Dads under pressure: why it's time for men to take their share of parental leave

Nick Clegg’s dream of equal parental leave is finally a reality — from next week couples can split the entitlement between them. So man up guys, it’s time to take your share, says Rosamund Urwin
Holding the baby: new fathers currently get two weeks’ leave, which many take as holiday (Picture: Getty)
Rosamund Urwin25 November 2014

I have enough trouble just taking my holiday,” sighs Dan, a 31-year-old banker who works in Canary Wharf. “There’s no way I could ever take more than a fortnight’s paternity leave. Even when colleagues want two weeks off, they’re under pressure not to take it, and to be on the BlackBerry all the time.”

Dan — who doesn’t want his surname in print — is employed by a well-known US firm. He would like to be a hands-on father when he and his wife have children but feels the world of high finance isn’t conducive to much nappy-changing or Bugaboo-pushing.

“It’s not about salaries for most male bankers — though there’s something pretty ingrained in men about being a provider,” he says. “It’s more about the pressure from colleagues and clients to drive revenues, and about the attitudes of your seniors. In banking, bosses are usually a lot older — they’ve already had their kids. The guys at my level are trying to make the jump to the top ranks. Their bosses will think, ‘I coped without any paternity leave’.”

Will, who’s 30 and a lawyer, can relate to this. “At my firm you can’t take more than three weeks’ leave if you’re working on a case. We’re a small firm and we actually don’t have any women with children or who are likely to have them. One guy’s wife gave birth recently and he was back at his desk in a week. It would be tough for a man in a highly competitive industry with intolerant bosses who never had these advantages themselves to stand up and say ‘I’m taking my fair share of time off’.”

Currently, men are entitled to two weeks’ paternity leave when a baby is born. However, in 2011, the Coalition introduced additional paternity leave, which enables fathers to take up to 26 weeks of paid leave once the mother has returned to work. Research suggests fewer than one in 50 new fathers has used this right.

But the law is about to change. The new rules will allow couples to divvy up 50 weeks’ leave between the two of them. Employers will start receiving requests from December 1, with the right existing for babies expected on or after April 5. The move is intended to increase flexibility: a mother may return to work earlier and hand over to the father, and they can even switch back.

But, as many couples will testify, a cultural shift is needed to encourage fathers to take up this leave. Rayhan Rafiq Omar works in property and recently co-founded the estate agent comparison site GetAgent. He felt his masculinity was called into question for wanting to be an active father. “Taking leave when my son was born brought criticism from family and work,” he recalls. “I was called a ‘pussy’ and ‘under the thumb’. I wanted to share the good and bad with my wife, Sofi, [to stop her] feeling burdened and alone. I regretted every day I had to show my face at work leaving Sofi alone with a tiny baby.”

Such attitudes are common. According to a survey by law firm Linklaters, 62 per cent of men are concerned that taking shared parental leave would be career-damaging.

Happy family: Nick Clegg with his wife Miriam and newborn son Miguel (Picture: Steve Back)

Another big hurdle is financial. The statutory rate of pay during paternity leave is just £138.18 per week and only around one in six employers tops that up. A Mumsnet survey found that 39 per cent of fathers feel forced to use annual leave — rather than paternity leave — so they can afford to spend time with their newborns.

Meanwhile, in the Linklaters study, 70 per cent of men interested in taking shared parental leave said they would be put off if no additional pay was offered. A few employers, such as Deloitte, Shell and PwC, have already pledged to provide enhanced shared parental leave, matching what they offer in maternity and adoption packages — but they are in a minority.

These are the problems that the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is trying to confront to make British business more family-friendly. Speaking to the Evening Standard after a round table discussion at Deloitte, Clegg said that with his own family, he would have liked flexibility: “[What we would have done] would have been completely different from one child to the next. I wasn’t at a very busy time in my career when my first child [Antonio] was born but Miriam was very busy. Whereas when Miguel [his third son] was born, I was party leader.”

Clegg describes the current system as “totally Edwardian” and says that two weeks’ paternity leave is “so absurd, it’s sort of Monty Python-esque”.

Mark Kennedy, a partner in tax at Deloitte and a father of three (aged seven, five and one), agrees. He took two weeks leave straight after the birth of each child. “They can be two of the easiest weeks: there’s a lot of healthcare support in that time and attention from families and friends. Three months in may be where you need to be there for your partner and baby. Flexibility would have helped that.”

Clegg acknowledges that altering the law needs to be accompanied by “a bigger, more profound change” in culture. “We need a willingness [among employers] to trust people to make their own decisions as adults and parents,” he says. “Dads feel reluctant to take up the leave available to them, often for quite imperceptible reasons about what it is to be a man. As Miriam says, the cause of women is going to be most dramatically advanced when men and dads change their behaviour.”

So what should a progressive employer do to help staff? “Employers need to publicise their own policy and make sure line managers know about this new form of leave,” says Simon Kerr-Davis, a senior employment lawyer at Linklaters. “Then they need to consider offering the same financial enhancements that they already offer for maternity leave — that will be a key driver in taking it up as statutory paternity leave is so low. If many employers continue only to offer enhanced maternity leave, women will still be the default carers.”

Kerr-Davis’s own story is telling. He was working at a different legal firm when he had his two sons. For the first, who is now 18, he wasn’t entitled to any leave and had to go through several committees to battle for three days of floating holiday dependent on the birth date: “It’s one of the reasons I became an employment lawyer,” he explains.

He delivered his second son on the bathroom floor, and was entitled to three days’ leave but had to take a client call within an hour of the birth. For his 10-year-old daughter, he had two weeks of leave: “It felt extremely different.”

He believes role models in organisations are essential to encourage take-up of shared parental leave. Half of the men surveyed by Linklaters said they would be influenced against taking it if other men in their organisation chose not to. “It’s about looking over your shoulder — ‘I can’t take it unless one of my peers is’. We need role modelling and publicity — so encouraging senior men and older men to do it, and for older fathers to be positive about family-friendly leave.”

Clegg agrees: “You need a pioneer generation who have the courage to break the mould, a generation of bosses who’ve been through this, a whole bunch of people who can look up to older bosses and see they took time off and they still got to the top.”

Eventually, Clegg hopes, and Kerr-Davis feels, we will move to a “use it or lose it” system of shared parental leave, as in Scandinavian countries. Clegg couldn’t persuade his Coalition partners of the merits of such a system. “I don’t think socially that’s where we are yet,” says Kerr-Davis. “This legislation is probably a halfway house to where we will be in 20 years.”

But isn’t there a chance we risk simply spreading the guilt many working mothers have long felt to men? “The guilt thing will dissipate the more people see around them that it’s OK to make your own choices,” reckons Clegg.

Kennedy thinks the guilt can be positive. “I’ve had a lot of conversations where older fathers are reminiscing about family life, regretting not spending more time with their children. That’s helped me: I don’t want to be like that.” He points out that technology has cut the strings tying workers to their desks — and that can extend beyond workers who are parents. “Someone might be leaving at 5pm, as I do to make sure I am home for bath and bedtime, but then they’ll be on a conference call later. Offering flexibility to staff without children also helps stem potential resentment.”

He believes more modern workplaces, where male employees are encouraged to play full roles as fathers, will breed a healthier culture: “It’s definitely better to work in a place where no one watches whether your jacket is on the back of your chair.”

Paternal instinct: the dad who did his bit

“It’s two years now since I did my stint of parental leave — three months away from work, at home with an under-one and a four-year-old. ‘At home’ is the salient phrase here.

“Looking back on it now I recall the confinement of it — stuck within the same four walls of our south London flat, chugging through the chores when the girls were asleep or, when they were awake, trying to keep them entertained with three crayons and the back of a cereal packet. Even when we got out and about that autumn, we had visited every local playground, shop and café half a dozen times each in about three weeks.

“I was only doing this for a few months — how do the full-time stay-at-home mums cope with the monotony for years on end? The other parents I bumbled around with were almost exclusively mums — they weren’t admiring of what I was doing (why would they be?), rather, I think a few were mildly envious of my wife who had been able to return to work.

“The reaction from the dads I knew ranged from utter bemusement to the belief that daddy childcare consists of whacking CBeebies on and retiring to the newspapers with some cocoa. Which, very occasionally, it was. The remainder was sticking to the deadlines — get the mealtimes right and everything else more or less fell into place. Get them wrong, and… well, hell hath no fury like a four-year-old not getting her fish fingers when she expects them.

“I was fortunate. I have a partner in a well-paid job and was able to save money myself to pay for my half of the bills and the mortgage. The result is, I think, that the girls are as happy to be fed, cuddled, played with and yelled at by Dad as much as Mum.

“I’m sure that’s the case in plenty of households where the father’s not able to take extended parental leave. But time flies. No1 daughter is in

Year 1 at primary school and the small one is about to start nursery full-time — so those days and hours of loopy fun are fading. I’m glad I made the most of them.”

Mike Higgins

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