“It was Necessary at the Beginning to Make This Whole Revolution”

Abstract

This article compares and contrasts the attitudes of Polish and Swedish fathers to individualized or gender-neutral parental leaves popularly referred to as “daddy quotas.” The comparisons of two distinctively different societies that are characterized by very different family policy systems and gender-equality policies allow the article to explore how family policies help to shape men’s attitudes to parenthood and gendered parenting roles. Polish family policy is mother oriented and only recently started to address the social citizenship rights of fathers. Polish men’s role in the family is still normatively coded in terms of male breadwinning. Whereas in Sweden, there is a long tradition of gender-neutral parental leave and a normative and institutionalized social policy tradition of encouraging fathers into greater engagement with care work. This study shows that institutional contexts, in particular parental-leave provisions, impact how men perceive their own parental roles and their own interpretations of prevailing models of masculinities.