Paternity Leave Culture

Paternity leave has changed dramatically. The next challenge for organisations is making sure that what happens in real life matches what is written in the policy.

When my eldest child was born, I had been working at Deutsche Bank for about a month. I wasn’t entitled to paternity leave, so I took a week of annual leave and then went back to work.

That was simply how it was.

Fast forward many years to when Iris was born and my experience could hardly have been more different. I was able to take two months of fully paid parental leave when she was born and another two months later. Four months in total.

Clearly, the policy had changed enormously. But when I look back, I think something else mattered just as much. I felt able to use it.

I didn’t spend those months worrying that people would think I was less committed to my career. Nobody made me feel that I was inconveniencing the organisation. I didn’t return to find that taking leave had quietly changed how people saw me or what opportunities were available to me.

The organisation coped. My colleagues coped. Work continued. I came back.

And I got something that I would never have imagined having when my eldest was born: proper time to be a dad.

That experience is why I have become increasingly interested in the research now appearing around fathers and parental leave. Because while much of the public debate understandably concentrates on how much leave fathers should receive and how well it should be paid, I think there is another question organisations need to ask.

What is the point of having a brilliant parental leave policy if the culture quietly tells men not to use it?

The expectations of fathers have changed

A recent Financial Times article, From presenteeism to fatherhood, captures the change rather well. The expectations placed on fathers — and, importantly, the expectations many fathers have of themselves — have moved significantly.

The FT points to British Social Attitudes data showing support for the traditional idea that men should earn the money while women look after the home falling from 48% in 1987 to just 9% in 2022. Younger generations are also more supportive of sharing childcare and parental leave. 

In other words, many men no longer see being a good father primarily as being a good provider. They want to be present as well.

The problem is that workplace culture has not necessarily moved at the same speed.

The OECD published an excellent report on paid leave for fathers in 2025. It concludes that fathers are taking more parental leave than they were a decade ago, but use remains nowhere near equally shared between mothers and fathers. The OECD identifies three major barriers: financial considerations, traditional gender norms and workplace cultures in which men worry that taking leave could damage their careers. 

That last point is critical.

An organisation can remove the formal barrier by introducing an excellent policy while leaving the informal barrier completely intact.

There are really two parental leave policies

I think most organisations effectively have two policies.

The first one sits on the intranet. It tells you how many weeks you can take, what you will be paid and how the process works.

The second one exists in people’s heads.

It is constructed from what your manager says when you tell them you are taking four months off. It is shaped by whether senior men take the leave themselves. It comes from what happened to the last person who took it, whether colleagues complain about covering the workload and whether someone quietly advises you that “this probably isn’t the best year” to disappear.

That second policy may never be written down, but it can be far more powerful than the first.

There is now some fascinating evidence for this.

A 2024 study of 572 male civil servants in the Netherlands tested different circumstances that might affect whether fathers would use parental leave. The strongest influence was the expectation of negative career consequences, followed by support from managers and colleagues. In other words, simply having the right to take leave was not enough. Men were assessing the professional risk attached to using it. 

This is not a new concern. Research published in Social Science Research by Richard Petts, Trenton Mize and Gayle Kaufman examined how taking parental leave affects perceptions of job commitment. Petts summed up the issue neatly: paid-leave policies only deliver their intended benefit when employees actually use them and do not believe they will be penalised for doing so. 

That is the policy-versus-culture problem in one sentence.

Sometimes men are frightened of a culture that doesn’t actually exist

One of the most interesting pieces of research I found comes from the Behavioural Insights Team and Santander UK.

Researchers discovered something called pluralistic ignorance. Men were personally supportive of fathers taking longer parental leave and working flexibly, but they underestimated how supportive other men around them were.

That matters because we often behave according to what we think the group believes, rather than what the group actually believes.

The researchers tested a remarkably simple intervention. They told men that the majority of their male colleagues supported fathers taking longer parental leave. At Santander, that increased men’s intention to take five to eight weeks of leave by 62%. A similar experiment at another large bank increased intentions by 50%. These were changes in stated intentions rather than observed leave-taking, so we should not pretend the study proves equivalent changes in behaviour. But the size of the effect is still striking. 

Think about what that means.

Sometimes the barrier isn’t even that colleagues disapprove.

It is that men think their colleagues disapprove.

That is why visible role-modelling matters so much.

Every time a senior man takes meaningful parental leave and returns to a successful career, he is doing something beyond looking after his own family. He is sending a signal to everyone underneath him that this is normal behaviour here.

I suspect we underestimate how powerful that can be.

This is also a health issue

The emerging research on paternal mental health makes this more important than a conversation about employee benefits.

A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health examined a population-representative sample of fathers in Ohio. Fathers who had unpaid rather than paid leave had higher odds of reporting anxiety symptoms. Fathers who said their leave needs had not been met had substantially higher odds of reporting both depression and anxiety symptoms. Financial barriers to leave were also particularly common among fathers reporting recent mental-health symptoms. 

It is important to be precise here. This was observational research. It shows an association; it does not prove that unpaid leave causes anxiety or that paid leave will prevent mental ill health.

But it is not an isolated finding.

Another 2026 US study looked at employer-supported paternity leave, which I think is especially interesting for organisations. Among men, having no access to paternity leave was associated with higher odds of fair or poor self-rated mental health. Even more strikingly, having leave available without feeling that the employer supported its use was also associated with poorer self-rated mental health. Again, this was cross-sectional research and cannot establish causality, but the distinction between availability and employer support is exactly the distinction between policy and culture. 

A Swedish study published in the American Journal of Public Health this summer adds another piece of the puzzle. Researchers followed 746 fathers and found that those who took between 14 and 40 weeks of parental leave were less likely to show depressive symptoms later than fathers taking four weeks or less. The researchers themselves are careful to point out that this was observational and cannot demonstrate cause and effect. 

And there is an important counterpoint. A 2025 study using UK national survey data found no significant association between fathers taking paternity leave and either parent’s mental health. The authors suggested several possible explanations, including the relatively short duration of UK statutory leave during the period studied. 

I actually like the fact that the evidence isn’t perfectly neat.

That is how research works.

We should not turn paternity leave into the latest simplistic wellbeing claim that “X weeks of leave improves mental health by Y”. Families are complicated, workplaces are complicated and fathers are complicated.

What we can reasonably say is that there is a growing evidence base suggesting that how much leave men have, whether it is paid, whether their needs are met and whether their employer genuinely supports them taking it may all matter.

That should make organisations pay attention.

The leave itself is only part of the experience

Another recent article, from the Australian HR Institute, makes an important additional point. Organisations have concentrated heavily on improving the entitlement while often paying far less attention to the transition around it.

What happens before somebody leaves? Who takes over their responsibilities? What happens to their clients and projects? How are opportunities handled while they are away? Who keeps in contact? What happens if there is a restructure? How are they brought back?

The AHRI article argues that parental leave needs to be treated as an organisational system rather than simply a policy. It highlights the danger of leaving the quality of the experience to what amounts to a “manager lottery”, where one employee has a brilliant manager and another has a terrible experience under exactly the same corporate policy. 

I think that is exactly right.

A good policy without a good operating model simply transfers responsibility from HR to individual managers and hopes that they get it right.

Some will.

Some won’t.

And the person taking the risk is the parent.

So what should organisations actually do?

If I were helping an organisation look seriously at its approach to fathers and parental leave, I would not start by reading the policy. I would start by finding out what actually happens.

I would want to know how many eligible fathers take the leave, how much of it they take and whether the numbers vary by seniority, division, manager or income level. A headline saying “we offer 20 weeks” tells me almost nothing if most men take two.

The OECD makes the same point. It recommends better measurement of leave use by each parent alongside adequate pay, flexible design and work to change workplace norms. 

I would then look at six things.

1. Make it financially usable

There is little value in offering long periods of leave if taking them creates a household financial crisis.

The Ohio mental-health research provides one reason to take this seriously, while the OECD’s international analysis consistently shows that fathers are more likely to use leave when it is adequately paid. 

The meaningful metric isn’t weeks available. It is weeks realistically accessible.

2. Make the manager response predictable

Nobody should have to wonder whether telling their manager they intend to take parental leave will be treated as good news or an operational disaster.

Managers should know what to do before, during and after leave. They need guidance on workload, handovers, contact, return-to-work conversations and career continuity.

Most importantly, the first reaction matters.

“Congratulations. That’s great. Let’s work out how we make this work” sends a very different cultural signal from a long silence followed by “Four months?”

3. Make senior role-modelling visible

Senior men taking leave matters because culture is learned by watching what successful people actually do.

It is not enough for the CEO to tell everyone that fathers should take parental leave if every man on the executive committee was back at their desk within ten days.

The OECD notes that fathers taking leave can create peer effects that encourage other fathers to do the same. The Santander experiment suggests that even correcting men’s assumptions about what colleagues believe can change intentions significantly. 

People need evidence that the permission is real.

4. Remove the guilt from the handover

One reason people can feel uncomfortable taking extended leave is the knowledge that somebody else has to pick up their work.

That is an organisational problem, not a reason for someone not to become an active parent.

If a business offers four months of parental leave, it should plan on the assumption that people will take four months of parental leave. Resourcing and succession planning need to reflect the policy.

Otherwise the company is effectively saying: “Please take the benefit we have offered you, provided you don’t inconvenience us by doing so.”

5. Protect the career, not just the job

This is where I think organisations need to look beyond simple compliance.

Did the individual miss a promotion process while away? Did their biggest client quietly become somebody else’s client? Did their responsibilities shrink? Did assumptions get made about what they would want when they returned?

The Dutch research is especially relevant here because perceived career consequences were the strongest factor affecting men’s willingness to use parental leave. 

If people see that taking leave changes careers, the culture will adapt very quickly — just not in the direction the organisation intended.

6. Ask fathers what actually happened

This is perhaps the simplest one.

Don’t only survey whether people know the policy exists.

Ask men who used it whether they felt supported. Ask men who didn’t use it why they didn’t. Ask returners what changed while they were away. Ask whether their manager helped or hindered. Look at promotion, retention and performance outcomes afterwards.

And listen for the informal language.

“I could have taken it, but…”

“My boss was supportive, although…”

“It wasn’t really the right time…”

“I didn’t want to leave the team in the lurch…”

Those sentences will probably tell you more about the real culture than the policy document ever will.

This is bigger than fathers

There is another reason I think organisations should care about this.

When fathers take meaningful leave, the effects do not stop with fathers. OECD evidence links fathers’ leave with greater subsequent involvement in childcare and household work, stronger father-child relationships and a more equal division of caring responsibilities. Normalising men’s leave can also reduce the assumption that it will always be women who disappear from the workplace when a child arrives — one of the mechanisms behind the motherhood penalty. 

So this isn’t men versus women.

Quite the opposite.

Creating workplaces where fathers can genuinely participate in family life should be part of creating workplaces where mothers don’t automatically carry the career cost of having children.

It is also about what kind of fathers we want men to have the opportunity to become.

I know what four months gave me that one week couldn’t.

Time.

Time to become competent rather than helpful. Time to know routines rather than wait to be told them. Time to develop my own relationship with my daughter. Time to experience the exhausting, mundane and wonderful reality of looking after a baby rather than being the person who returned home from work and joined in.

That matters.

The real test of a policy

I am hugely encouraged by how quickly parental-leave policies are changing. The OECD reports that between 2014 and 2024 the number of OECD countries providing paid leave earmarked for fathers increased from 28 to 35, while the average duration increased from nine weeks to 12.7 weeks. 

But I think the next stage is harder.

Writing a policy is relatively straightforward.

Changing what people believe will happen when they use it is much more difficult.

It requires leaders to model it, managers to support it, organisations to resource it properly and HR teams to measure what happens afterwards.

Because ultimately, the best parental-leave policy isn’t the one with the biggest number written in the benefits brochure.

It is the one where a father can say, “I’m going to take the leave,” without mentally calculating what it might cost his career.

That is when policy becomes culture.

And that is when the promise written on the page becomes something people can actually live.