This feels like something that (together with healthcare) should be decoupled from the employer as much as possible.
It may be reasonable to handle childcare and healthcare individually with privatised services. It may be reasonable to have them handled centrally for almost everyone by the government, as in Scandinavia.
But having to rely on your relations with employer for these issues is just begging to be abused, and often is - where the employees are sufficiently vulnerable, they get abused even more by this.
Completely agreed. Mandating that employers pay parents not to work is hugely problematic; for starters, it creates an economically rational incentive to avoid hiring women of childbearing age. If society believes that having children and taking time off to raise them should be encouraged, then society should pay for it, not individual businesses.
Meanwhile, in Sweden, parental leave is shared by both parents. Out of the 16 months total, each parent is guaranteed two months, and the couple can divide the remaining 12 months as they wish. Many still give the woman all of it, but there's a growing trend to split it equally. Among my peers - university educated upper middle class - everyone splits it equally.
And, when parental leave is mostly split equally, you remove the basis for discrimination against women in this area.
By requiring that the male parent take part of the parental leave, it encourages men to get more involved with their children and family life and being a father. Which is a good thing IMO.
(This is presuming there is exactly one man in the relationship, there could be 0, 1 or 2)
Correct. However part of the thinking/motive of this approach, is that many men who want to focus on children are not able / comfortable with taking time off, and programmes like this help them. The theory being that this approach harms less people than "no restrictions which in practice means women take all the time off".
That preference is for the most part a social construct that is further reinforced by the salary gap between men and women. By encouraging couples to split parental leave equally, you lessen the hiring discrimination against women in child-bearing age, which in turn lessens couples' preference for letting the least-paid parent take the most parental leave, and thus you have a positive spiral leading to more gender equality.
It may be reasonable to handle childcare and healthcare individually with privatised services. It may be reasonable to have them handled centrally for almost everyone by the government, as in Scandinavia.
But having to rely on your relations with employer for these issues is just begging to be abused, and often is - where the employees are sufficiently vulnerable, they get abused even more by this.