Fathers attend a meeting of the EU Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality to support paternity leave legislation. Thierry Charlier/ AP/ Press Association Images
In what seemed to be a big step towards closing the enormously gender-inequality in the UK’s system of statutory parental leave (which allows women statutory parental leave of up to 52 weeks, while men have just two), it became legal last year for mothers and fathers to share a period of parental leave totalling 50 weeks equally between them.
It was hoped that this shift to shared parental leave (SPL) would cultivate a society in which men could identify more strongly as caring and nurturing fathers, setting progressive examples of masculinity for future generations, and in which a woman was not automatically assumed as the primary caregiver taking absence from work.
