Negotiating Fathers’ Care: Canadian Fathers’ Leave-taking as Conformity and Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite some changes to the ways contemporary families are handling the allocation of paid and unpaid work, the path of least resistance still tends be maternal caregiving with mothers more likely than fathers to cut back on their employment or drop out of the workforce entirely. Because men typically maintain, and may even strengthen, their ties to the labour market at the transition to parenthood, offering them paid parental leave is thought to provide an important opportunity for fathers to develop the skills and sense of responsibility that are characteristic of mothers’ parenting, ultimately reducing gender inequality in families. Although leave schemes that specifically target fathers are praised for their high usage rates, there has been little research into the quality of men’s time at home. This dissertation addresses this gap in the literature by probing the time-bounded and gender-laden circumstances of early parenthood to consider the ways in which fathers’ early involvement might set the stage for their greater participation in domestic life. I do so by examining how Canadian fathers come to use, experience, and act in response to their time on parental leave. The men in this study waxed enthusiastically about the parenting skills and emotional bonds they developed while on leave. Many were so moved by the experience that they came to incorporate the values and practices of care into their identities. Yet at the same time, the allocation of leave time and couple’s subsequent divisions of housework and domestic responsibility remained gendered. Couples had to engage with gendered cultural expectations that took men’s employment for granted but allowed them greater leeway than women when it came to meeting parenting standards. Nevertheless, I argue that the transformative potential of fathers’ leave-taking should not be dismissed – even small changes to couples’ gendered roles and fathers’ identities are important in undoing gender inequality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".