Usage of parental leave by fathers in Norway

Purpose - Fathers' participation in childcare is not only important in promoting gender equality but can be also important for the child's better upbringing. To promote fathers' involvement and participation in childcare, in the 1990s Norway and other Scandinavian countries have evolved their parental leave schemes such that employed fathers may have equal access to paid parental leave as mothers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that determine use of parental leave in Norway. Design/methodology/approach - This paper's dependent variable is ordinal. An individual has three options: do not take leave, use leave up to the paternity quota or use leave in excess of the paternity quota. For modelling the choice between these three categories, an ordered logit model is used. Findings - Fathers' workplace type has no effect on their use of paternity quota, but they opt to take gender-neutral leave if they are working in female-dominated professions. In addition the effects of mothers' relative income, education, working time and number of pre-school children are more important for the use of gender-neutral leave by fathers as compared with leave up to the paternity quota. Originality/value - Several studies in Scandinavia have investigated the determinants of use of paternal leave but this paper differs from the existing literature in the following respects. First, it differentiates the determinants of taking paternity quota and gender-neutral leave and it focuses sharply on the difference between husbands' and wives' characteristics. In addition, it uses a large dataset that includes information from several public registers, merged by Statistics Norway. In contrast, the previous studies in Norway were based on relatively small samples and self-reported data.