Longer parental leave comes up against lack of law and cultural traits

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Of the five days of paternity leave provided for in the labor law, designer Rodrigo Menezes, 32, feels he has enjoyed only one. The son, now 8 years old, was born after a risky pregnancy and was hospitalized at birth. Back at work, the employer wanted to deduct the days of absence from the salary.

“I argued that it was a right, but he said no. It wasn’t the only reason, there were other problems, but it certainly weighed on me to resign.”

A savings account allowed him to spend the first three months dedicated to taking care of his son, alongside his wife. The shared time, he says, allowed him to rebalance the routine. When he returned to the market, he took temp jobs and home office placements.

“With that, I participate in everything. I take and pick them up at school, I go to the parents’ meeting, to the doctor, and I can’t imagine going back to a company that doesn’t respect that”, he says. “After being a father, I’m even more certain that the five-day leave is not enough.”

The conflicting relationship of many employers with parental leave has a dual origin, according to experts, and which feeds into each other: one cultural and one financial. Both succumb to the inequality imposed by legislation.

“It’s a gear. There is a false perception that a bigger license is just a cost, but companies that grant equal rights turn this into an investment”, says Michelle Tiemi, CEO of the Filhos no Currículo consultancy.

“The main obstacle [para a ampliação] it’s the mindset. For many years, care is the responsibility of women”, says Daniela Diniz, director of content and institutional relations at the consultancy GPTW. “The cost is indeed a practical obstacle, but the biggest one has to do with our culture of seeing children tied to their mother.”

Brazilian law provides for 120 days for mothers and five days for fathers. This period may change if the company joins the Empresa Cidadã, which allows extending maternity leave to 180 days and paternity leave to 20 days. According to the Federal Revenue, 25,845 companies are in the program.

Economist and professor at FGV (Fundação Getulio Vargas) Cecilia Machado, who is a columnist for Sheet and studies the effect of maternity leave on women’s participation in the labor market, argues that increasing leave for men would also reduce career abandonment by mothers;

According to GPTW, which ranks the best companies to work for, in 2006, 100% of companies offered employees only the minimum required by law. “Nothing extraordinary and we are talking about the best companies”, says Diniz.

In 2021, the picture changes, albeit slightly, when 5% of companies said they grant between one and three months of paternity leave. At GPTW, maternity and paternity leaves last six months.

Even in companies where the right to leave has already exceeded the minimum required by law, HR managers see some resistance among employees to use the period. A 2019 report by Instituto Promundo points out that 68% of parents did not even take the five days off.

In the company NTT Ltd, only 12, among the approximately 900 employees, requested the extended leave since November, when the benefit was implemented. There, employees can take six weeks of paid leave and another ten weeks without pay.

“Not only 12 children were born, of course. We know that not everyone is using it”, says Daniela Gartner, HR director.

For her, there is in the low adherence a bit of the profile of NTT, which has many new employees, but also the cultural trait of the care attributed to the woman, seen as the one who has to deal with the heavy routine of a newborn.

Tiemi, from Filhos no Currículo, defends, for companies that are studying the expansion of licenses, that they set an example from their leaders, or the change does not come out on paper.

For controllership specialist Eric Mamoru Oishi, 36, the moment is one of expectation. Her second child is due in January 2023, when, for the first time, she will be able to take longer leave. There will be 28 days of paid leave and, on return to work, two days will be home office.

“I think I’ll be more relaxed to get back to my professional routine after spending more time with my family. Also, the hybrid work model, which I didn’t have in my first experience, should help a lot.”

At Superdigital, where he has worked for a year, he has even taken a course for parents. “My wife and I were already planning to get ‘pregnant’ again. When I had my first child, it would have helped a lot if I had been able to spend more time at home, especially if I already had access to the preparatory course content.”

Juliana Abreu, executive director and partner of BCG (Boston Consultin Group), believes that extended leaves will have more and more weight in retaining employees and reducing turnover. At BCG, men and women are entitled to six months.

The next debate to be raised, says the manager, is the differentiation that Brazilian legislation makes between licenses, perpetuating the notion that mothers are responsible for care.

For lawyer Caroline Marchi, labor partner at Machado Meyer, the search for diversity in teams also highlighted the need for parity in benefits. In the business world, much of this demand comes from the ESG agenda, an acronym for good environmental, social and governance practices.

Large companies such as Twitter (20 weeks leave), Merck Brasil (60 days), Diageo (26 weeks) and Grupo Boticário (120 days) have adopted different policies for parental leave.

Marchi considers that the legislation cannot keep up with the changes, transferring the responsibility for adjusting their policies to companies. “The government is always late, it doesn’t see what is changing in society and continues to impose discrimination.”

The lawyer Marcella Ferreira e Cruz, from Machado Meyer, says that today the burden of equalizing the duration of the licenses is fully assumed by the companies, but that the jurisprudence advances to expand the rights and oblige the INSS to contemplate other types of removal, such as the 180-day concession for two adoptive mothers.

Currently, those who grant longer periods for secondary care (as mothers and fathers who did not generate or are not classified as holders of maternity leave are being called) launch these leaves as paid leave in the eSocial (bookkeeping system), since they do not there is provision for another type of framing.

The INSS rule for adopters provides for 120 days of leave, whether men or women. Still, a federal employee had to go to court to guarantee the right to 180 days of leave. He became a father from in vitro fertilization and registered the children alone.

For the STF (Supreme Federal Court), the jurisprudence legitimizes new family configurations, “always with the purpose of the integral protection of children and adolescents”, said Minister Alexandre de Moraes in the decision.

A study released by the International Labor Organization says that investments in paid leave for fathers and mothers and in child and elderly care services could generate almost 300 million jobs by 2035. According to the report, 1.2 billion men of reproductive rights live in countries where the right to paternity leave does not exist.

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