Canadian researchers provide recommendations for HR on best practices for paternal leave
A new report released by Canadian researchers has shown how Canadian paternal leave policies discourage fathers from taking time off from work to care for children. The problem can be solved with flexible work arrangements implemented by employers, they say, but managerial bias stands in the way.
“Oftentimes, these policies get labeled for mothers only,” said researcher Kim de Laat, assistant professor of Organization and Human Behaviour at Waterloo University. “Because of the stereotypes that still exist that they're the primary breadwinner, to use [flex work time] is sometimes taken as indicative that they're not as ambitious as they should be.”
In Canada, paternity leave is low paid compared to maternity leave, and in some provinces the employment insurance benefit rate is based on the mother’s—or birthing parent’s—hours worked. With the exception of Quebec, which offers fathers a 70 to 75 percent wage replacement during parental leave, provinces offer fathers a 33 to 55 percent wage replacement rate for five to eight weeks.
The Canadian research found that fathers who worked remotely during the pandemic reported higher levels of participation in childcare and household work.
They also found that fathers who took parental leave took on more responsibility for household work and sharing childcare duties with their partners.
And they want to keep doing the childcare; in Quebec, where paternity leave is compensated higher, 85.6% of fathers took or intended to take time off to care for children, compared to 23.5% in the rest of the country.
The study, which de Laat conducted along with Alyssa K. Gerhardt of Dalhousie University and Andrea Doucet of Brock University, showed that parental leave is framed as an employment policy issue instead of a work policy issue, and more accessible flexible workplace policies could help to mitigate that.
Reframing flexible workplace accommodations as a universal, default option for all employees — rather than a special benefit to be requested — is an important way to encourage fathers to take paternity leave, de Laat said.
“The other thing that people in managerial roles can do, and especially leaders, is make use of the policies as well, and make it known that they're using the policy, so that they set the tone, essentially, for the whole company.”
Federally employed workers were given the ability in 2017 to request flexible work arrangements after six months of continuous employment. However, management is still able to assess requests and refuse them if they believe it would impede their work, meaning bias can still be a factor in granting flexible work.
“It's not just parents, but people with disabilities, people with elder care responsibilities, people with pets, even. People can either be stigmatized, or feel stigmatized, by requesting to use flex time or remote work,” de Laat said.
While offering universal flexible work arrangements might not seem beneficial to the employer on the surface, de Laat said, research has shown that remote work contributes to overall increased employee wellbeing, which improves productivity.
Additionally, top-up rates for parental leave wage replacement in federal and public sectors, as well as in large private sector organizations, can reach as high as 93 percent, while in many other contexts top-ups are limited solely to mothers.
“Obviously there might be some hesitation because it's not cheap to just issue wage top-ups, but when you weigh that against other issues like attrition and employee wellbeing, it could make a difference,” she said.
“Happy employees make a huge difference in attrition rates, in productivity and culture. While there might not be hard outcomes that you can measure out of the gate by making changes to the policies, I think overall it would be a valuable undertaking for employers as well.”
