Equality‐Promoting Parental Leave

Ideally, we would raise our families in a world in which we could easily respect three key values: the pursuit of individual plans and goals, the provision of parental care to meet dependents’ needs, and the achievement of gender fairness. But, in reality, liberal egalitarian feminists are confronted with difficult trade-offs between these values because existing social practices place them in conflict. In particular, such trade-offs seem necessary in the design of an ideal form of parental leave. Such a policy needs to respect the three key values in a manner that plausibly offers real power to significantly reduce unfair burdens that, due to the gendered nature of our societies, accrue to women who are also mothers. It is widely assumed that the interests of newborns and infants are, in most cases, best served if they can be cared for by their parents in the first months, perhaps even the first few years, of their lives. 1 Call this the good of parental care. Unfortunately, even when both parents are entitled to paid parental leave, it is much more likely to be taken up by mothers than by fathers. This is potentially harmful for several reasons: it is likely to lead to statistical discrimination 2 against women in hiring and promotion decisions; it has a depressing effect on the lifetime earnings of women; it confirms the dominant gender ideologies that women’s priorities should be with their families whereas men’s should be at work; and it amounts to mothers continuing to do more caring work within the household not just for a short period but for many years. Liberal egalitarian feminists are also attached to an egalitarian ideal of gender fairness, which is very critical of the gendered division of labor whereby men do most of the paid work and women most of the unpaid work and family care. Call this the good of gender fairness. Yet, coercing people to split parental leave equally between mothers and fathers is not an appealing option since liberal egalitarian feminists also endorse the liberal value of allowing people to pursue their own ideas of a good life. Call this the good of individual choice. Is there a way to solve the tension between pursuing, in the field of parental leave policies, the three goods that are essential to liberal egalitarian feminists—that is, the goods of parental care, of gender fairness, and of individual choice? The recognition of the tension between pursuing the good of parental care and the good of gender fairness in the design of parental leave in liberal societies has led policy-makers and scholars to search for a model that protects the interests of