Shared parental leave came into effect in the UK in April 2015, allowing mothers to share a portion of maternity leave and pay with their partners during their baby’s first year.  

Available data suggests uptake has been low. A 2023 evaluation report from the Department for Business and Trade estimated that between 2015 and 2020, 1% of eligible mothers and 5% of eligible fathers or partners took shared parental leave following the birth or adoption of their child. 

In December 2024, campaign group The Dad Shift used a freedom of information request to access data that showed fewer than 2% of new fathers in the UK have taken up shared parental leave since the scheme was introduced. 

Cultural inequalities 

Sociologists Dr. Paula England and Michelle J. Budig coined the term ‘the motherhood penalty’ in 2001, and in recent years, campaigners including Pregnant Then Screwed have worked to address the impact of systemic issues surrounding motherhood, while more research has focused on understanding the effects of women’s absence from the workplace. For example, in 2023, the advertising industry’s All In census found that 55% of women respondents in the UK sector who had taken parental leave in the previous five years felt that doing so had harmed their careers. 

With the UK lagging European counterparts in terms of statutory parental leave and childcare provision, financial considerations are a key concern for many families and are often cited as the main reason for the poor uptake of shared parental leave. An international review comparing the leave policies of 47 countries around the world, published in 2021, found that parental leave in the UK is the least generous in Europe. 

However, finances are not the only issue – there's the implicit cultural assumption that women will bear the brunt when it comes to child-rearing. UCL Institute of Education Emeritus Professor Peter Moss, who co-edited the review, wrote at the time that the UK’s leave policy is “implicitly matriarchal, eschewing gender equality for the idea that women should be the main carers of young children”. Professor Moss also noted that ‘shared’ parental leave is not really shared at all – as it simply offers the option for one parent to transfer some of their maternity leave to the other parent.  

Louise McLaren, managing director of Lovebrands in the UK, thinks the low uptake of shared parental leave is ultimately a cultural issue. When her two children, aged 12 and nine, were born, McLaren felt that taking extended time away from her role running client accounts would be difficult, so she and her husband discussed how they could take an equal approach to child-rearing.  

“When we had our kids, I really felt that it was important from the outset that it was a shared endeavour and a shared responsibility,” says McLaren. “I think the fact that I was the higher earner played into a bit of the practicalities of how we handled that.” 

McLaren and her husband shared their leave. While McLaren took more time away, her husband took as much leave as he could and then reduced his hours when their children had started nursery. “I went back to full-time, knowing that in this industry, it can be hard to work part time if you’re working on projects. He worked three days a week, then four days a week. It felt unusual at the time and it’s still unusual,” she adds. 

“Women will just hold themselves back if they feel that it’s got to be their responsibility and they’re the ones taking time out of the workplace. When you do the work that I do, taking a year out can be quite significant. I run accounts and I was doing back then, so it’s quite difficult if you’re running a client account, if you’re senior in a business, to step away for a number of months. It’s fundamentally unequal for that to be the assumed sole responsibility of the woman.” 

McLaren points out that while the corporate world has moved on in the past decade – despite more recent pushback on inclusion initiatives, stemming from the White House – with many workplaces now supporting a range of family dynamics, these policies sometimes exist on paper only. “Even if policies have been evolved to support that, they’re often not well socialised, so people don’t necessarily know what they’re entitled to,” says McLaren. “More significantly, I don’t know if people feel like they’ve got permission, and that comes down to role modelling. There’s one thing having a policy and another thing making it the expectation culturally that men would take that time in the way that women do.” 

Changing the status quo

Felix Koch, co-founder and managing partner at Within, has found himself becoming a role model for expectant fathers during his career. As a father of three, he has taken extended periods of leave from work both prior to the introduction of shared parental leave, and since.  

When his eldest child was born in 2012, Koch was consultancy director at Promise, part of Communispace (now C Space), and he took four months off, unpaid.  He says: “I’m German, so I came from a market that has much better parental leave provisions in the first place. I was always clear that I would do it. We only have kids once and I would not lie on my death bed and say that I wished I had done more PowerPoint in those four months. It was quite important for me to do it.  

“I felt protected by the law and the fact that it was unpaid was unfortunate, but it didn’t stop me doing it. In the end, it is a financial question, but I think a lot of guys hide behind the money and say: ‘We couldn’t possibly afford less earnings’. Very often, once you’ve reached a certain amount of salary, you can burn through your savings and it’s worth doing it, so I think it is often a lazy excuse to maintain the status quo.” 

Koch was the first in the company to have done it, and later, when the business was part of Omnicom, he was one of the first fathers to have taken shared parental leave. He believes visibility is key to normalising men taking more parental leave.

"At C Space, we were very progressive about promoting shared parental leave. You need role models, and I was very aggressive talking about it and being a role model because I knew some would need an extra push to be convinced. I even put it on my LinkedIn – making it more visible is important,” he says. 

From an individual to a shared perspective 

Bethan Blakeley, research and customer experience manager at SimpliSafe UK, has taken shared parental leave twice with her wife. "I would love for more people to take it up,” she says. “We both get time to bond with the baby, neither of us have to take too much time from our career and feel like we're ‘falling behind’, and it makes us a better team because we can both really empathise with what the other is going through. 

“It's tough being the parent at home but it's tough being the parent going to work, both in completely different ways. Doing both of these things individually means we work a lot better as a team because there's a much better level of understanding.” 

In contrast, Blakeley feels that there is not a great level of understanding in the research sector of how shared parental leave works, which can leave parents feeling like they are “fighting an uphill battle” to get it set up. “But it’s totally worth it,” she adds. 

She also thinks there is a need to better highlight the benefits that sharing leave offers the family unit overall. “Some birth mothers I've spoken to have the perspective of: ‘I worked hard for nine months and it’s my leave – why would I share it?’. But if you see what it can bring you as an individual, and as a family, I think we can really turn these opinions around and open minds.” 

Tash Walker, founder of The Mix, also raises the importance of the benefits offered by sharing parental leave. Running her own business, the prospect of taking a significant amount of time away after having her child was “really scary”, and the pandemic ironically helped, as it brought a recognition that work could be more flexible.  

Equality in how she and her partner managed child-rearing was important to Walker, and when she returned to work after four months of maternity leave, her partner then also took four months away.  

Walker says: “When people get back to work after having a baby, it’s such a difficult transition. But because when I went back to work, I knew my husband was looking after the baby, it meant that I could feel free to go and work and do things I needed to do, because I felt so confident that my husband was at home looking after the baby and it was totally fine. 

“He got to spend time with our child and build that bond and relationship, and I could also return to work and be more on my game than if I had returned and had to immediately transition her to [professional] childcare.” 

Money matters 

To encourage more people to share parental leave, Walker says: “First and foremost, we have to sort the finances out.” 

Walker notes that her husband essentially had to take unpaid leave, adding that it is not dissimilar to a mother taking maternity leave and sacrificing her own salary. “That financial barrier, especially today when people are so much more conscious of the cost of living, is a real deal. If businesses are not offering supported paternity leave as opposed to just unpaid leave, then it makes it a really difficult financial choice for families. Who can afford to take three or four months off? It's a really hard choice for people.” 

The Mix offers the same policies for paternity leave and maternity leave, says Walker. “If people literally can't afford to do it then it’s a false choice. Independent businesses such as mine can make that choice but equally if we look at some of the bigger networked agencies, I think some of them need to step up to better support people to make choices that feel right for their families.” 

Businesses may need to go back to the drawing board to assess whether their policies are still fit for purpose. McLaren, who was one of the individuals behind the MRS retention research published last year, says agencies need to think harder about how they support people with different life stages in general, if they want to attract and retain the best staff. 

She says: “It’s about so much more than the salary now – it’s about that wider package that gives staff a sign that their employer is there to be with them with whatever may come and support them so that they can continue to work, and if they need to take time off they can be supported through that and then come back to work as they are best able. Parental policies must have equality for same-sex couples, single parents and parents who have a bumpy road to parenthood. These are all things that people will be looking for in packages as they search for new roles.  

“These things get discussed, so there is a bit of a reputational risk to the agency if it has not moved with the times as well as the risk to attracting and retaining the best talent. It’s really difficult to afford to have a child now, considering childcare costs relative to income and how the economy is looking. This is important context to where we are now – these policies really have to be fit for purpose. In difficult economic times, people will be thinking about those [details] more carefully.” 

In the end, it is a question of fairness. When Koch returned from leave, he put together a presentation on what he’d learned, which is on his LinkedIn page. “We did a ‘lunch and learn’ to make sure people hear from someone who has taken it. But of course, the irony is that guys get celebrated for taking leave, but what about the women who do it all the time and who don’t get celebrated? It doesn't make sense – it’s a topsy-turvy world.”

Koch would like to see more open dialogue about the work that is being done in caring for children; work that often remains unrecognised and disproportionately falls on women.“It is a lot of work. We need to be in communication about that. Was I a better leader of an agency because I had taken leave? Of course I was, because I know what it means to look after a small child and I would know what it was like to need to leave at 4pm to pick up your kids; I would also leave at 4pm. It helped me build empathy and build a case that it’s a joint affair and that we need to put the burden on both genders.”