On November 3, 2023, MenCare hosted the fifth webinar in the CARING series, Normalize Equal Parental Leave, highlighting strategic recommendations from the State of the World’s Fathers report. Our expert panel includes parents, lawyers, and advocates with a wide range of experiences navigating and advancing access to paid parental leave, including advocates who worked on the groundbreaking case that just granted equal paid leave access to both mothers and fathers in South Africa.
About the webinar:
MenCare envisions a world where men doing care work is so normal that men not doing care work becomes the anomaly. Normalizing equal parental leave would mean fathers not taking leave to care for infants would be abnormal, and that workplaces would find it strange if male employees did not use their available leave.
More countries and employers are offering parental leave to fathers, and this trend is likely to continue as governments and employers increasingly appreciate care, including men’s care. But there are still barriers; paid parental leave is still too short in many places, it is often not fully paid, and informally- or self-employed workers have the least available parental leave across all countries.
The MenCare global fatherhood campaign advocates that the gold standard for parental leave provision is fully paid, equal parental leave of at least 14 weeks for all parents, regardless of sex, including a portion of nontransferable leave for fathers. This webinar highlights relevant recommendations from SOWF 2023 relating to the provision of parental leave.