Study Finds Few Male Faculty Take Paid Parental Leave

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Maryland have published a study on the use of paid parental leave on college campuses. The authors state that the general consensus is that women faculty take parental leave to care for their newborn children but when male faculty take parental leave, they simply use the time to write, conduct research, and gain career advantage. But the result of the study shows that this assumption is not correct.

In an article published in the January 2013 issue of the journal Fathering, the authors found that few men took paid parental leave and those that did tended not to have a homemaker spouse. The results also show that men chose not to take parental leave because they feared they would be viewed as not dedicated to their jobs.

The study found that women and men in STEM disciplines were the least likely to take parental leave. Co-author Jennifer Lundquist, associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, stated, “Many STEM disciplines are still male-faculty dominated and our participants described informal departmental cultures which operate on the outdated assumption that faculty have a stay-at-home partner to provide support.”