A French lesson in paternity leave
Breaking news, care policies that don't see care as work... don't work
France is a relatively good country to be a father.
With four weeks of paternity leave (including four mandatory days) for no change in salary, it sits comfortably above its average European neighbour.
About 70% of eligible fathers actually take leave, and of those, about 65% use the full allocated time. We have a long way to go, and four weeks is still a far cry from what mothers need to truly flourish in their postpartum, but those are not terrible numbers.
Besides this common form of leave, France also has a more extensive version, confusingly called ‘educational parental leave’. This refers to the specific right of every worker to dedicate themselves to raising their first or second child up until its third birthday, without losing their job in the process (for the third child or more, the period can be extended up to five years). Though this is much less universally used, about 400.000 families benefit from it every year.
In theory, it is indiscriminately open to both parents. They can choose to completely stop working, and receive a monthly compensation of about 400€ - roughly 30% of French minimum wage - or work part-time, in which case the compensation drops to about 250€.
In practice, the policy is obviously designed for only one parent to take leave, given that it’s virtually impossible for a family to live off that kind of money. Unsurprisingly, in 2014, 95% of beneficiaries of the provision were women.
An attempt at change
That same year, French lawmakers decided to tackle this imbalance by reforming the compensation structure of parental leave. The objectives? Encourage a fairer split between parents, and boost mothers’ reentry into the workforce.
To achieve this, the duration of compensation payments was reduced from three to two years in case of non-shared leave, making it impossible for one parent only to be paid for three. This essentially earmarked one year specifically for dads, nontransferable. If a couple wanted to receive payments for the full three, they now had to take at least a year of leave each.
Last week, economists Mathilde Guergoat-Larivière and Mathieu Narcy published a paper evaluating the effects of this reform. Verdict: it didn’t do much.
To ensure that families observed would have comparable conditions in all respects bar that of the reform, they analysed couples’ rates of parental leave use the month just before it came into effect, versus the month just after. The effect was negligible. Rates of part-time leave use among fathers rose by a meagre 1.4 percentage points, and only by 0.2 for full-time leave.
Note: the second parent is most often a man and therefore referred to as a ‘father’, even though some couples in the sample are made up of two mothers.
Proponents of the reform were particularly banking on the fact that mothers, suddenly unable to be paid to stay with their child for a third year, would “pass the relay” onto their partners. But even in those scenarios, the objective of 25% shared-leave arrangements was far from met: for those fathers whose partner had to give up the extra year of compensation, the effect was a little stronger but still of only 4.4 points for part-time leave, and 0.6 for full-time.
Lawmakers were also hoping the policy would incentivise women to go back to work earlier. That, too, didn’t really happen. Two-thirds of those women who lost access to a 3rd year of compensation still stayed home, for no pay. Presumably because they either wanted to, or because even with a salary, it’s still often cheaper to stay home than to pay for childcare.
So, what does this tell us?
First, let it be said that the results themselves are not particularly surprising. It would be unrealistic, for one, to manage to drastically change something as ingrained as the socio-sexual division of care labour in the span of a month. What I am more surprised by is that those behind the policy were surprised. I think this example holds a precious lesson about how policymakers (and researchers!) categorise parenthood - and what they fail to understand about it.
The devil is in the sock drawer
As a potential cause for the weakness of the effects, the authors of the study first point to the weakness of the compensation: since men typically have higher salaries than women, the revenue loss associated with parental leave is greater for them. This higher opportunity cost probably explains why, when men do “take the relay” from their partners, they do so almost exclusively part-time.
But they nuance this by pointing out that fathers who make less than their partners (about 30% of the sample) also didn’t change their behaviour post-reform - even though it would’ve overall been financially advantageous for the household.
Even more telling is another study they cite, which shows that even fathers who were already working part-time did not decide to take part-time leave, even though that would have meant receiving extra money for no change in their work patterns and allowed them to avoid foregoing a full year of compensation.
So, financial incentives are not it. The authors then point to the obvious culprits: culture, gender roles, stigma and negative employer attitudes around paternity leave. They also acknowledge that women are typically the ones handling the paperwork associated with family benefits, which ties them to the caregiver role.
But wait: this last point, mentioned in passing, seems to me to be the absolute heart of the matter.
What the reform’s designers seem to have failed to consider is that taking care of a child does not just require continuity of presence - having someone there, whoever it may be. It requires continuity of knowledge.
Parenting is not a hobby you can take up, then transfer to someone else for a couple months, then pick back up again. Parenting is hard work. And like any form of work, it requires patience, time, mistakes, and a lot of learning to develop the set of skills needed to do it properly.
Handing over the full-time responsibility of children to your husband when you have spent the last two years taking care of them without him makes about as much sense as writing the first half of a novel, then handing the manuscript over to your toddler who can’t read.
I caricature, of course. Many men who work full-time are also very involved fathers. (Many are not.) But there is a crucial difference between ‘involved parent’ and ‘parent who knows’. Knows what foods the kids will and won’t eat, the name and address of their dentist, when the eldest has to go to football practice and which socks to pack for her; knows the kids’ vaccine history, the last time the fridge was fixed, what groceries are low in the pantry, how to pay the fee for the youngest’s school outing and how to sign him up for cello practice and when the annual talent show is and what costumes they need for that… and when the next child benefits payment is coming.
In a podcast conversation about parental leave with Elena Bridgers, marriage and motherhood expert Cindy DiTiberio explains:
“Incompetence can start very early on, because an infant requires very specific things. If you are not there to know all the things, you look to your wife, and she becomes the expert. [The only way to avoid this is] if both parents are tasked with fully being responsible for that infant early on - and by fully, I mean, let that mother leave for a day. She probably won’t like it either! I don’t know how young the infant needs to be, but let it happen early enough on so that the father is fully responsible.
[That is the only way] he can feel just as capable. He’ll learn his own methods. But the hierarchy starts there, in those early days. Again, it’s hard, especially when breastfeeding is involved. But I just think we have to be really careful. We’re all so tired during that stage, without some intentional practices, what ends up happening is we slip into, ‘mom knows all the things and dad bumbles along as a helper’. […]
That parent will also be responsible for that child for the rest of their life. He should be an equal parent, an equal partner.”
Bibbidy, bobbidy, parent!
This ‘hierarchy of knowledge’ produced by mother-centric parental leave structures cannot be magically fixed over the course of a month just because the state said so.
Maybe part of the reason French men didn’t take parenting over from their wives for the last year of paid leave is because they would not even know where to begin. In a professional job replacement, they would go through a handover period, with some training. But here, they are to be suddenly entrusted with a set of responsibilities that they’ve had no part in shouldering since the birth of their children. And to make matters worse, be paid very little for it.
This study does not allow us a closer look at these in-couple dynamics. But it shows that cosmetic changes to the incentive structure of parental leave policies cannot disrupt the deeper roots of the gender parenting imbalance. Making parenting a truly shared enterprise starts in the very beginning. And the ‘one caregiver, one worker’ model (even in a world where they did alternate) still not only cements the idea that care is not work, but that a child’s early years are best spent in the care of one exclusive caregiver. A far cry from “it takes a village”.
As often with public policies around care, this reform was neither malicious nor completely unwelcome. But it failed to grapple with the gendered micro-dynamics that structure family relationships. It failed to recognise (and properly compensate) parenting for what it is: a lot of work, involving specific knowledge and specific skills. And therefore, it inevitably failed to deliver the kind of creative, radical overhaul of our current systems that is needed to truly make parenting - and all care work more broadly - fair, valued and collective.
If that’s something you care about making happen, you’re in the right place. Welcome to The Fifth Wave.
Guergoat-Larivière, Mathilde, and Mathieu Narcy. 2025. “What can we learn from the 2015 parental leave reform?”. Centre for the Study of Employment and Work.
[In French, untranslated]
Fascinating. The gender averages and research always surprise me. As someone who was fortunate to have my spouse (who is also very hands-on *and* emotionally attuned) present for our daughter’s first three years, I wholeheartedly support giving men extended parental leave. And socializing it to the realm of a public good.
Mine and I both took a career hit to be there once our baby was born—and I didn’t have any PPD or anxiety to contend with, likely as a result of us *both* prioritizing being at home. He does a ton of the paperwork, housework, and play. I did years of breastfeeding and the night time responding (we attempted him doing it but my physiology wouldn’t allow for that.) And still, we’re both burnt out, exhausted beyond belief.
Would offering extended parental leave to both parents help ease gender stereotypes, social expectations, and—as Darby Saxbe’s wonderful work shows—aid the patresence neuroplasticity and hormonal changes fathers have that makes them incredible parents as well?
It’s dumbfounding that caring for an under three was ever relegated to a “one person job” — as it clearly is not. Elena Bridgers’ excellent work on hunter gatherer societies shows this all too well. Policy should support parents to be present, hard stop. Educating the public on why is the first step. And I think the neuroscience on how parent-infant co-regulation bolsters adult mental health is a good starting point!
Mélina what a fascinating essay — thanks for sharing. I had no idea about this program in France — which sounds like a UBI-type approach for caregivers? I’m very interested in that topic, particularly the part-time model — so thank you for sharing this! I’m looking forward to digging into this more.
Oh and the point on knowledge transfer is brilliant, and actually acknowledges the deep work required in care.
(Darby Saxbe (funnily mentioned in the above comment) wrote a great piece on UBI for caregivers you might enjoy as well.)