Sharing Parental Leave between Mothers and Fathers
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World Bank, Washington, DC
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Parental leave has been increasingly
used as a family policy to facilitate balancing care and
work responsibilities and promoting gender equality.
However, fathers' parental leave participation is still
low, even when it offers both job and wage protection. This
paper examines the effects of an information and
awareness-raising intervention, delivered via email and text
messages on men’s and women’s awareness and intentions of
shared take-up of a parental leave program. The experiment
provided recent and prospective parents meeting the social
security requirements to benefit from parental leave with
information about the program. Additionally, a subset of
recent parents received messages that told them about (i)
the benefits of fathers’ involvement in childcare, or (ii)
the importance of planning parental childcare. The
intervention was successful in increasing knowledge about
the parental leave program and shifting traditional gender
norm views among women, regarding father’s involvement and
care planning. For men, knowledge about the program
increased. However, the strong association between parental
leave and breastfeeding led to fathers privileging mothers’
use of the leave benefit. The findings show limited impact
on actual leave taking, with the message about couples’
leave planning increasing the effective use of parental
leave among fathers compared to the information message. The
results show that low-cost, targeted information
interventions can have substantial effects on program
knowledge among potential future beneficiaries. Although
these interventions can support more equal gender roles and
change gendered attitudes toward care responsibilities, they
are not sufficient to shift behaviors.
Palabras clave
PARENTAL LEAVE, GENDER NORMS, INTRAHOUSEHOLD CHILDCARE ROLES, GENDER EQUALITY PROMOTION, BREASTFEEDING, FATHER'S PARENTAL LEAVE, GOVERNMENT TEXT MESSAGING