Increasing Parental Leave Uptake: A Systems Social Marketing Approach

Abstract

Ineffective paid paternity leave policies perpetuate gender inequality and have significant, long-lasting outcomes for families, organisations, and the economy. They maintain unequal divisions in child-rearing and household chores that restrict families’ decisions about workforce participation and caring responsibilities. Low levels of uptake of paternity leave are caused by workplace practices, social norms, and economic factors that influence the choices fathers make when their children are born, and which become entrenched over time. Fathers’ early involvement in children's lives is profoundly beneficial for families, therefore, we recommend to policy makers and organisations how they can change internal workplace cultures to allow for a more inclusive image of parenting and a more nuanced image of the ideal male worker. We outline a systems social marketing approach that addresses change at the macro, meso and micro levels through the three E's model (establish, explore, and enable), to help policy makers, organisations, and families consider the implications of meaningful parental leave and the importance of increasing fathers’ uptake. Future research questions for increasing parental leave uptake are presented.

Marketing systems: A Listen, Learn, Leverage Framework

“…Both stakeholder fields show “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert” (Arendt 1986, p.64). We concur with Layton (2015), Duffy, van Esch, and Yousef (2020) and Byrne and Callaghan (2014) that stakeholder action fields self-organize through the various social mechanisms in the system to engage or not engage with the desired collective outcomes. In essence, each stakeholder action field is a contextualized network of actions and reactions with its own collective agency.…”

“…Moreover, it is the evolutionary processes that point to the “scaled” nature of systems. Marketing systems can be localized sub-systems, adjacent, complimentary, competitive and/or supervening systems and are nested within one another (Baker et al 2015; Duffy 2016; Duffy, van Esch, and Yousef 2020; Kennedy 2017; Layton 2015).…”

“…Choosing and describing a focal marketing system in this manner facilitates a meso view of a system through which macro and micro behavior dynamics and structural dynamics can be identified, analyzed and mapped. The importance of this view is highlighted both in social marketing (Biroscak et al 2014; Bryant et al 2014; Domegan et al 2017; McHugh et al 2017) and macromarketing (Duffy 2016; Duffy, van Esch, and Yousef 2020). Furthermore, the meso and community-based influences have been confirmed for specific contexts of epidemiologic risks and occupational health hazards (Spencer et al 2020).…”

Exploring Subsistence Marketplaces Through a Feminist Perspective

“…Second, systematic social marketing that emphasizes a broad system-based perspective to addressing wicked problems (Duffy et al, 2020) is a useful framework to shift entrenched gendered norms (Martam, 2016). Marketers need to consider campaigns and programs that acknowledge “second shift” phenomena, by facilitating women to work from home and providing opportunities for child care closer to their home.…”

Leave Management Information System using InsideDPS Software for the Efficiency of Human Resources Management

“…Leave plays an important role in achieving organizational performance [1]. The use of leave rights by employees has a positive and significant effect on organizational performance [2], and in a broader scope, leave strengthens family resilience which is a basic element in the organization's productive culture formation [3]. The leave mediates the saturation and emotional atmosphere of the employee towards the High Performance Work System [4].…”