This project explored parenting leaves in the UK, by examining leave policies and how black parents negotiate the policy landscape through an intersectional lens, filling a gap in the existing scholarship. The aim is to advance an intersectional analysis of contemporary parenting culture, identifying leave as one mechanism through which ideas about ideal parenting behaviour are promoted. Despite popular and cross-party support for increasing fathers’ involvement in childcare, the introduction of policies such as Shared Parental Leave (and Additional Paternity Leave before it) have not radically altered leave-taking patterns; the little research on Shared Parental Leave has found that mothers still take more leave than fathers. An intersectional analysis suggests that these gendered patterns are also raced and classed and reveal the ways that leave policies can reinforce racial and socio-economic inequities. The aim of this project is to first, discursively examine three key points in the development of leave policies in the UK, looking for how such policies and their context reflect gendered, racial and class politics and second, to explore how black parents have negotiated these policies in the post-2015 leave context. The project qualitatively and intersectionally examines parenting leaves in the UK to uncover the ways that race, class and gender inequalities not only inform contemporary parenting ideologies but are expressed in policies and shape individual experiences of parenting.
Both scholarly and popular debates about parenting leaves reflect broader societal concerns, including women’s position in the workforce, men’s role in parenting and ideal childrearing practices. These varied drivers of leave development are captured in the development of options available to parents in Britain since the 1970s, from paid ‘maternity leave’ as it was introduced in the 1975, to paid ‘paternity leave’ first introduced in 2003, to unpaid parental leave made available through an EU directive and most recently, ‘Shared Parental Leave’ which is, despite its name, a kind of maternity leave that can be transferred to fathers and partners. Policy attempts to accommodate these competing motivations have in different ways reflected dominant ideas about not only what it means to be a ‘good’ parent but the requirements of ‘good’ citizenship. For example, the question of whether (and when) women ought to be encouraged to return to paid work after they bear their children is inseparable from how we define appropriate parenting behaviour and citizens’ duties to their communities. Such notions of good parenthood and good citizenship cannot be fully understood without attending to race, gender and class, especially as they determine which women are encouraged (or forced) to return to paid work and which are supported to stay at home with their young children (Harris, 2004). This project examined the raced, gendered and classed nature of our definitions of ideal parents and citizens as such ideas are expressed in leave policies and how they might be identified in the way parents use leave. To advance this examination, this research project utilized two qualitative methodological approaches, both informed by intersectional feminist theory, to examine parenting leaves in Britain. First, a discursive analysis of three key moments in parenting leaves legislation; the introduction of paid maternity leave in 1975, the addition of paternity leave in 2003, and the most recent transformations in 2015, and second, in-depth, longitudinal interviews with fourteen black parents (including couples and single parents) who have recently begun leave, drawing a connection between their parenting practices and how they used (or did not use) what leave provisions were available to them. Within the scholarship on parenting leaves and the broader field of Parenting Culture Studies in which it may be situated, this research contributes an intersectional analysis, examining how race, gender and class manifest in the dominant constructions of ‘good’ parenthood that inform leave policies and in parents’ own experiences of taking leave.
The overarching aim of this research project is an intersectional examination of parenting leaves, both in terms of policy formation and black parents’ experiences with using (or not using) leave. The theoretical insights that an intersectional perspective can offer include revealing how black parents manage their leave-making decisions (an important gap in scholarship on parenting culture more generally and among the studies that examine parenting leaves in particular), providing a more complex, nuanced understanding of the role that leave policies and their take-up plays in beliefs about and practices of parenting and an understanding that can inform the design of parenting leave policies that better serve not only parents but also their employers.
