---
title: "Fathers on leave and mothers at work (research idea)"
description: "31 recent papers study maternal employment and parental leave, twice as many as the year before, nearly all in economics journals. Several countries now reserve long leave for fathers. Does it shrink the earnings penalty mothers pay after a birth, or do fathers take the leave while mothers keep the care?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/paternity-leave-and-mothers-work
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/paternity-leave-and-mothers-work.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Fathers on leave and mothers at work (research idea): 31 recent papers study maternal employment and parental leave, twice as many as the year before, nearly all in economics journals. Several countries now reserve long leave for fathers."
date: "2026-10-29"
updated: "2026-10-29"
status: "seed"
tags: ["economics", "labor", "households"]
keywords: ["paternity leave", "parental leave", "maternal employment"]
---

# Fathers on leave and mothers at work

31 recent papers study maternal employment and parental leave, twice as many as the year before, nearly all in economics journals. Several countries now reserve long leave for fathers. Does it shrink the earnings penalty mothers pay after a birth, or do fathers take the leave while mothers keep the care?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 31 papers carry a maternal-employment, parental-leave or paternity-leave keyword, up from 15 in the year before: "maternal employment" on 19, "parental leave" on 9, "paternity leave" on 5. Thirty appeared in economics journals; none carries an AI keyword. Over three years they sit next to work-family balance (10), child care (7), maternity leave (7), gender pay gap (7) and child penalty (7). Spain raised fathers' paid, non-transferable leave in steps from 2019 until it matched mothers' 16 weeks in 2021, and one recent paper in the archive studies it. Related notes look at [housing costs and fertility](/ideas/housing-costs-and-the-fertility-decline) and [pay transparency and the gender pay gap](/ideas/pay-transparency-laws).

## Questions

- Does leave reserved for fathers reduce the drop in mothers' earnings after a birth?
- Do fathers on leave share the care, or does the leave become time off while mothers still do most of it?
- Does equal leave change how employers hire young men and women, now that both are likely to take it?
- Does it change whether couples have a second child?

## Data that could help

Spanish social security records (the Continuous Sample of Working Lives), EU-SILC, time-use surveys and the OECD Family Database.

## Next step

Estimate the child penalty for couples with births just before and after each step of Spain's 2019–2021 reform, using social security records.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, marketing, information systems, tourism and hospitality, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-29*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| paternity leave | 0 | – | 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 0, 0 | 8 |
| parental leave | 1 | #3527 | 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 | 17 |
| maternal employment | 0 | – | 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 1, 0, 1, 1, 3, 0, 1, 2, 3, 0, 3, 3, 2, 0, 0 | 32 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Fathers on leave and mothers at work. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 29, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/paternity-leave-and-mothers-work

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-paternity-leave-and-mothers-work,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Fathers on leave and mothers at work},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/paternity-leave-and-mothers-work}},
  urldate = {2026-10-29},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).