28/7/26

From presenteeism to fatherhood

Companies need to reflect modern expectations of parental leave

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This article is republished from The Financial Times.

“There’s been a generational shift”, reflects Jasmine Kelland, a researcher into fathers and the workplace, looking back to her grandfather’s time when there was no expectation that working life would accommodate his children.

Studies suggest that society has indeed shifted. The British Social Attitudes survey found support for the traditional division of working and caring roles (“it is the man’s job to earn money and the women’s to look after the home and family”) declining by 39 percentage points between 1987 (48 per cent) and 2022 (9 per cent).

It also showed that support for more equal divisions of childcare and parental leave was higher among younger respondents. A 2025 survey by Working Families, a charity which has recently announced its closure, found 31 per cent of fathers wanted equal leave, a benefit on offer from employers such as Goldman Sachs and Spotify.

However, says Kelland, “people over-egg how much things change in the workforce. There’s been a shift in middle-manager multinational company [experiences] but there’s a huge amount of society that doesn’t fit into that. There’s a huge difference between a middle manager at Goldman Sachs and a guy on minimum wage working with a bunch of labourers wanting to work compressed hours.”

In the UK, for example, men are only entitled to two weeks on statutory pay. According to the OECD, paid paternity leave across its member countries averages 2.4 weeks, with Spain offering the most at 16. Some employers choose to enhance pay as well as leave.

Even among companies that offer parental leave, “take-up isn’t as common [for men] as women,” says Kelland, adding: “We still have a long way to go.” Men meanwhile face “banter” from bosses and colleagues if they do take up the offer. There are also cases of parental leave being scaled back, such as Deloitte’s policy for some workers in the US.

A new survey shows some 45 per cent of parents feeling pressured to reduce their time off. Astrid Gyllenkrok Kristensen, co-founder of LEIA Health, which conducted the study, says: “The problem is that delivery still depends on individual managers.”

“It’s mixed”, says Elliott Rae, who advises companies on parental leave. “We know attitudes to gender roles are becoming more progressive in that men are open to taking on more caregiving roles and leave [but] there are men who grew up with no paternity leave, no flexible working, weren’t in the delivery room” who still see traditional roles as the way to progress.

“They don’t have much of an understanding of why they should change; we have to go in and explain why it’s important for their business, making them an employer of choice and [it] may have a positive impact on retention. Some people can challenge their own beliefs and have the mentality to do that.”

Heejung Chung, director of the King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, says: “We hear a lot of employers saying why is it my issue? Younger workers are saying you have to understand we come with a set of responsibilities.”

Adrienne Burgess, co-founder of the Fatherhood Institute, says 25 years ago, “we witnessed fathers advising other fathers not to miss the birth. Today, when hardly a father is not in that room, we hear them comparing employers’ parental leave policies. With fewer than a quarter of top employers publicising their offer, [according to Working Families] fathers are whispering to each other — and companies are missing a trick. A healthy paternal leave offer would put them ahead of the game.”

“There is still a bias against fathers taking leave,” says Chung. “But as the policy changes, norms change. These norms are not fixed points that are innate in the culture but driven by assumed consensus; there’s a huge demand for shared leave and shared care.”

Lesson from the past: too much emphasis on presenteeism

Lee Chambers, founder and CEO of consultancy Male Allies UK, has seen “tension around caregiving, flexibility and parental leave, but it’s less about age and more on the workplace norms people have been exposed to and [their] life stage”.

In his research interviewing 27 male FTSE CEOs and chairs for a report on gender balance in UK FTSE 350 companies, many senior leaders had built careers in environments where “long hours were a signal of commitment: being present and visible was the output”.

One male chair told him that the first time he took a day caring for a child was his grandson, not his daughter or son, which made him realise “he’d missed the joy of playing with his own children”.

There is some friction, Chambers reflects, between older generations and those entering the workforce “who are generally more vocal about boundaries around work, open about caregiving and wellbeing, and feel flexibility should be as standard. We see real polarity in this generation too, with some subscribed to hustle culture.”

Overall, he detects that “men’s appetite for caregiving has increased more quickly than organisational cultures and expectations have”. The “subtle perception that those who request flexible working are less committed, less available and less ready to be all-in leaders, is impacting men more than ever”.

In 2017, when he brought in shared parental leave to his technology business, male employees felt able to take it because he had done so and spoke openly about doing so. “It came with a financial cost, but suddenly talking about family commitments became as normal as talking about KPIs.”

It also means making sure that employees are judged on their contribution rather than presenteeism. “Workplace norms in many places still assume that being there is what good work looks like”, though for those roles that do require in-person attendance, employers should look at other forms of flexibility.

“When we do build better structures for those who caregive, loyalty and sustainable high performance are much more likely to happen.”

Today’s challenge: making parental leave equal

Andrew Cunningham, Senior Bid Manager at Aviva, has been with his employer for 28 years and had four children. With his youngest he was able to take six months’ parental leave under Aviva’s equal parental leave policy, introduced in 2017, which gives all UK employees up to 12 months’ leave, of which six months is fully paid.

Equal parental leave has been taken over 3,800 times at the company, with more than 750 colleagues taking it more than once. On average, dads take more than 22 weeks of leave.

With his oldest three children, Cunningham only took the statutory two weeks plus holiday. Now with the benefit of longer leave, he realises a fortnight was insufficient.

“It’s such a shock to the system, a total change to your routine. I’m back [to] work, leaving my wife here to deal with this new baby. And you’re tired. There are so many things she needs to do in terms of hospital appointments and doctor’s appointments.”

With his youngest daughter, he felt able to support his wife (also an employee at Aviva), by making meals and looking after the other three children. “She had a caesarean. I don’t know how you would manage having a major operation” on top of looking after multiple children.

For Cunningham, the value was not just the time he spent with his wife and new baby but also with their other children. “I was able to go to [their] classes, and [it] helped me meet some of the other parents that I wasn’t able to do before.”

He would recommend it. “You never get that time again, do you? It goes by so quickly. Six months just flashes by.”

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