Employers’ Discrimination against Fathers and Mothers Taking Parental Leave: Evidence from a Discrete Choice Experiment

Anna Matysiak, University of Warsaw
Ewa Cukrowska-Torzewska, University of Warsaw
Agnieszka Kasperska, University of Warsaw
Gayle Kaufman, Davidson College

In this study, we examine the consequences of parental leave use for mothers’ and fathers’ hiring and earning opportunities. This topic is of high social relevance given the persistently low uptake of parental leave by men in Europe. In countries where parental leave is granted to fathers on a "use it or lose it" basis, men typically make use of the portion of the leave specifically designated for them but rarely take advantage of the entitlements available to both parents. One of the reasons for this state of affairs might be that employers discriminate against parents who made use of a parental leave and do it more strongly against fathers than mothers. This is because men are still expected to be loyal employees for whom work always comes first. We test the hypothesis that fathers face stronger penalties for parental leave use than mothers using a self-designed discrete choice experiment. We interview 1,000 managers who are asked to assess hypothetical job candidates with randomly assigned gender and varying durations of parental leave taken. The study is situated in Poland, where a two-month parental leave for fathers was introduced in August 2023, following the implementation of the EU Work-Life Balance Directive.

Keywords: Human Capital, Education, and Work, Gender Dynamics, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination, Randomized controlled experiments

See extended abstract.