff turnover for businesses.[14]
32. This not only suggests that parental leave is important in securing gender equality and giving British families freedom of choice, but that parental leave has to be combined with a strategy of improving access to high quality flexible working and hiring throughout their careers to allow fathers to fully invest in their children to the degree they want.
33. The benefits of more gender equal caring trickles down to benefits for children as well. Good quality care for British children at ages 3 and 5 from their fathers, which was associated with longer periods of leave for fathers, results in higher cognitive scores than for children whose fathers were providing less care. Estimated benefits are highest for children with highly involved fathers.[15] Other papers also suggest an improvement to children’s educational outcomes from fathers taking more leave.[16]
34. The evidence cited above does suggest that higher paid, well-educated men tend to take off more leave – the reasons for this are unclear and could result from gender norms associated with different social classes, or the financial calculation of father’s leave being more attractive or viable for higher earning men.
35. Some countries permit fathers and mothers to take parental leave part-time whilst working part-time. Take-up is mixed: for example, 25% of fathers take their leave part-time in Norway, whilst only 6% of children in Finland saw their parents take leave part-time. Although there is a strong case that fathers need more flexible working, and Fawcett is open to the idea and would see it intuitively as part of a wider strategy of care, more evidence needs to be gathered on this aspect of leave policy.

How Do Father’s Quotas Work Internationally?

36. There are a number of options available for providing fathers with parental leave, but the success rate of these policies internationally varies dramatically. Small seemingly-technical details can affect the rate of men’s take-up of parental leave by dozens of percentage points.
37. There is substantial international variation when it comes to parental leave, from the United States, which has no national-level paid statutory leave, to Austria which has up to two years of parental leave, the time alone varies enormously. Aspects such as funding, caps, different entitlements for mothers and fathers, specific tax breaks, replacement rates, local variations, pre-natal leave etc. can all differ greatly between countries even with similar policies, creating a complex context on which to draw international best practice. This constellation of different factors emerges from balancing the different values and priorities which go into leave policy.
38. The Government has stated that its Shared Parental Leave policy has“…the intention of boosting male[17] participation; helping to bridge both the employment gap and the gender pay gap; and enabling fathers and partners to play a more active role in caring for their children from an early stage. It does this by giving working families more choice and flexibility.”[18]
39. Navigating the international evidence, despite its complexity, it becomes clear that the only way this goal can be achieved is with non-transferable leave for fathers paid at high replacement rates that can be used at any point after the birth. These “daddy months” needs to both be longer than the current two weeks of paternity leave offered and higher paid in order to offer a system that is in line with families’ real choices about sharing care.
40. Take up of parental leave by fathers is low worldwide, except in countries with certain types of “father’s quota”. These countries include Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Quebec in Canada. One important alternative to father’s quotas are “bonus systems”, discussed below.
41. The common features of these systems are that they all have high replacement rates (77.6% in Sweden, 100% in Norway, 80% in Iceland, and 75% in Quebec, typically with a cap), and non-transferable period of leave for fathers that can be used without restriction during the qualified leave period.
42. The evidence shows that these fathers’ quotas all achieve high rates of leave-taking by fathers. In Sweden, where each parent has 90 days of non-transferable parental leave in addition to transferable allocations of 165 days of replacement rate paid and 45 days of lower paid leave, fathers take 25% of all the parental leave days that are taken in 2014, compared to 12% in 2000, in addition to their ten days of paternity leave and mother’s 12 weeks of maternity leave.[19]
43. In Norway, where both parents have ten weeks of non-transferable leave, and 26 or 36[20] weeks transferable leave, fathers now take up 18% of all days taken, and 21% of fathers took the full quota in 2012 compared to 0.6% in 2011.[21] In Iceland in 2012, where each individual parent’s and the shared transferable leave are all three months each, 92.7% of fathers took leave from their quota, and 33% of all days taken, a figure which had experienced a temporary decline as a result of Iceland’s financial crisis. [22]
44. Quebec provides an interesting case, as the rest of the Canada did not implement a father’s quota, allowing us to identify from changes to father’s behaviour in Quebec effects specific to the father’s quota. In 2006 Quebec introduced a replacement rate of 70% compared to Canada’s 55%, and set a much higher cap. It also changed the duration of leave from the 15 weeks of maternity leave and 35 weeks of shared parental leave (and no unique entitlement to paternity leave) that the rest of Canada maintained to 18 weeks of maternity leave, 32 weeks of parental leave, and 5 weeks of a fathers’ quota.
45. As a result, the province saw a substantial increase in the number of fathers taking paternity leave. Fathers’ leave participation rates jumped 250%, from a pre-reform rate of 21.3% to 74.9%, whilst in the rest of Canada they slipped from 11% to 9%. Further, the average father who took time off in Quebec took almost exactly the 5 weeks off that they were entitled to under the new quota system: it was possible for them to take far more leave under the old shared parental leave system, but most took two weeks. This suggests that the creation of a fathers’ quota results in weeks of leave ‘sticking’ to fathers in a way that Shared Parental Leave cannot achieve. [23][24]

Bonus Systems – An Alternative?

46. One alternative model is a “bonus system” like those operated in Finland, Germany, or Japan. These typically have restrictions on the flexibility of their use. These systems see families gain additional leave overall if both parents share an existing period of leave (i.e. if fathers opt to take some), rather than having a specific individual quota for fathers. Some options recommended in the UK which advocate a generous expansion of paternity leave but only after the partner has returned to work also fit this definition.
47. The result of this is that fathers are sharply incentivised to take leave only if their family already planned to take off the maximum amount of leave under the bonus system, as the parent taking less leave (again, usually fathers) do not face a “take it or leave it” situation if the family does not take enough leave overall to access the bonus leave. This is in contrast to individual entitlements to non-transferable leave in which fathers and mothers are equally incentivised to provide care with “take it or leave it” quotas regardless of the amount of leave taken.
48. Finland’s quota specifies that eighteen non-transferable days can be taken by fathers at any point, and thirty–six days can be taken as a bonus to top up 158 days of shared parental leave the household already.[25] Parental leave is paid at a replacement rate of 70 % of average incomes. This achieves a take-up of 32% of fathers taking the thirty-six days. In Japan, where the 365 days of parental leave entitled to both parents are topped by a bonus of the father taking an additional eight weeks at a replacement rate of 67% achieves a take up rate of 2%.[26] Germany’s similar bonus system for a replacement rate that essentially caps at 65% achieves a take up rate of 32% for two months. [27] Take-up levels in Germany and Finland appear to be better than in the UK – but not substantially so.
49. These kind of bonus systems lend further evidence to the idea that non-transferable leave is key to encouraging fathers to take leave. It also indicates how important it is that all fathers are incentivised to take leave for a gender equal policy to work in practice.

Recommendations and Costing

50. The evidence is clear that if the Government wants to implement a genuinely gender equal system that gives families freedom of choice to share care as mothers and fathers wish, a fathers’ quota – a period of leave reserved for fathers on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis - is essential, and it needs to be paid at a high replacement rate.
51. At present, in the UK, mothers only have a high replacement rate for the first six weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay. To begin to realise Fawcett’s vision of shared care, the Government needs to move to a fathers’ quota system with a greater degree of equality in receipt of high replacement rates.
52. To truly move the dial in terms of fathers sharing care, a non-transferable period at a high replacement rate for more than six weeks would be required. Naturally, we would argue that any extension in the duration of high replacement rates should be equal between mothers and fathers.
53. A move in this direction would entail costs. We refer the committee to evidence produced for it by Working Families last year which found that to implement a system comprising 2 weeks at birth (paid at 90% of earnings with a cap), 4 weeks upon a partner’s return to employment (at 90% with a cap), and a further 9 weeks at the statutory rate would cost between £204 million and £413 million a year net.[28]  This would be roughly half the cost of the Marriage Allowance, which is at £700 million a year.[29] Paying for equal leave and the sharing of care within the home would do at least as much to develop parents’ bonding with their children and strong relationships within the family as a tax cut will.
54. Fathers who are self-employed or otherwise ineligible for SPP receive no minimum benefit for taking leave, making even the basic two weeks financially unviable. Reform should consider including a Statutory Paternity Allowance to fill a similar need to the Statutory Maternity Allowance.
55. We also recommend that the law should change so that flexible working is advertised by default unless there is a compelling business case not to.