From "Gender Roles and Infant/Toddler Care: Male and Female Professors on the Tenure Track." (PDF)
Both utilization of paid parental leave policies by men and men’s belief in non-traditional gender roles are associated with higher levels of participation in parenting tasks. However, even those male professors who take leave and believe in non-traditional gender roles do much less childcare relative to their spouses than female professors do. This result holds even when the male professor’s wife works full time.
Which leads the authors to conclude:
It would be useful to have future research available to see if the conclusions of the current study hold up in different settings. However, based on the current study, it appears that we should seriously consider restricting paid post-birth leaves in academia to women. Almost none of our male faculty did half the baby/toddler care. Even the three men (out of 109) who said they did perform half the work were not simultaneously recovering from pregnancy and delivery as their female counterparts were. Moreover, none of them was breastfeeding, a task more time-consuming and perhaps physically draining than any of the other tasks in the survey.
HT: WSJ The Juggle
