Roosmarijn de Geus, PhD

My second daughter is almost turning one and with that I have reached the end of my maternity leave for her. Yes – you read that correctly, I was able to take a full year of paid leave here in Canada. Understandably, my lengthy time off work led to some incredulous responses from family and friends in the Netherlands where the standard maternity leave amount is about 16 weeks. It also compares favourably to the U.K. where I had my first child and was off for six months of paid leave (which was already on the very generous end of the scale in the UK). And if anyone is reading from the USA – I apologise, the countries might be close, but when it comes to parental leave the USA and Canada are miles apart. 

These conversations made me wonder – what is the desired length and structure of parental leave? So, during nap times and now that my husband is also on leave (leave for fathers – another fascinating conversation topic!) I started to dig around for some data on this question! 

Parental leave around the world

This beautiful map by the World Policy Analysis centre using 2022 data gives a nice snap shot of parental leave provisions across the world. As is clear – there is a lot of variation! We can see the differences between the three countries I’m most familiar with, Canada = green; UK = light green and Netherlands = yellow. The yellow coloured Netherlands seems a bit out of step with its European and Scandinavian neighbours, all of whom are shades of green.

What do parents want?

Having established that there is clear variation in provisions of parental leave – I turned to the question of: what do parents want? How long is the ideal parental leave, should parents split the leave, and who should pay for it? As it turns out, there isn’t much data on this, but the best comparative data-set I found was the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) which ran a module on “Family and Changing Gender Roles” in 2012 and 2022 and has some of the info I am after. Unfortunately Canada and the UK were not part of the 2022 survey so I’m using 2012 data here. And though 2012 feels like yesterday to me, I realize this is now quite old. But, it’s a place to start. Also – I analyzed the 2022 data for the Netherlands and the results are remarkably similar to those in 2012.

Support for parental leave

First, I looked at support for paid parental leave. As we may expect, this is pretty widespread in all three countries I’m interested in. Support reaches 86% in Canada and 89% in the UK. Somewhat surprisingly, support for paid leave comes in at only 76% in the Netherlands.

After this, I looked at the mean level of duration in months as suggested by respondents, which is shown below. Note that respondents were asked this question in a gender-neutral way – namely they were asked to imagine a couple expecting a baby whilst both working full-time. If one of them stops working to take care of the baby, should paid leave be available. The figure shows the 95% interval around the mean, so broadly represents the lower and upper bound of the average level of support in each country. Canadians support the longest leaves, between 10-12 months of paid leave, followed by UK respondents with 8.5-9.5 months. In the Netherlands the mean level of suggested leave is between 7-8 months, which is significantly longer than the current offer of 4 months. Note respondents give a suggested duration for paid leave but are not asked about specific levels of renumeration (e.g. full salary, partial salary, minimum wage etc.)

I also looked at differences between male and female respondents and found that women on average support 1 month more of paid leave compared to men. This is true in all three countries.

What about the money?

Who should pay for parental leave? Here we see consensus across the three countries – a generous majority thinks parental leave should be paid jointly by government and employer, though no further information is provided on the exact split. The one thing that stands out here is that in Canada there are higher levels of support (24%) for parental leave to be paid entirely by the government when compared to the other two countries. 

In conclusion

It’s clear to me that in general there are broad levels of public support for parental leave across all 3 countries I looked at and that there is a general consensus that such leave provisions should be paid for jointly by the government and employers. Of course – many questions remain about levels of remuneration during leave, provisions for fathers versus mothers, eligibility requirements – and I still have many questions about variations in support across different population groups.

I will be going back to work in September, so my time will be more limited, but hopefully I can keep the side project going and find answers to some of these questions. If you happen to know of recent public opinion data on this please drop me a line!