This isn't just an apriori fact of the culture, but an intentional result of the structure of the leave.
90 days are reserved for each parent (there's an exception for single parents) i.e. if the father doesn't take those 3 months they are lost. Apparently before this policy came into effect, fathers would typically take very little leave. But once there was an incentive to take 3 months they began to take longer periods and split the overall time more evenly.
So even though it's part of the culture, it's not impossible to understand how it came to be, and therefore not impossible to replicate elsewhere.
12 of the 14 months can be doubled as well, up to 24 months, at half the regular salary replacement. A good option if a parent wants to work part-time.
One can go also up to 36 months of parental leave, but the rest of the time is unpaid.
Fellow German here, I don't know of anyone in my friend circle rich enough to be able to put together the downpayment for a home...
So yes, it's a good amount but still much less than the minimum 80% here in Sweden.
Still only 2% of men take the leave, while 42% of women do [1].
I can only speculate as to why.
1) Our cultural wiring runs deeper than just "sex is a social construct"
2) The German system is still quite complicated. As countless online calculators and private consultancies helping you filling out the forms prove. As well as the above statistic itself, since financially it would make more sense if the father took as much leave as possible (if he earns more, the family gets 65% of "more").
[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualit...
This statistics is simply misleading. It says that 2% of the fathers with children under 3 years old are currently on parental leave at any given time.
Let's say you split the 14 months of parental leave so that the mother takes 12 months and the father 2 months (which I commonly see). So within the first 36 months of the child's life there is a 2 in 36 chance that the father is currently on paternal leave in any random month. So basically you have to multiply that 2% by 18 to get the total number of fathers who take paternal leave: 36% if they all take the minimum number of months.
"which I commonly see" is not something that is statistically sound. And neither is just multiplying it. If fathers would on average take 1 month out of 24 offered this wouldn't exactly count as a success for the programme or gender equality.
everything else being equal - i.e. both parents having the same salary, career prospects, desire to work vs. spend time with baby, energy levels, etc. - it's simply more efficient for the woman to take care of the baby, as she's the only one that can feed it (or, more specifically, her feeding the baby is very likely medically better than using baby food)
At least anecdotally, many of the fathers I've talked to take the 2 months at the very minimum.
This issue could be fixed easily, by adding up the income of both partners and then paying 65% of the sum.
But instead in Germany you get 65% up to a maximum amount of 1800 Euro of the person taking the parental leave. So if your salary is higher than roughly 2800 Euro (after taxes/netto) you will get even less than 65% of your income during parental leave. So if there are two partners, one above 2800 Euro and one below it is clear that the one below should take the parental leave. So the mathematics of the German system together with a gender imbalance in salaries guarantees a conservative split of the parental leave.
If our government wouldn't be so incompetent one could think that they invented these rules on purpose. But that would imply that they can do math. And that is a conspiracy that is so absurd nobody would believe that.
Whoever of the parents is earning less, in most cases it would make more sense for the less compensated parent to just switch into part-time, if he/she isn't already working a tax-free "mini-job", while the higher compensated parent takes the leave. This yields the highest income per hours@home.
But that's usually not what people optimize for, they optimize for max total income, because rent or mortgage payments etc aren't based on a percentage of income but fixed amounts. Sure, it's great if you only work one hour a month and get 1000€ for that instead of working 100 hours and getting 4000€. But if your rent is 1100€, what good does that do?
Does it matter?
This option gives you neither.
Rather, I have a colleague who took paternal leave with their partner and afterwards switched to part-time for a bit.
You get paid (80%). You can't get fired. Choosing not to do it means you don't want to do it, or you chose something else over your parental leave. Not only would skipping parental leave not be seen as normal by my social circle, it wouldn't be seen as normal by my manager or colleagues. I'd be getting questions like "you took zero weeks of leave when your son was born? why?".
So maybe it doesn’t mean you don’t want to do it but simply can’t afford to do it.
That would of course be an acceptable excuse. I meant that for my particular situation since my peers know I can afford it, they would also know I chose not to because I dind't want to (not acceptable), or because I felt my career would suffer (not acceptable).
> Still only 2% of men take the leave, while 42% of women do [1].
> I can only speculate as to why.
To give a context of the culture and legal system, as of today, unmarried fathers don't get legal custody automatically, and if they apply and the mother refuses, they need to go to court. This is even a recent change; until 2009, if the mother refused, there was no chance, and until 2013, the father had to go to the European Court of Human Rights.
Germany has a very surprising family culture in the Northern Europe context - the surrounding countries are considerably more progressive. An educated guess is that the Nazi regime promoted the father provider/mother educator model, and it's taking a very long time to move on.
Interesting. Do unmarried fathers have any financial responsibility for the child?
I can only speculate as to why."
I thought the answer is simple - father cannot breastfeed a baby (even though gender is only a social construct, as some people claim, nature is still nature and reality is still reality).
France has 1 year parental leaves, which may be extended up to a total of 3 years (and more in case of twins, etc). But they are unpaid though the employee may then qualify for various benefits.
There is also a 'birth leave' of 3 days. So when you have a baby you can have a 3 day leave at birth, then the now 28 day paternity leave within the next 4 months, and an unpaid 1-3 year parental leave.
Iirc, the first leave is on full pay by the employer, the second on capped pay by a special state benefit (but employers can top up), and the third is unpaid though, as mentioned, other benefits exist subject to conditions.
The idea being that one leave is for attending the actual birth (in France mothers are usually kept in hospital for a few days after birth in order to recover and to be taught how to look after a baby, fathers are welcome during the day), one leave is for bonding with the new born baby, and the third leave is, if needed, to look after the baby until (s)he reaches free nursery school age.
French admin is always as simple as can be, not ;)
In my case, at the time I worked for a company that offered a lot of annual leaves (I had about 8 weeks a year) so took normal annual leaves instead of the paternity leave after the initial 3 day "birth leave" in order not to lose money as the paternity leave cap was quite lower than most engineers earn.
This hits home hard: my newborn is now one month old, and I had to forgo the 11 days of leave.
Why? Because there’s a hard cap on the salary: I ran the numbers for me for the current 11 days in France it means over 1k€ of income just vanish, and it’s not like we can make loans, rent, and other fixed expenses disappear, right at the moment where we have to shell out money for the hospital and general baby equipment. If it were 28 days that would be over half of my salary going poof.
Union agreements say that for the employer to fill in the remainder it’s required I’d be in this company for at least two years, but I joined only a year and a half ago.
It so happened that I took barely any off days during this time so I took a month to bond, which sure took its toll on me (not the bonding of course, the lack of time off for over a year)
That's not a very large difference, the main difference is that the Swedish one never goes over 80% of your salary while the French one goes up to 100%.
So then what exactly do you return to? It can't be your old position exactly -- you were replaced. So its more like a vague promise that the business will rehire you into some arbitrary position? Or even worse, make up a new position of equivalent power upon your return?
You can't know. It's supposed to be whatever I did before, or equivalent. Basically if they replace me I can make a fuss about wanting my position back or an equivalent position. In any case, you can't e.g. be at a worse pay grade even if you have a lower "position" than before. I have never seen it be a problem.
> even thirty days absence should disrupt things, if an alternative isn't found..
We do 5 or 6 weeks holiday every year without problem, not sure why that would be such a big issue. Actually since I had kids I distribute out my remaining parental leave days to a couple of weeks per summer, so from ages 0-8 my summer holidays have been 7 or 8 weeks every year. No manager would even ask a question about this.
> So its more like a vague promise
Well it's the law...
But most importantly so long as people want to take paternal leave, I think even the promise of being rehired is good enough. The key to the system working is that everyone does it. I wouldn't want to work for a manager that hadn't.
- Someone leaves for 8 months of maternity leave
- Org hires a replacement with determined-end contract
- Org loves this new person
- New person also enjoyed their time in this position, made new contacts and learned new skills which they can leverage elsewhere
- Org also now knows who to contact immediately when there is another opening or new full-time position
A growing company or government office can absolutely benefit from the "overhead" of such extensive parental leave, it's just subtle.
Also, by your argument it is not viable to hire women of fertile age. Which, in Sweden at least, is really out of touch with reality.
If you're in a more singular position (manager etc.), then the entire's department workload can be rearranged so that your work falls onto one or multiple of your colleagues while you're gone. Since apparently most bigger orgs are in constant flux, it's not hard to do.
Also, since it's the norm that people disappear for long periods of time, businesses can hire with some slack (e.g. hire 110% of needed capacity) to easily absorb absences.
Just because you cannot get fired for going on parental leave does not mean that the company cannot hire a substitute for your absence. This is typically what happens.
I work as a developer and in the places I've worked it has never been a problem. You leave and while you're gone your responsibilities are shared by other colleagues. When you're back you resume your old position. It's true that you might not get back to doing exactly the same work as before you left, but in my experience that's rarely a problem. In my case it's been quite the opposite and an opportunity to take on new things. I think this is quite common
It's true that the employer overall needs to keep more staff around since some percentage will be away on parental leave and your need to cover those fluctuations. For small companies this can be a problem but in general I think this system has great acceptance with the public.
Here people have 26 days of paid leave + 1 year of combined paternity+maternity leave per kid + paid health leave whenever a doctor decides it's needed.
Businesses work just fine - they simply hire more people to offset the fact that everybody is expected to be out of office X% of the time. Also there are temporary contracts and B2B contracts if needed (less protection but also less taxes so they are quite popular with IT people).
The following excerpt is from [3]:
There are parts of my surrounding family that expressed their concerns, “if you go away, your career is going to suffer”. I’ll be honest and say that I also had similar concerns the first time I went away. And when I returned, I came back to a slightly different role. That sent up a flag for me. The team had been restructured and I was now asked to support a leader as opposed to be a leader - like I was before I left. I was to support Lars Gustavsson, our Creative Director and the famous Mr. Battlefield. So while I was no longer THE lead, I was still in the leadership group plus I was now learning from a seasoned pro. So it worked out and ultimately I feel my career was not negatively impacted in any significant way.
For this parental leave I worked with my manager Adam Clark (Head of Production) to establish a departure plan which started in Summer 2019. We planned which areas I would work on, and we created a rough initial plan for the transition period. We spent the remainder of the year fulfilling that plan at quarterly intervals.
The result of this early planning is that my role will be covered in full while I am away. My lead position will be covered by another Producer who has worked with me for the past quarter, being onboarded regarding all crucial functions. This type of commitment to planning gives me confidence to go on leave, knowing I will come back to a similar well planned roadmap in 2021.
Additionally a number of my colleagues have been transparent on what they want me to do when I return. Both Ryan McArther (Sr Producer) and Andreas Morell (Sr Producer.) have had sit downs with me and detailed the role they want me to take upon my return. That again, gives me confidence to leave and enjoy my time away.
[1] https://www.dice.se/news-articles/life-at-dice-why-3-dads-ar...
[2] https://www.dice.se/news-articles/life-at-dice-why-3-dads-ar...
[3] https://www.dice.se/news-articles/life-at-dice-why-3-dads-ar...
That's one of those miracles that happen when people pay the right amount of taxes!
It's incredible what social democracy can do for you if you stop fighting it in the name of the war to socialism!
Isn't it?
Personally I don't understand how is it viable to have a society where the GDP is astronomical and people have to spend their own money to pay insurance companies that make billions in profits, while women have no right to a fully paid maternal leave.
Unless in those countries people are considered like cogs in the machine...
> So its more like a vague promise
You can' t be fired. It's by law.
It's odd that Swedes aren't taking full advantage of the situation.
But in all seriousness, Germany and Sweden (and the USA for that matter) all have sub-replacement fertility rates. I understand that you believe that people will reproduce like rabbits, especially if incentivized, but the data doesn't reflect that.
In every system there are those that game the system. The question is: does the benefit for the majority outweigh the cost of those abusing the benefit?
You think people not having children are abusing the system? I know many who just don't want to become parents at 40 anymore, so they will never have children. That decision is also influenced by economic situations.
Some people really like to raise children, multiples.
But lets not forget that children are work. More children, more work. The thought that you are 'retiring' and relaxing just isn't so: for 14+ years, you always have a diaper to change, you always need to keep a childproof house, you always need to toilet train someone. For some years, you always have a preteen to watch over. Someone just going off to college. Etc.
But again, this isn't the norm. Even large families rarely have so many children. The amount of folks that try to have 12 children is such a small portion that it isn't worth worrying about and honestly, just parrots right-wing fears that folks are having children to get money from the government.
Educated people don't have enough children to replace themselves, and its not because they are too busy.
Give people the choice and most choose to do things preventing children until they have existential crisis. Remove the choice and people are have children at twice the rate, pretty much coinciding with when they become sexually active.
It's not that hard to understand or perceive.
Do you have some data to back that?
In a place like the US you can get more granular data down to the county level and see the same thing. Economic centers having the same trends in first birth age as other developed nations.
There is an even distribution of sexual activity, you might just have to trust me on that one, but there might be some study to cross reference and show thats a constant.
Given the same result occurring in so many places, the evidence suggests people aren't interested in children until they are afraid they can't pass on their genes in a healthy way. Fix that and I would expect to see the age increasing another ten years. Fix the stamina deterioration and I would expect to see the age increasing further again.
"People being more selfish" might definitely be a factor, but you might come across as considering it like the factor, which would required exceptional data..
I used the word suggest and chose it specifically. I did consider those things and chose not to write a dissertation to convey the exact same concept as the word "suggest". Do with it what you will.
It is possible to be reductive because the same thing happens in so many places. I think there are very few exceptions to "educated, choices, access to contraception" where "cultural peer pressure to have children young" actually works.
Either that, or there’s something plugging the loophole the GP mentions.
Your job is probably protected while on maternity leave too.
I*d say that one of the main difficulties with 12 pregnancies is the actual pregnancies - they are hard on the body and honestly, it isn't recommended that folks have a pregnancy a year - if one even is able to have so many. The more likely situation is that having 12 children means some of those children are fosters or adoptions. And at that point, I don't actually care if someone has 12 children so long as they are good parents.
Why I would change 8 hours to it?
It is also unethical way of life in this planet.
Let’s not project western purity codes to the entire planet. This planet still has countries with high mortality rates, infant and otherwise.
According to you.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-fertility-rate-by-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/08/09/is-sweden-our...
Here is one study (of many): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337068662_Declined_...
Even in the UK (from where I come) it's only first generation migrants that have many children, the second generation seems to fall in line with the society. From my anecdotal experience.
The fathers are looked at negatively if the don’t take some of this time.
https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-maternity-leave-pater...