Where should the battle against poverty start? What has the parental leave system to do with income and poverty levels?
To open the debate among the public and to disseminate main conclusions about parental leave system reached from evaluation and research projects, Cristina Castellanos Serrano, TIHR Senior Researcher/ Consultant, introduced a session on the parental leave system at the Institute’s Food for Thought lunchtime talk series.
How the public sector designs parental leave system has a significant impact on how men and women use time and income in their roles as parents and workers. Parents are expected to care and provide to meet their children´s needs. The parental leave system is a public policy that aims to help parents have more of the time and income needed for their children´s wellbeing. It also creates a social image of what parenting should look like. Thus, the parental leave system has a huge impact on (re)creating or modifying gendered parental roles, depending on its design.
As observed in the debate, how care and labour market involvement is structured by public policy influences consciously and unconsciously how employers, the very fathers, mothers and society in general, conceive parents´ roles as caregivers and breadwinners, and how the gender dynamics are played and/or contested.
Recording of the talk
Part 1 of the talk:
Video clip referred to during the talk:
Video source:
PLENT: International Platform for Equal, Non-Transferable and 100% paid PARENTAL LEAVE
Part 2 of the talk:
Slides from talk
Cristina Castellanos is Senior Researcher and Consultant at The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (UK) and Lecturer on Economic Policy and Macroeconomics at Cardenal Cisneros University (Spain). She is an economist specialising in gender mainstreaming, labour market and public policies from an international perspective. She is interested in the impacts of public policies on labour, relationships, poverty, care arrangements, time use, individual and household dynamics and decision-making.