Note: I wrote what’s on this age back in 2015, when I was quite workd up about trying to come up with concrete things that *men* can do to try and close the gender gap at work. Reading it back again in 2023, it seems like an appalling load of mansplaining, for which I can only apologise. I still think *men* can do more - like playing an equal role in child rearing. But we can possibly do it in a less elf-serving manner ...

I'm prompted by a recent discussion between Annabel Crabb & Leigh Sayles on their excellent “Chat 10 Looks 3” podcast (never understood the looks 3 part myself) that had a “callback” to Annabel’s excellent book “The Wife Drought” from 2015.

1. (I'm a tech nerd, who  started using PCs in the 70's and email in the 80's - I've never seen the point of social media adding "glitzy secret sauce" to the writing of notes to each other. And I still avoid it as a modern day luddite. So I'm "ranting into the void" via a web page because ... well because.)
   

Why don’t men take parental leave? Some do, but in general the take-up rate since parental leave was extended to males has been terrible.

It's true there used to be lots of institutional barriers, perhaps best highlighted by the names we use. Men get offered “paternal leave”, while women get offered “maternity leave”, and the conditions for the former are usually significantly different from the latter. Why aren't they the same?

When our son was born 13 years ago, even my public service employment conditions (at the time probably some of the most generous available) only allowed me to take 2 weeks “paternal” leave. So even if I wanted to share parenting duties with my wife, I couldn’t. In the end, I chose to use 3 months of long-service leave following my wife’s 6 months maternity leave, to extend the period when my son was being cared for full-time, while (critically) allowing us to both keep our jobs and careers.

Prompted by that experience, and later the content’s of “The Wife Drought”,  I became convinced that we need to level the playing field.

Given there are only two things as a male that I’m not capable of doing when it comes to raising children - gestation and lactation - why is it that as a society we still thinking this is a task that having a Y chromosone makes you uniquely and solely qualified to undertake?

That, I think, remains the underlying issue that stumps me. And possibly that’s something it wil take society a long, long time to get over. Changing social memes is hard.

But the one thing as a society we should do is at least level the paying field. We need to eliminate employment conditions that stop families getting to make their own choices on child caring will be shared for themselves, rather than having it forced on them by society saying ‘men get this’ and ‘women get that'.

We need to get rid of the seperate conditions for “maternity” and “paternal/parental” leave, and just have the rules say “you get X months (hopefully 6 or greater) *between* you - you decide how to split that between you”.

Here in my own University I’ve been banging on about this for a while.

(I think the attendees at the many workshops, committees, task forces, working groups, seminars and breakfasts we have gender equity, might all be a little sick of me wheeling out my well rehearsed “gestation and lactation” line).

I’m happy to say UNSW did indeed introduce a (somewhat convoluted) arrangement that effectively delivers that situation (no matter where both partners are employed) a few years ago.

Those arrangements are now spreading across the University sector, and slowly

elsewhere. We need to make sure they spread nationwide so that every couple facing the birth of children has the freedom to choose how to share their parenting arrangements for themselves.

The sad part is that the take up of this arrangement has been poor. Blokes still don’t take up the option. I’d like to think that’s something that might change. But attitudes are resistant to change.

15 June 2019