Parental leave can be ‘career suicide’ for male employees, conference told

Taking parental or family leave is still regarded as “career suicide” for men in some companies, an employers’ conference in Dublin has heard.

“Unless we start to fix that for men, we won’t fix that for women either,” said Ibec‘s head of skills and social policy Kara McGann, who warned against assuming all “straight white men” benefit from current work practices.

Speaking at Ibec’s annual employment law conference in Dublin, Ms McGann said a generation of young men believe their voices are not being heard in conversations about workplace culture and fear they may lose out where diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies are pursued by employers.

“Sometimes we’ve actually ignored men’s voices in that conversation, particularly straight white men, where we’ve assumed they’ve all got the same privilege and they’re all getting to do everything that they want to do,” she said.

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“Actually, when it comes back to that perennial issue of care, we find that in some organisational cultures men who look to take paternity leave or look to be more involved in care or work-life balance around caring responsibilities, that’s career suicide.

“As far as the organisation culture is concerned, if you’re serious about your career, that’s not part of the equation. And really, unless we start to fix that for men, we won’t fix that for women either.”

Only half of fathers avail of paternity leave and a quarter of men take parent’s leave compared with two-thirds of mothers, a study last week from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and the Economic and Social Research Institute showed.

Mr McGann said Ireland had come a long way on women’s rights in the workplace since the abolition of the marriage bar just over 50 years ago but still had work to do on a number of fronts.

She said the fact that 25 per cent of company directors are now women was evidence of progress and suggested more companies are taking steps now to ensure women do not suffer long-term career damage because of leave for maternity but, she said, one in four leadership teams at listed companies are still all-male.

Tom Hayes, a former trade union official who now works as a consultant to many multinationals, advising on European employment law, said the rewriting or abandonment of DEI by many US companies under pressure from the Trump administration would cause problems in Ireland.

“What Trump is trying to do is to return to the days when Christian, white men were at the head of the queue for everything. That’s what it’s about,” he said. “It’s a return to a white male, patriarchal-dominated approach. That’s not going to work here.

“We’ve seen the Trump administration writing letters to companies in Europe saying: ‘Are you going to be compliant with the president’s executive order?’ And it is going to create a difficulty, no question about it.

“Whatever a company that is based in the United States may choose to do in the United States to comply with the president’s executive order, they’re not going to be able to do that here in Europe. We have a thicket of laws coming out of the European Union or embedded here nationally that won’t allow that.”