“Paternity leave” is no more than a first step

From 2024, fathers will be given two weeks off after the birth of their child. According to Federal Family Minister Lisa Paus (Greens), this is "another important building block for the compatibility of family and work". A nice thought - but two things are irritating.

On the one hand, the question arises as to why Germany took so long to be asked. After all, a corresponding EU directive should have been implemented in July 2022. The Commission has already launched an infringement procedure. And even now there was no need to act quickly - only the so-called "paternity leave" was now given a date.

Which brings us to the second point – the terminology. “Paternity leave” suddenly prevailed as the “exemption”. Symbolic of our society's attitude towards childcare? I myself have little experience with babies and their needs, yet I believe that caring for a newborn is not necessarily a holiday.

If you think this thought through, you quickly end up with a problem that has been described again and again for years, but is still there: childcare is not perceived as work at all. At least not as a full one. The same applies to helping with homework, packing a school bag, doing laundry, arranging doctor's appointments, cleaning, shopping.

At least a little progress can be seen, at least as far as the choice of words is concerned: in the past, women simply "didn't work" and were "housewives"; today there is the term "care work" (activities that involve caring and caring, which includes childcare), which at least includes the word "work".

Nevertheless, unpaid care and housework hardly enjoys the same status in society as gainful employment. And this non-work is usually done by women. On average, they spend around 52 percent more time per day on unpaid care work than men, according to the Federal Government's Second Equality Report. That's the equivalent of one hour and 27 minutes more – every day.

To avoid falling into the mother-part-time employee trap with no advancement opportunities, a friend of mine recently decided to continue pursuing her career, despite having a 12-month-old daughter. Her husband did – of course – the same. So now: Manager with managerial responsibility, 40 hours of paid work per week (rather more), at the end of the day she is a mother, housewife, wife, friend. She says she wouldn't have been given the job part-time. Almost every second company does not fill management positions part-time at all, according to a survey by the Ifo Institute (in 2021). And just 6.5 percent of managers in Germany work part-time.

If everything had gone perfectly, the full-time work-part-time mom model might have worked. But the little daughter didn't like the day care center at first. Then fever, runny nose and abdominal pain alternated. Sometimes it hit the child, sometimes the parents. Weeks followed in which we had to work late into the night between toys to make up the hours.

Nevertheless, she had a guilty conscience. "I try my best, but I also know that I'm not a good employee because I can hardly work overtime," she says. An isolated case? Hardly likely. And so "paternity leave" can possibly be a building block for more justice in the distribution and recognition of care work. But only a small one.

What does it take for real change? First: A radical rethinking of the importance and effort of care work. Second: job-sharing models that enable women to have children and work in managerial positions without a guilty conscience – just like their partners. And men should be given the opportunity and show the will to take on long-term care work.