Adaptation to paternal leave policies in Finnish municipalities: changing gender norms and cross-border policy legacies

Countries where public opinion tends to favour gender equality tend to invest inpolicies supporting the dual-earner family model or the earner–carer family model,while countries where public opinion is more inclined to support conservative gendernorms tend to have policies supporting the male breadwinner family model.However, whilst gender equality norms may be endorsed by the majority of thepopulation, conservative norms could still be largely supported at the sub-nationallevel, potentially leading to lower responses to policy reforms intending to boostgender-equal practices.This study examines shifting norms in fathers’ parental leave uptake in Finnishmunicipalities in the 2010s, around the first reform that gave fathers an independentright to a 6-week quota of “solo” parental leave. We applied a Bayesian spatiotemporalmodel on administrative data from Finnish municipalities and approximatedlocal norms based on voting data. Furthermore, we used the proportionof Swedish-speaking residents as a proxy for cross-border policy influences fromthe neighbouring country Sweden, where paternal leave-taking has been practicedlonger.Local support to de-familialising policies was found to predict higher leavetaking,but only under a less supportive policy configuration. The proportion ofSwedish-speaking residents was found to be increasingly important for predictingpaternal leave-taking. We interpret this as a sign of cross-border influences fromSweden. Interestingly, uptake increased the fastest in a more conservative region,probably due to its strong linguistic and cultural links to Sweden. Furthermore, weobserved spatial dependencies between neighbouring municipalities, which supportsour spillover hypothesis; that interactions among families nearby lead them to adoptnew practices.