Investments in working parents: The use of parental leave

Organizations and national governments are increasingly making work–family policies available to help working parents combine their careers with childcare. Nonetheless, many people who could benefit from these policies do not use them, and little is known about why people do or do not use work–family policies. Some studies have suggested that organizations restrain or encourage people’s use of these policies, yet no large-scale quantitative studies exist. This chapter examines how organizations relate to the utilization of a specific work–family policy: parental leave. We combine two ways of looking at organizations: the family-supportiveness of the organizational culture and by treating them as actors that make strategic choices to invest in policies, which are influenced by organizational characteristics such as size, public ownership, or the proportion of women employed. The results indicate that organizations play a less important role than expected – only the size of an organization was shown to relate to parental leave use. Rather, national differences explain most variations in parental leave use. Organizations do, however, play a role in the utilization decisions of men, but not women, suggesting that while women are expected to use parental leave, men base the extent of their involvement at home partly on pressures from the workplace organizational context.