Beyond Gender: Rethinking Comparative Leave Policies through an Intersectional Lens

Despite a substantial body of research on leave policies and their cross-national variations, significant knowledge gaps persist. One notable gap, increasingly recognised in the field, is the limited focus on intersectionality. While gender equality has been a primary concern of leave policy scholarship, other dimensions of inequality—such as socioeconomic status, ethnicity, migration status, disability, family composition, and age—have received less attention. As a result, much comparative research tends to generalize the impacts of leave policies, often overlooking how these policies differentially affect diverse social groups.

This paper offers a critical assessment of existing comparative leave policy research, identifying some of the conceptual and methodological challenges that may hinder the integration of an intersectional perspective. First, the multi-layered and ambiguous nature of leave policies, which risks concealing gender and social inequalities within policy responses and their implications. Second, a lack of coherent leave policies and their clear conceptualisation in comparative research. Third, a limited understanding of how leave policies construct inequalities among different groups of parents, particularly through ‘silent’ elements of policy design—such as entitlement structures—that influence the distribution of policy resources. Finally, the oversimplification inherent in translating complex leave policy designs into comparative indicators, which often fails to capture the heterogeneity of entitlements across different social groups and countries. Through this critical discussion, the paper calls for more nuanced and inclusive approaches in future comparative leave policy research, better reflecting the diverse and intersectional experiences of parents and caregivers.