28 March 2023

The effect of earmarked parental leave - Thomas H. Jørgensen on TV2 News

Thomas talked about earmarked parental leave and how full wage compensation during parental leave lead fathers to take more parental leave.

Parents of children born after 1st of August 2022 has 11 weeks of earmarked parental leave each.

IDA, The Danish Society of Engineers, has conducted a survey among their members indicating that affected fathers on average increased their leave from 9,5 weeks to 13,6 weeks. The reduction in leave of mothers is almost identical.

IDA members are, however, a selected group of people and Thomas talked about his research with Jakob Søgaard in which they provide an estimate of how we would expect the response to be in the general population.

They expect around a 30% increase in the leave of fathers while the average leave of fathers in the IDA survey increased a bit more, around 40%.

Their research shows that especially the level of compensation during leave matters a lot for how much leave fathers take. In many local labor market negotiations the parental leave compensation has been part of the negotiations with many agreeing on increasing the number of weeks will full wage compensation.

You can read more about the research here

and about Thomas H. Jørgensen Carlsberg funded research here

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