Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id874028359
men still didn’t feel culturally identified with parenting responsibilities and considered childcare women’s work. They largely declined to take the allotted shared parental leave. Employed women who returned from leave were still saddled with a disproportionate share of childcare burdens, limiting their options for career advancement and preserving a gender pay gap. This dynamic, which emerges everywhere women enter the workforce in large numbers, is known as the “motherhood penalty.”
✏️ Norway was making strides in policies that encouraged/mandated equal pay and rights and work between women and men, but there was still a gap in cultural values and perception. 🔗 View Highlight
id874029627
In 1993, on a recommendation from the committee, Norway expanded the total parental leave to forty-two weeks and introduced a “father’s quota,” or pappaperm — four weeks of fully paid leave reserved exclusively for fathers, not transferable to mothers, and not synchronous with mothers’ leave.
✏️ A key approach to fixing that gap. 🔗 View Highlight
id874030275
These were four weeks designated specifically for the father to be home alone with the infant. To be eligible, the mother was expected to be back at work or school. The idea was that men should have the opportunity to not only bond with their children during infancy but actually experience what it’s like to be the primary caregiver. Thereafter, the theory went, fathers would be less likely to conceive of childcare as “helping” their wives but as performing a task necessary to their family’s functioning, a task whose difficulty they appreciate and of which they understand themselves to be equally capable. The program’s designers believed that fathers, mothers, and children would all benefit — perhaps children most of all.
id874030901
The offer was too attractive to resist.
✏️ The policy was made attractive and incentivized. You were getting paid to be a dad at home. 🔗 View Highlight
id874031769
the percentage of dads who took parental leave went from 2.4 percent in 1992 to more than 70 percent in 1997
✏️ Today it’s 90 percent. 🔗 View Highlight
id874031963
a massive cultural sea change was inevitable: parenting newborns and the children they grow into could not, under these circumstances, still be considered “women’s work.”
id874032822
fifteen weeks each for mothers and fathers and a shared period that parents can distribute as they wish. The non-transferable pappaperm, which now also applies to same-sex partners and adoptive coparents, is now nearly four months long.
✏️ The evolution of that original policy has become even more generous, not less. 🔗 View Highlight
id874034332
In 2018, Nordic men reported more happiness than their European counterparts and a weaker correlation between job satisfaction and happiness, suggesting that they’re finding joy in family life.
id874035749
the fastest and most effective way to change ideas about gender roles is to implement programs that make equality the path of least resistance.
id874038148
Most of us still believe in some measure of gender equality. The bigger problem — and likely one component of the reactionary upswing — is that Americans have spent decades becoming more progressive in our values while our institutions make reconciling work and family profoundly difficult. To bring that observation down to earth: while three-quarters of American men think men should take equal responsibility for children, only 5 percent take paternity leave of more than two weeks — primarily because it isn’t available.
✏️ US shows that it doesn’t matter if your people have a cultural value or leaning towards a certain thing… your institutions have to embody and incentivize it as well. 🔗 View Highlight
id874038197
Our public childcare system is paper thin, and we have paltry tax credits and subsidies for families with working parents. As a result, men and women alike “feel trapped by policies and cultural expectations that tie men to work, and women to care.
id874038299
This is how we win. Not just with public awareness campaigns about the perils of the manosphere, but with a movement that can say: We see your lone-wolf sigma male discourse, and we raise you paid paternity leave.
✏️ There is an interesting underlying theme or concept here. Don’t battle negative things with negativity, but rather just counter it with positive change and action. Don’t complain. Act. 🔗 View Highlight