The Importance of Paid Leave

Learn the benefits of paid leave and how men and women can create a more equitable workplace together.

Today’s post is by W. Brad Johnson, PhD and David G. Smith, PhD, co-authors of FAIR SHARE: How Men and Women Can Create a More Equitable Workplace Together (HBR Press, June 30, 2026).

From World War II through the end of the twentieth century, the workplace was increasingly composed of women. Labor force participation rates for women peaked at the end of 1999 at 60.2 percent. By the end of 2024, women’s labor force participation was slightly lower at 57.3 percent, while the participation rate for men was 67.9 percent. Since the mid-twentieth century, changing attitudes about gender roles—including the acceptability of women working outside the home, increased levels of education for women, and technology-facilitated changes in the demands and skills required in the workplace—there has been compelling economic motivation for both women and men to engage in the workforce.

With more women and mothers in the workforce, we would expect a rebalancing of unpaid work at home, especially caregiving. However, in dual-earner couples and even those where women earn more than their husbands, women are doing two more hours of caregiving and three to four more hours of housework each week than their partners. The proverbial “second shift” lives on.

Here’s the good news: when fathers have equal access and take paternity leave for durations similar to mothers’, women are more likely to stay in the workforce and their earnings increase faster. And leave-taking fathers are more likely to retain shared childcare responsibilities and increase their housework—long after paid leave ends—which can indirectly improve mothers’ employment outcomes. The personal, relational, child development, economic, workplace, and societal impact of gender equality in paid leave is far-reaching and presents an incredible opportunity. When fathers have paid leave access and use all of it, there is a systemic economic impact on women’s earnings and careers, family budgets, business profitability, and national productivity.

So, how are we doing when it comes to gender-fair paid leave? Currently, only one country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), among thirty members, doesn’t offer any statutory paid family leave; you guessed it, it is the United States (one of only six countries globally without national paid leave). In 2024 there were thirteen US states with paid parental leave, and outside these states, roughly 27 percent of employees had access to paid parental leave through their employer. Across OECD countries, the average paid paternity leave is 2.3 weeks, average paid maternity leave is 18.5 weeks, and average paid parental leave is thirty-nine weeks (parental leave in many OECD countries is the total combined amount of leave available to the mother and father). In the United States, women have access to an average of ten weeks of maternity leave and fathers, a paltry single week of leave. Because maternity leave is typically inclusive of the medical leave mothers need to recover from childbirth, it reinforces the need for fathers to be present for the baby’s and the mother’s care. The inequality doesn’t end with access to paid leave. While mothers in the United States report taking a median eleven weeks of leave, most fathers take a week or less, and 70 percent are back at work within two weeks. As Dawn Huckelbridge, director of Paid Leave for All, notes, “Paid leave isn’t a women’s issue, it’s not a social issue, this is an economic imperative. And it impacts men.”

Parental, maternity, and paternity leaves are a focus of much of the advocacy and policy work for caregivers as they support long-standing research on infant and maternal health. However, the supply of informal caregivers—unpaid individuals who care for family and friends—is shrinking, even as demand continues to grow due to an aging population and the increasing rates of chronic illness. This widening gap is driven by societal shifts such as more women participating in the workforce, lower birth rates, and families living farther apart. Roughly 45 percent of men and 56 percent of women identify as informal caregivers, and the top reasons reported for not doing more informal caregiving were financial strains and not being able to take time off from work. Generous caregiving leave is vital to the health and vitality of society and requires the commitment of organizational leaders.

Communicate the Benefits of Paid Leave for Fathers and Families

Inclusive leaders dedicated to a gender-fair workplace must become informed evangelists for the evidence-based benefits of equitable and generous caregiving leave. Although the health and wellness benefits of paid leave for mothers are well established, fathers who use longer periods of parental leave also experience positive and transformative outcomes. Fathers who identify more closely with being involved parents and partners take a more equitable role performing unpaid domestic labor, which has a positive impact on women’s participation in the labor force, wages and careers, and the family’s overall wellness.

Equal paid parental leave is the secret to creating real gender equity at work and at home. The following efforts are a few ways leaders can voice the benefits and opportunities to men in their organization.

Leverage Paid Leave for the Transition to Fatherhood

Parental leave helps expecting and new fathers transition to this crucial role. Ben Reyes, lawyer at Blank Rome LLP, shared that when taking his parental leave, his wife was ramping down from her five months of maternity leave. He used that time to transition their daughter away from breastfeeding to bottle feeding, developing new habits, and sleep training, so that they could have her ready for daycare at six months old. Reyes said, “My leave paved the way to do that. It was crucial to our family dynamic and plan.” Co-parenting with an infant while managing two careers helps dads develop planning skills and builds a foundation for full engagement in decision-making, and equitable distribution of domestic responsibilities moving forward.

Developing caregiver competence and confidence is another salient benefit facilitated by generous caregiving leave for men. Mothers connect to the child over the first few months, bonding and learning to understand the child’s needs in a way that creates caregiver competence and confidence. Brad Harrington, formerly at the Boston College Center for Work & Family, told us that “if the father never has solo time with children, that caregiver skill set won’t develop, casting mother and father into traditional gender roles and exacerbating career and wage plateauing for mothers due to longer caregiver career interruptions.”

Fathers who take extended parental leave share more fairly in solo care of children and care of sick kids, spend more time on domestic labor over the long term, and have a stronger sense of ownership and competency for parenting than fathers who do not take extended parental leave. The impact of men taking paid leave in the first year has positive ripple effects across children’s lives. And fathers’ proficiency at home during the first year equates to more time and flexibility for women to focus on their careers over time.

Talk with Men About Positive Health Benefits

Leverage the compelling research on health outcomes to motivate men to take all their paid leave. One of our favorite strands of research addresses the buffering effects of paternal paid leave on risks to their partners’ mental and physical health. When fathers take leave and lean in as full caregiving partners at home, mothers have better mental health trajectories, including greater overall well-being, lower stress, and fewer symptoms of depression. One study found that when fathers take parental leave, their partners were less vulnerable to postpartum depression and reported fewer parenting struggles. And the health outcomes don’t stop with mothers; there’s a lot in this for fathers taking paid parental leave too, including greater overall well-being, and lower stress and fatigue.

How about mapping caregiving leave and gender-fair parenting to better brain health? To better understand the research, we turned to one of the leading researchers in developmental psychology, Darby Saxbe at the University of Southern California, who said, “There’s evidence that father’s brains remodel from preconception across pregnancy and into the postpartum period in a way that supports greater efficiency in parts of the brain that are linked with social cognition and accurately imagining other people’s mental states. And there’s evidence that those areas are tied to stronger bonding with their baby.”

The benefits of paid leave extend to relationships with partners and children. Fathers who use paid leave reported improved relationships with their partners, an experience reciprocated by partners who report that the increased support maps to a stronger partner bond rooted in shared parenting during leave. There’s even evidence that this improved relationship connected to shared caregiving leave correlates to couples staying married longer. And don’t forget the opportunity for closer relationships with children. Caregiving time with children in their early years allows fathers to nurture a lasting bond with their kids. In one study on father-child relationships, paternity leave-taking was associated with children reporting higher parent involvement, father-child closeness, and better parental communication. Increased time for caregiving leave creates an opportunity to experience daily activities with children in those critical early months and years that echo in stronger father-child bonds years later.

Show Men How Leave-Taking Provides an Economic Boost

We love the health and relationship outcomes of parental leave, but let’s get back to the dollars and cents of paid leave within families. Nothing does more to reduce the family gender wage gap than paid parental leave. When fathers take on more unpaid work at home, enabling mothers to return to work and more rapidly, mothers’ wages improve. Research shows that for every month of parental leave a father takes, his partner’s income increases by almost 7 percent. In fact, paternity leave has a larger effect on mothers’ future earnings than maternity leave.

Paid parental leave for fathers improves household income as well as general family financial well-being. And when men share in taking caregiving leave, we see the maternal wall (aka, motherhood penalty) come tumbling down. When both parents utilize paid parental leave, it allows both partners to remain engaged at work and minimizes gender disparities in career progression.

The most gender-fair and forward-leaning employers are even creating positive indirect impact on employees’ partners. In our conversation with Molly Moon Neitzel of Molly Moon Homemade Ice Cream, she shared that the company has conversations with employees about Washington state’s paid family leave for men and women when they have a child, including how it will save their family money on childcare if the baby’s father also takes his full twelve weeks of leave. Moon Neitzel said, “This is a financial equation that benefits our employees. I hope there are a lot of men motivated to take parental leave because they’re partnered with an employee of our company, though not necessarily working for us.” We find this to be a terrific example of a company using its influence for the good of its employees.

Adaptation from FAIR SHARE: How Men and Women Can Create a More Equitable Workplace Together (HBR Press, June 30, 2026). by W. Brad Johnson PhD and David G. Smith PhD. Johnson and Smith are the cofounders of Workplace Allies where they consult, research, write, and speak around the globe on the topics of allyship, cross-gender workplace relationships, and inclusive leadership. They are the coauthors of Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women (2019) and Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace (2020).

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