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Abstract

This paper investigates the variation in paternity leave policy in Slovenia and Hungary in order to gain insight into the drivers and obstacles to policies that support gender equality and women’s rights. Contributing to gender equality and women’s rights, paternity leave policies have been found to support both child care and maternal employment. In European countries such as Spain and Germany, such policies have decreased the gender wage gap within households and shifted opinions on gender roles regarding who is responsible for care work. Given the positive impact of paternity leave, it is of interest why Slovenia has a more generous paternity leave policy than Hungary despite their shared communist past and present European Union membership. Both countries had seen high levels of female employment in their communist era. Today, the EU aims to reduce gender inequality through strategic goals for women’s employment set in the Work-Life Balance Directive. Despite these similarities, when considering paternity and parental leave days together, Slovenian fathers are entitled to more than triple the days in Hungary—160 days of leave compared to 54 days. In an empirical approach, this study used cross-national databases, government websites, journals, and news articles to test the applicability of existing theories of social policy variation in explaining this difference in policy. This paper finds cultural impacts, interest groups, framing, and institutional structures to be large contributors to the difference between Slovenia and Hungary’s policy, with leadership having some influence.

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2024 Kendra Nguyen

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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