Support or suppress: Father’s parental leave uptake in the workplace context in Finland

Parental leave uptake by fathers represents one pathway to redress the typically unequal division of early childcare. Following the Nordic schema, the Finnish leave system is designed around this concept to encourage leave uptake, but a substantial share of fathers refrain from it. Though there is a substantial body of literature on policy and individual-level motivators of leave uptake, the decision to take leave often occurs in the context of the workplace. Workplace factors are often cited as typical barriers to uptake. We systematically investigated how the most important workplace characteristics are associated with fathers’ parental leave decisions. We used administrative, linked employee-employer Finnish register data and a multilevel Bayesian approach to examine employed first-time fathers’ use of the father’s quota in 2013–2017. Contrary to our expectations, the probability of taking father’s quota did not vary by the gender composition of or gender wage gap within the workplace. Workplace educational level was important, but only for tertiary educated fathers. Increased competitiveness of the workplace lowered the probability of taking the quota. Our findings call for further study on the interplay of individual and contextual factors in fathers’ parental leave uptake.