Gender roles and Sweden's daddy leave

The question about gender roles being a function of biology seems to hang a lot of people up when you start talking feminism and parenting. I think a lot of people think feminism means insisting on androgyny, and I think if you dig a little deeper many think that means rejecting the virtues and activities that have been traditionally associated with mothers—which isn’t my idea of feminism. I also think that many women resign themselves to their frustration over their partner’s failure to take an equal parenting role and make sense of how they themselves suddenly became hausfraus by attributing it to biology. I don’t know or care much what’s “natural,” but I’m for freedom from the penalties and rewards that enforce gender roles. We’ll certainly never know what’s natural until we erase those constraints.

These roles are deeply rooted and the mechanisms that enforce them complex. Case in point: The government of Sweden noticed that despite their generous family policies, which include a FULL YEAR of paid parental leave (go clean up your drool now), which could be allocated between parents as they choose, few fathers were taking advantage of it. In 1994, mothers were taking about 89 percent of the leave, and although Sweden has one of the world's highest rates of female participation in the labor force and smallest gender pay gaps, the gap persists and a glass ceiling is evident. So in 1995, Sweden set aside a month of paid leave that could be used only by fathers and in 2002 instituted a second month of “daddy leave.”

It’s too soon to tell what effect this will have (although fathers’ share of family leave has been going up since the 1995 change), and I don’t see how such an explicitly gendered policy could ever be instituted under the U.S. legal system. But let me leave you with the words of the Swedish parliament when the daddy leave was passed. Read ‘em and weep for our own benighted government.

"It is important that fathers use their opportunity of taking parental leave. Research shows that an early established and close relation between father and child is beneficial for both the father and the child and provides a good founding for the relation later in life. ...
An increased use of parental leave by fathers should contribute to a change in attitudes among managers so that they will view parental leave as something natural to consider when planning and organizing the work. Such change in attitudes is necessary for both men and women to dare to take parental leave without a feeling of jeopardizing their career or opportunities of development at work. Another reason for increasing fathers' use of parental leave is that women's prospects of achieving equal opportunities with men in the labor market are limited as long as women are responsible for the practical housework and children. A shared responsibility for practical care of children would mean a more even distribution of interruptions in work between women and men, and women would thereby gain better opportunities of development and making a career in their profession."