Engaged in the fight for gender equality, the Finnish government plans to give new fathers the same amount of paid parental leave as new mothers, he announced Wednesday.
Paid paternity leave will thus be extended to six and a half months, like maternity leave. One of the parents can give the other up to 69 days if they wish, says the Finnish newspaper "News Now Finland".
Pregnant women will also be entitled to one month of maternity leave before the expected date of birth.
Quoted by Reuters, the Finnish Minister of Health and Social Affairs, Aino-Kaisa Pekonen, said that the objective of this "radical reform" is both to improve gender equality and to boost the rate of declining birth rate.
The Swedish model
Falling birth rates are a recurring problem in Finland, as the American agency Bloomberg points out. The number of newborns fell by about a fifth between 2010 and 2018 to 47,577 children for around 5.5 million inhabitants, notes Reuters.
According to Aino-Kaisa Pekonen, such a measure has already enabled Sweden and Iceland to increase their birth rate. In Sweden, paternity leave consists of 12 months to be shared between the two parents and a minimum of two months for each of them.
The measure is expected to come into force in Finland at the earliest in the fall of 2021, and would cost almost 100 million euros.
Eleven days of paternity leave in France
In France, maternity leave extends to 16 weeks, while “paternity and childcare” leave provides eleven consecutive days for a single birth and eighteen days for a multiple birth.
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It is taken by about seven in ten fathers, and complements the compulsory three-day birth leave.
It should not be confused with parental leave, which can be up to one year and whose compensation is not as advantageous.
In France, voices are regularly raised calling for an extension of parental leave. A report from the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs (Igas) recommended in 2018, to go from 11 days to two or three weeks.
The Secretary of State for Equality between Women and Men, Marlène Schiappa, also estimated in May 2019 that paternity leave could be "extended" and "better paid", without giving further details.