Shared parental leave (SPL) - a catalyst for progressing gender justice or a reinforcement of the status quo? Exploring the disjuncture between parents’ increased aspiration to share care and limited uptake of SPL in the UK

This thesis explores parents’ decision-making when planning care for their child’s first year and the disjuncture between aspiration to share parenting and low uptake of the UK’s Shared Parental Leave (SPL). This thesis combines the Capability Approach (CA) to conceptualise what is of value to parents when planning care with a discursive conceptualisation of gender to explore how gender norms are constitutive of parents’ care capabilities. Through seven online discussions with parents (36 in total) and 12 follow-up interviews, this thesis contributes to family leave policy and social justice debates, providing insight to interaction between parents’ subjectivities, constitutive of gendered relations of power and couple relationalities, and to the role of the UK’s SPL policy as a means to parents’ care capabilities. Offering theoretical innovation which blurs distinction between gender norms theorised as a conversion factor and as constitutive of parents’ capabilities, this thesis extends analysis of the UK’s SPL policy as a means, differentially accessed by parents, to a means differentially (co-) productive of what is feasible and imaginable to parents. Normative constraints were illustrated through contradictions between gendered moral imperatives to treasure time with one’s child and the de-valuing of care relative to paid employment. Interaction between masculine and feminine aspects of care illustrated greater value attributed to breadwinning, compared to caregiving, sometimes privileging fathers’ greater decision-making power. Rather than providing the means for parents to imagine the feasibility of sharing leave, the UK’s SPL policy entrenches default prioritisation of mothers to reproductive work and taking most available leave. Parents’ navigation of work-family priorities exposed that more equally sharing leave involved sharing the risks, as well as the joys associated with care, contributing to debates that gender justice cannot be effectively achieved without invoking affective justice and challenging patriarchal values underpinning the UK’s family leave policy.