While Iceland and Spain historically belong to two different welfare regimes, both countries have enacted fathers’ quotas to their systems of paid parental leave. From the year 2000, Iceland has provided fathers with a three-month-long quota, and Spain introduced a 13-day fathers’ quota in 2007. Using survey data, the article applies structural equation modelling to learn of the interconnection between parents’ leave use, their working hours and fathers’ participation in care of their children. Fathers’ leave use was found to be associated with their involvement in care in both countries, both directly and indirectly, through the reduction in working hours. Icelandic fathers were more engaged in childcare than fathers in Spain, which could be explained by the longer period of paid leave available for fathers in Iceland.
Many working fathers would be potential users of the existing reconciliation measures but they do not request them. One barrier they encounter is the lack of sensitivity on the part of corporate culture to men who want to balance work and family life. We use a sample of Spanish wage-earner fathers and path analysis to analyzefollowing Sen's capability approach-how companies that support the use of reconciliation measures by fathers can reduce the gap between theoretical rights to and effective use of reconciliation measures, which leads to a decrease in levels of work-family conflict experienced by these working fathers.
This article examines why Spanish fathers still make little use of the family-friendly measures (FFM) they are entitled to. Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach is applied to the analysis of this agency gap in work-family balance (WFB). Males wishing to balance work and family face a series of barriers that inhibit their use of FFM, creating a gap between the theoretical right to use these measures and the real ability to do so. We illustrate this broader issue with qualitative information collected from a Spanish sample (59 semi-structured interviews with 43 salaried fathers, 6 salaried mothers and 10 human resources (HR) managers). Three types of factors (conversion factors) that enhance/limit the capabilities of fathers to use reconciliation measures were considered: individual factors, policy and societal factors, and factors related to the organizational culture of workplaces.
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.