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A Chinese father carries his daughter while visiting a commercial and tourist area in Beijing on October 3, 2020. Photo: Getty Images

To raise China’s birth rate, have shared parental leave and make dads take a third of it, lobby group says

  • The Shanghai Women’s Federation says its proposal aims to force dads to be more involved in childcare, encouraging women to have children
  • The country’s birth rate has continued to fall in recent years, despite the government ending its one-child policy in 2015

As China grapples with a decline in its birth rate, the Shanghai Women’s Federation (SWF) believes it has the solution.

The organisation has called on the city’s legislative body to make it mandatory for new fathers to take parental leave.

In addition to the existing 128 days of maternity leave and 10 days of paternity leave permitted, the SWF wants to add shared parental leave and require fathers to use at least a third of it, it said on social media platform WeChat recently.

SWF deputy chairwoman Weng Wenlei said its proposal aimed to boost gender equality and encourage women to have children, as it would force men to be more involved in childcare. 

“We hope that families would be encouraged by the public policies [to have children], without adding burdens to employers or worsening childbirth-related discrimination faced by women,” she told the Xinhua news agency.

Fathers-to-be learn to take care of newborns at a maternal hospital in Handan in north China. Photo: Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Emily Xie, a Shanghai-based white-collar worker and mother of a three-year-old boy, said she would support legislation to force fathers to take leave, although she doubted how many of them would truly spend the time on childcare.

“We currently have 10 days’ paternity leave for men on paper, but in reality only government agencies and big companies comply with this policy,” she said. “My husband works in a small private company and he didn’t take leave for one single day after my child’s birth.

“But it’s always better to have something than not – and that’s the case with mandatory parental leave for dads, because such government policies can [affect] their willingness [to help look after a baby] and make a good work-life balance more attainable,” she said.

In the rest of China, provisions for maternity and paternity leave are similar to those in Shanghai. Yet the country’s birth rate has continued to fall in recent years, despite the government ending its one-child policy in 2015, and allowing couples to have two children.
The intention behind shared parental leave is certainly laudable. At the very least, this sends a message that allows and encourages men to participate in child rearing 
Li Xuan, assistant professor of psychology, NYU Shanghai

In 2019, there were only 10.48 births per 1,000 people in China, the lowest in 70 years, and the number of births was down 580,000 compared with the previous year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

SWF put forward its proposal for government-supported shared leave for new parents at the annual session of the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress earlier this year.

Shared parental leave is widely available in Europe, and paid paternity leave is common across Europe, Asia, South America and parts of Africa.

According to a report by Unicef, the United Nations’ children’s agency, in 2019, 26 of the world’s 41 richest countries offered paid paternity leave, while 40 had paid leave for new mothers.

A father with his child in Beijing. Photo: Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images



China’s neighbours, Japan and South Korea, have the most generous paternal leave entitlements.

Despite an impressive 30 weeks’ leave for new fathers in Japan, they are not keen to take them. In 2017, just over 5 per cent of fathers who qualified for it took the leave, according to the report.

The situation is better in South Korea, but fathers still only accounted for about 20 per cent of all parental leave taken in 2019, according to its Ministry of Employment and Labour.

Because many fathers do not use their full allocation of paternity leave, some countries, including Italy and Portugal, have made paternity leave compulsory.

The Shanghai proposal comes amid heated discussion about the extent to which responsibility for raising children in China falls on women.

Despite some change in attitudes towards fatherhood in the past decade, Chinese fathers are still far less involved in childcare than mothers, especially during a child’s early years, said Li Xuan, an assistant professor of psychology at NYU Shanghai who specialises in fatherhood.

It is a trend reflected around the globe, she said. “The intention behind shared parental leave is certainly laudable. At the very least, this sends a message that allows and encourages men to participate in child rearing.”

However, when it is left up to couples to decide who takes what proportion of shared parental leave, it is often the mother – who frequently earns less than her partner – that takes up most or all the leave, Li said. 

“Therefore, asking parents to make fully individual decisions on how they would share the leave does relatively little to boost fathers’ leave uptake, and so does not really help increase the father’s involvement in the early months [of a child’s life] or relieve the burden of mothers,” she said.

She said the SWF’s proposal was a step in the right direction to nudge fathers to take their leave. However, “the success of such a policy, of course, depends on how it is implemented, its enforcement and financing,” she added.




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