What’s biology got to do with it? Parental leave use among adoptive and biological parents

Ann-Zofie Duvander, Stockholm University
Ida Viklund, Stockholm University

Sweden is one of the fore-runners regarding gender equal parental leave use. The remaining inequalities are often explained by biological differences between mothers and fathers. Sweden is also a main recipient of internationally adopted children. In this study we attempt to bring more clarity to the impact of the biological dimension of childcare, specifically the division of parental leave use between parents, by focussing on the difference between biological and adoptive parents. Swedish parental leave benefits add up to 16 months at high earnings-related replacement that can be used during the child’s preschool years. Two months of the leave is reserved for each parent and fathers use almost one quarter of the total leave. There are only minor differences in regulations for parents to adoptive and biological children. We use Swedish register data for the period 1993 to 2007 and we compare the leave use for 13 426 internationally adopted children to the use for biological children born in the period. Results so far show that fathers to adoptive children use more leave than fathers to biological children, also when controlling for individual and couple specific characteristics such as age, education, income and family composition that have been found to influence parental leave use in earlier studies. Nevertheless, parents to adoptive children follow the general trend of sharing of leave in the period and distinctive gender differences remain also for this group of parents.