Stockholm university

Do biological factors explain the unequal division of parental leave?

Parents who have adopted a child share their parental leave in much the same way as families who have a biological child. A new study from the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) which has compared adoptive and biological parents’ leave use shows that biological factors may not explain the unequal division of parental leave.

Two parenst and a doughter walkning hand in hand in a summer park
Photo: Syda Productions / Mostphotos

“Mothers take more parental leave than fathers. These longer periods away from the labor market have more negative consequences for mother´s career than for men´s. It is therefore important to understand why gendered divisions of parental leave persist”, said Maaike van der Vleuten, researcher in sociology at Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University and one of the authors of the new study.

There could be several reasons why parents divide their parental leave unequally, one of them is that mothers in heterosexual relationships are the ones that are pregnant, need to recover from childbirth and breastfeed. To study how important these biological factors are the researchers compared parental leave use of adoptive couples to couples who have a biological child.

Sociologist Maaike van der Vleuten
Sociologist Maaike van der Vleuten Photo: Daniel Rossetti / SU

“Our study shows a striking resemblance in how both groups of parents use their parental leave. Biological mothers use 82 percent of all available parental leave days, while adoptive mothers use 80 percent. Moreover, both biological and adoptive mothers took the first and longest time with the child, about 8 -12 months, after which adoptive and biological fathers take on average 3 months.” said Maaike van der Vleuten.

Because of the similarity in leave use, the researcher conclude that biological factors do not seem to explain why couples divide their leave unequally.

The results from the new study point towards the importance of norms of mothers as caregivers and fathers as breadwinners that are still present in society, according to the researchers.

“The gender differences in parental leave up-take are large for both adoptive and biological parents. We know that some policies have been very effective in changing norms of fatherhood and motherhood in Sweden, especially policies aimed at increasing father´s leave use. However, our results indicate that more needs to be done to shift parents’ division of care towards a more gender equal result.”, according to Maaike van der Vleuten.
 

How the study was carried out

The study used Swedish register data and included almost 50,000 parents who had children between 1994 and 2009, of which approximately 46,000 were biological parents and almost 4,000 were adoptive parents. The data comes from the Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU). The couples are followed for three years after the child arrives.
The researchers compared adoptive and biological parents similar on characteristics like age, education and income. To produce the comparison groups, the individuals were grouped using coarsened exact matching.

The study looks at how couples divide their leave, how long each parent uses parental leave (in days) and the timing of parental leave (who takes leave when).

 

Read more about the research

Moberg, Y & Van der Vleuten, M. (2022). "Why do gendered divisions of labour persist? Parental leave take-up among adoptive and biological parents”. European Sociological Review.

Contact:

Maaike van der Vleuten, researcher in sociology
Swedish Institute for Social Reseach (SOFI)
Stockholm University
Email: maaike.vandervleuten@sofi.su.se
Tel: +46(0)8-16 43 61