Changing objectives in the Norwegian political discourses on parental leave for fathers
Work and Family Researchers Network
June 14-16, 2012
New York City
Symposium:
Supporting Fatherhood and Paid Work: International Perspectives on the Effects of Policy and Ideology
Berit Brandth and Elin Kvande
Department of Sociology and Political Science
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Trondheim
Norway
Changing objectives in the Norwegian political discourses on parental leave for fathers
Introduction
The point of departure in this paper is the extensive focus on fatherhood and fathering in the Norwegian family policy discourse during the last twenty five years. Particularly the father’s quota has been a subject of heated debate over the years. Whenever its intensions are articulated (explicitly or implicitly) they relate to a number of objectives that span from working life and family to the individual. We will explore the different arguments in the political discourse in this period with a particular focus on what leave for fathers is understood to accomplish as the leave itself has increased considerably in length. We ask whether there has been a weakening or a strengthening of the political argumentation of gender equality and improved father-child relationship as objectives. We also ask how the neo-liberal politics of individual choice and the renewed interest for biological perspectives have affected the thinking and the political objectives of parental leave for fathers. We will analyse these questions, combining contributions from discourse- and institutional perspectives.
The Norwegian institutional context
A gender symmetric utopia?
Combining paid work with caring for children has become more challenging for families as women's engagement in working life has increased. Over the past decades the issue of work-family balance has reached a prominent place on the policy agenda in most western countries. In this connection Nordic work-family policy and practice has been launched as a modern-day utopia presented for example by Gornick and Meyers (2005, 2009). In this utopia the needs of parental caregiving and market work are valued in an egalitarian way where paid parental leave, designed so that fathers in particular would be incentivized to take this leave, is one of the main components.
International scholars debate the Nordic model of work-life reconciliation as an interesting or problematic utopia. The critique and debates are active and interesting, discussing for instance whether this Nordic inspired gender symmetric utopia actually represent a feminist utopia at all (Orloff 2007), and whether men are willing to take up more care work (Bergmann 2008). The success of the Nordic model of work-family reconciliation has been rated as half-full, as well as half empty (Lister 2009). Despite a high level of economic activity, women do not enjoy the same labour market opportunities as men. Women’s weaker labour market position may, on the one hand, reflect the failure of parental leave policies to shift to a significant extent the gendered division of labour in both private and public spheres, something which moved a Norwegian governmental committee to suggest restructuring of the parental leave in order for fathers to be given a much greater part of it (NOU 2008). On the other hand, Norway has a high percentage of working mothers (80 per cent) combined with a high fertility rate, and this combination has often been seen as an indication of the impact of family policies facilitating the reconciliation of work and child care for both mothers and fathers.
The Norwegian welfare state model
In the Nordic countries, it is the state rather than the companies that fashion work-family policies. A central aim for work/family policy in Norway, as in most other Nordic countries, has been to encourage gender equality. This must be seen in connection with the Nordic welfare state model which builds on universalism and egalitarianism as core values in policy making (Esping-Andersen et.al. 2002). An important element in order to achieve this is the policy which is called the ’work line’ or earnings-related social insurance programmes. Benefits are based on the precondition that you ’earn’ the right to services from society through participation in working life and paying tax on your earnings. The work line has been a basic principle for the Norwegian welfare state since the early 1990s, and it represents a type of policy that is meant to encourage people to choose employment rather than social security benefits. Family policies are also closely connected to employment policies. A typical example of this is the parental leave system to which you have to qualify by being in the work force for the last six months prior to birth. The work contract as criteria for entitlement to paid parental leave represents a strong encouragement for both parents to establish themselves in the labour market before having a baby as it is through paid work that parents earn the right to take paid leave without losing their jobs. This type of policy encourages both parents to combine work and family obligations, which again is built on the model where both mothers and fathers are employed.
Connecting care policy to employment means that it builds on the same thinking as many other welfare benefits and schemes regulating conditions in working life in Norway that are defined as a part of the work contract. Thus, male employees who have become fathers in principle do not have to negotiate individually with their employers about using the right to the father’s quota, although such negotiations are more likely to happen in some workplaces, notably the so-called ‘new working life’. Being a right that applies to male employees as a group makes it easier to avoid the stress and strain of being one among a minority, or being the only one to take leave to provide care for children. Precisely because the father’s quota functions as an employee right, it appears to fit into men's and fathers' norms with respect to what are acceptable reasons for absence from work. This has probably contributed to the development of it as a majority practice in the course of a few years (Brandth and Kvande 2006).
Making the eligibility rights to parental leave dependent on working life participation has been the policy ever since the origin of the parental leave institution. It has, however, gained greater focus the last years as a distinctive characteristic of the Norwegian model.
Conflicting ideas and discourses
Even if Norway, as held by many international scholars, is an ideal when it comes to solving work-family constraints, this does not mean any harmony of interests on this issue. We will in this paper focus on the conflicting discourses embedded in policies for childcare within the country. We will do this by focusing on fathers in family policy discourse over the recent decades. Particularly the father’s quota has been a subject of heated debate the last years. Whenever its intensions are articulated (explicitly or implicitly) they relate to a number of objectives. We will explore the various changes in the way policies are framed in this period with a particular focus on what leave for fathers is understood to accomplish.
Hearing political arguments in various European countries concerning parental leave, one is often struck by the many intentions that are articulated. Arguments relate to objectives such as increased employment, employee protection, fertility, nutrition/breastfeeding, gender equality, father-child contact, children’s well-being, freedom of choice, etc. These objectives span from the societal, to working life and families, to benefits for the individual. It has been pointed out that the parental leave system is a series of assembled and complex agreements (O’Brien 2009). It is understood to serve many needs, and as a consequence it contains many objectives that are often mutually contradictory. By focusing on the leave that is reserved for fathers we expect to eliminate at least some of this complexity.
Theoretically, we are inspired by research on the importance of ideas and discourse in policy change. Ideational processes are increasingly seen to play a role in the understanding of policy development (Béland 2009, Padamsee 2009, Ellingsæter 2011). The cultural turn may have arrived relatively late to policy studies, but a great deal of recent research has made effort to describe how ideas, discourses and ideologies influence welfare reforms and how cultural and political contexts play a role in the processes of policy development (Orloff and Palier 2009, Padamsee 2009). A much described example of how changes in welfare policies are of a paradigmatic nature may be illustrated by the dualism in Norwegian family policy that has been justified by different political regimes. The parental leave and cash for care represent two very different ideologies on gender, choice and work-family reconciliation (Brandth and Kvande 2009b, Ellingsæter and Leira 2006). Orloff and Palier (2009) has shown how particularly feminist ideas have been directly and indirectly implicated in the alterations of policies, and thus been central to the transformation of the welfare state (p.406) and work-family reconciliation policies.
There are several inroads to the study of how ideas impact on social policy formation. First of all, one may study how ideas and discourses have developed over time (Padamsee 2009). Such a processual element of discourses may help understand why some ideas succeed or fail. ’New historical institutionalism’ has been preoccupied with studying path dependency. ’Discursive institutionalism’ is more dynamic and has greater focus on ideas and discourses which promote change, not only those which reinforce existing realities (Schmidt 2008). A second approach is to the study of ideas in policy development is to focus on how contemporary ideas are connected with each other, something that will illustrate the multiplicity of ideas and discourses within a society (Padamsee 2009). Some discourses are hegemonic in a certain period; their hegemony may however be challenged by competing discourses, and they may transform themselves by adopting elements from other discourses. According to Campbell (1998) ‘ideas in the background’ are those that are taken for granted while ‘ideas in the foreground’ are those that are continually disputed.
In this paper we will apply both these approaches suggested by Padamsee. First, we consider how the political ideas about the father’s quota have evolved over time. Second, we focus on the main discourses and ideas and how they interact with each other and form what we may term a ‘cacophony of ideas’.
Description of the parental leave system in Norway
As mentioned, parental leave includes many different types of leave from work to which parents are entitled in order to care for their children. In the Nordic countries the most common types of leave are maternity, paternity and parental leave. As the terms indicate, maternity leave is for mothers and paternity leave is for fathers. The broader term, parental leave, can normally be used by both parents. In Norway, parents can decide to share this part of the leave in the manner most suitable to them. At present, the sharable leave is 26 weeks with 100 per cent wage compensation or 36 weeks with 80 per cent, and the total parental leave period is 47/57 weeks respectively. Although parental leave in principle is sharable, part of it is reserved for fathers, the so-called father’s quota. The father’s quota is an individual right, non-transferable to the mother. While the parental leave means voluntary sharing between mothers and fathers, this is different with the father’s quota. The father’s quota does, however, contain many other possibilities for flexibility and choice in use. It can for instance be taken as part-time over a longer period of time, split up and used now and then until the child is three years old.
When the father’s quota was initiated in 1993, it was four weeks long. In 2005 and 2006 it was prolonged by one week each year and in 2009 by one additional month to a total of ten weeks. The last prolongation came in 2011, and it now means that 12 weeks or 3 months of the total parental leave is reserved for fathers and forfeited if not used. Concurrent with the extension of the father’s quota in 2009 and 2011, the sharable parental leave was shortened somewhat. Over the last decade there has been changes made to the eligibility rules making it available for a larger population of fathers.
As long as the quota was four weeks long consensus seemed to apply, and there was not much political or public debate on the issue, rather a pride in the high take-up rate. About 90 per cent of eligible fathers availed themselves of the leave, either the whole four weeks or parts of it. This calm continued with the extensions in 2005 or 2006. However, with the extensions in 2009 and 2011, which meant a doubling of the quota, many debates were triggered and the temperature has at times been very high! In this paper we will examine the different ideas of these debates with a special focus on objectives. First, we will take a look at how the objectives have shifted since the 1970’s.
Parental leave – shifting objectives over time
Equality
In 1978 Norway expanded the leave as well as replaced maternity leave with a gender neutral parental leave. Following Sweden a few years earlier, Norway thus became one of the first countries in the world to include fathers into the institution of parental leave. This change may be understood as a path break (Cedestrand 2011). What was entirely new with the leave reform in the 1970s was that some of the leave could be shared between the parents, which meant abandoning the idea that leave was only an individual right for women, and making it gender neutral with the exception of the first six weeks. By granting mothers and fathers the right to share the leave, legislation in the 1970s signalled a new political view on men's responsibilities in the home. Leave should not hamper gender equality as in the case with maternity leave. Gender equality meant gender neutrality: Women were desired in the labour market, and to facilitate their employment, men had to become more involved at home in order to prevent women’s ‘double burden.’ Both parents were now given rights and obligations in relation to their home and their workplace. Moreover, the 1977 Work Environ-ment Act granted fathers a right to take two weeks of welfare leave at the time of the child’s birth, the so-called ‘daddy days’, enabling fathers to be of help upon the mother and child’s return from hospital. Both parents now had access to individual as well as sharable rights.