“It was Necessary at the Beginning to Make This Whole Revolution”

Abstract

This article compares and contrasts the attitudes of Polish and Swedish fathers to individualized or gender-neutral parental leaves popularly referred to as "daddy quotas." The comparisons of two distinctively different societies that are characterized by very different family policy systems and gender-equality policies allow the article to explore how family policies help to shape men's attitudes to parenthood and gendered parenting roles. Polish family policy is mother oriented and only recently started to address the social citizenship rights of fathers. Polish men's role in the family is still normatively coded in terms of male breadwinning. Whereas in Sweden, there is a long tradition of gender-neutral parental leave and a normative and institutionalized social policy tradition of encouraging fathers into greater engagement with care work. This study shows that institutional contexts, in particular parental-leave provisions, impact how men perceive their own parental roles and their own interpretations of prevailing models of masculinities.

Work-Life Flexibility Policies From a Boundary Control and Implementation Perspective: A Review and Research Framework

“…Gender norms and views are defined as broadly salient perceptions associated with gender role expectations that typically involve some form of debate or contestation (rather than broad acceptance) about the roles of each gender in society. Examples include how cultural configurations of motherhood (Masood & Nisar, 2020) and fatherhood (Plantin, 2007), the presence of hegemonic masculinity (Almqvist, 2008), and the male breadwinning model (Suwada, 2017) influence the uptake of parental leave, typically rendering maternity leave as acceptable while discouraging paternity leave. Gender socialization involving expectations about traditional role norms (Chandra, 2012), notions of the "ideal worker" (Ewald & Hogg, 2022), masculinist and heterosexist biases (Hari, 2017), and the patriarchal labor model (Gálvez, Tirado, & Alcaráz, 2018) typically discouraged the uptake of other work-life flexibility policies-for both men and women alike-including teleworking.…”

Care Work and Parenting

“…The issue of choice is quite important here-it recurs very often in different discussions on the non-transferrable part of parental leave reserved for fathers. People who are against such mechanisms often stress that parents should have a right to choose how they want to share their parental leave (Suwada 2017b). Such an approach also appeared in the interviews analysed here-people dislike being forced to do particular things either by the state or by an individual person.…”