Beyond the Clock: Uncovering the Nexus between Overtime and Parental Leave Uptake

The transition to parenthood is widely agreed to be the life-course event that most shapes women’s participation in the labor market and men’s involvement in caregiving roles. The ‘greediness’ of the labor market has been suggested as key to understanding these gendered patterns, in which the greediness of jobs is hindering couples from enacting a more gender egalitarian division of labor. A range of studies have investigated the effect of ‘greediness’ on mothers’ labor market participation and salary, especially in the US context. However, far fewer studies have investigated the impact on fathers, who may find themselves constrained from fulfilling caregiving roles when pressured to prioritize paid work over parenting responsibilities. In addition, such studies tend to conflate individual- and contextual-level processes. This study fills this gap by exploring the importance of overtime – at the individual, workplace and organizational levels – for parental leave uptake among fathers and mothers in the European context. It utilizes extensive survey data linked to administrative register data covering the entire Swedish population. Findings showed that fathers who worked overtime themselves did not take less parental leave than those who did not work overtime. However, working in a workplace or organization where colleagues worked overtime led to a lower leave uptake. Overtime at the individual, workplace, and organizational levels was not related to mothers’ parental leave uptake. By examining how parental leave uptake is embedded within three interrelated frameworks – devotion schemas at the individual level, the ideal worker norm at the workplace level, and greedy institutions at the organizational level – we can gain a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics shaping the nexus between overtime and parental leave uptake among working fathers and mothers.