Fatherhood and Doing Gender. How Challenging Can Institutional Changes be?

Transition to parenthood in Switzerland takes place in a particularly gendered welfare state. It is the only European country where men do not have access to any kind of statutory parental or paternity leaves. Following a conceptualization of gender as a social structure, we consider that parenthood is shaped by social mechanisms producing difference and inequality between fathers and mothers at the institutional, interactional and individual levels. This paper investigates empirically the extent to which institutional change - such as the introduction of a paternity leave - can challenge the construction of gendered  fatherhoods. It is based on a case study conducted in a public sector organization which implemented in 2010 a one-month paid paternity leave. Sequence and cluster analyses are performed on register data about the patterns of employees' leave uptake (N=95). Interpretive analysis of interviews with fathers who took paternity leave (n=22) and with managers who experienced leave uptake in their team (n=8) is conducted.

Results indicate a limited challenge of the gender structure. At the interactional level, although paternity leave enables fathers to spend more family time, a gendered division of childcare tasks is observed: fathers still have a secondary role with the newborn child. The majority of interviewees adopt a modified male breadwinner family model, similar to the dominant norm in Switzerland. As regards interactions in the workplace, paternity leave contributes to make fatherhood more visible, but informal norms about the legitimate leave pattern are observed. On the individual level, paternity leave uptake contributes to men's appropriation of their fatherhood identity and to increase their sense of competence and duty as fathers. However, their conception of fatherhood is structured according to contradictory discourses which highlight change in gender relations and persisting differences between motherhood and fatherhood.