Gender Roles After Extended Paternal Leave

Taking extended parental leave is a visible departure from the expectation that fathers put work first. Does it also change who carries responsibility at home? This Japanese discussion paper by 筒井健太郎 examines the development of gender-role beliefs among men in dual-career couples. Its most useful finding is an unresolved tension: commitment to care can grow while older ideals of masculine achievement persist. Leave opens a process of negotiation; it does not certify its outcome.

Published by the Recruit Works Institute in December 2023, the paper asks how relationships with spouses, children, colleagues and other significant people alter men’s understanding of themselves. It is a qualitative research report, rather than a peer-reviewed journal article or a trial estimating the effect of a leave policy. Its account of changing identities should therefore be read differently from a national participation rate or a measured division of domestic hours.

Nine men looking back on leave

The Japanese original describes online, semi-structured interviews conducted in August and September 2023 with nine men who had taken at least one month’s leave. All their wives worked full time. Participants were recruited through the author’s acquaintances and referrals, not a representative sample of Japanese fathers. The dual-career focus concerns couples in which both partners seek to develop careers alongside family life; it cannot stand for every arrangement of paid work and care.

Using the modified grounded theory approach, M-GTA, the author develops concepts and relationships from the accounts to construct a process model. The interviews ask men to reconstruct earlier decisions and subsequent changes. They are not repeated observations made before, during and after leave. The researcher also identifies shared generational and parenting experiences with participants as part of the interview relationship. These are situated narratives, rather than an unmediated record of everything that happened within the couples.

A supportive father can still put work first

The accounts complicate the contrast between an old-fashioned breadwinner and a newly caring man. A father may begin with a sincere intention to share parenting while still treating professional competition, advancement and endurance as measures of worth. Organizational expectations help reproduce that attachment. When constant availability and working through ill health become signs of commitment, reducing work can feel like failure even where taking leave is formally possible.

Change involves more than time away from a desk. The paper follows disagreements over household work, wives’ physical or mental strain, and setbacks to their careers. In one account, a man describes his wife’s occupational downgrade after leave. Such material reveals how the ideal of sustaining a family can depend on one partner absorbing its costs. It remains a husband’s account of those events; interviewing him does not independently establish his wife’s experience or an employer’s decision-making.

This raises a feminist question about the story of a father’s growth: who has already paid for the realization that the old arrangement cannot continue? A wife’s exhaustion should not become a necessary lesson that enables a man to develop. Nor does a later commitment to care establish that burdens, initiative and decision-making power have become equal. Recognition matters, but the conditions that made another person’s sacrifice seem normal also need to change.

Who can negotiate a different working life?

The paper identifies resources that make reorientation possible: examples outside the workplace, asking for assistance, accumulated career assets and confidence in finding another job. Some participants reconsidered their relationship to employers and promotion. These details prevent the analysis from reducing change to a private moral decision. A person with bargaining power or an exit option does not face the same choices as someone who cannot risk income or employment security.

Negotiating flexibility on the strength of past performance may help an individual, yet it also leaves a structural question: must a worker first prove exceptional value to obtain a sustainable caring life? The report does not resolve that policy question. It does show why celebrating an exemplary father’s choice can obscure the organizational terms under which the choice became possible. Developing care commitments and retaining ambitions associated with conventional masculinity can occur together, rather than as successive identities in a finished conversion.

The author explicitly identifies retrospective reconstruction, the restricted life-stage window and the dual-career selection as limits, and calls for longitudinal and comparative work. Career changes also warrant follow-up. These nine accounts cannot establish how often change occurs, whether it lasts, or how other generations and employment arrangements differ. The model is a way of investigating a process, not a universal sequence every father must follow.

Read alongside the French study of domestic and parental time, this paper separates two questions that are easily conflated: how people explain changing responsibilities, and how much recorded work each person actually does. Time diaries cannot simply supply the missing observations for these Japanese households, and the interviews cannot explain French population trends. Together, the works sharpen a useful inquiry: when fathers become more involved, has responsibility moved, or has the language used to describe it changed?