The paper aims to provide a critique of Shared Parental Leave (SPL) in the UK from a gender equality perspective, namely to assess whether SPL is capable of enabling more men to take leave in order to act as the main carer for their child. Leave policies in Nordic countries, where the rate of take-up by fathers is high, are also examined. It argues that SPL is open to legal challenge by fathers who do not meet the eligibility criteria, as the SPL scheme as currently drafted breaches the terms of the EU Parental Leave Directive and is also discriminatory on grounds of sex. The paper concludes that SPL is flawed as a policy. Whilst the UK government argues for a more equal division of childcare between father and mother, it seems unwilling to challenge the expectation that mothers provide the primary care for young children. Thus SPL will only be successful if the policy is reformed to include a higher rate of pay and a period of leave reserved for fathers.
We peer inside the notion that small firm employment relations are a matter of mutual adjustment to conceptualise a key relation subject to negotiation as space–time–energy rhythms. Businesses must offer their goods and services in line with the rhythms of their marketplace and they do so by developing their own rhythms in the form of organisational roles and routines. Staff are only available to fulfil roles if they can synchronise work rhythms with those of their bodies, the people they care for, family members and care services. Mutual adjustment relies on synchronising organisational and market rhythms with non-business rhythms. This demands ‘rhythm intelligence’, practised by managers, workers and teams and, ideally, embedded as an organisational capability. Through empirical exploration of a typical point of negotiation – return from maternity leave – we propose a framework of practices and conditions that constitute rhythm intelligence and outline implications for managers and research.
This article contributes to existing literature on flexible working at an organisational level by presenting the results of a qualitative study of women employees and managers in small firms who have been involved in negotiating part-time hours on return to work post-maternity leave. The study finds that the right to request flexible working has become embedded in the policies of small firms and that the overwhelming experience of women employees was positive: their requests were accepted because they were perceived as valuable and consequently their managers wanted to retain them. However employees who lacked ongoing managerial support had a less positive experience. The study also examines other aspects of the operation of the right to request such as the efficacy of written policies on flexible working and the extent to which the negotiation process was formalised.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.