Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Corporations: The Case of Global Paternity Leave

Abstract

This PhD thesis provides insights into the communication and perception of a new global paternity leave policy, emphasising the corporate discourses and the experiences of father employees. The trigger point for the investigation was that four multinational corporations (MNCs) introduced paid paternity leave globally (in 2017 and 2019). The implementation of this type of policy has increasing relevance for companies from an inclusion perspective. A current gender equality issue across countries is how to reduce the gender pay gap, which increases when women reach childbearing age (Bütikofer, Jensen, & Salvanes, 2018). Coincidentally, gender pay gap reporting was made compulsory for companies in the UK in 2017 and in Norway in 2020, the two countries where the MNCs in this study are headquartered. There is growing awareness in many countries that to achieve gender equality in paid work, we may need to emphasise gender equality regarding infant caregiving (Earle, Raub, Sprague, & Heymann, 2023). From a research perspective, paternity leave has become increasingly relevant as more than 50% of paternity leave research has been carried out since 2016 (Pizarro & Gartzia, 2023). So far, paternity leave research has mainly focused on national leave regulations or fathers’ experiences in one or two countries. The current thesis contributes to the extant literature by presenting and discussing a global corporate approach to paternity leave and how employees from diverse cultural backgrounds experience it. Corporate texts are analysed to provide insights into the communication of global paternity leave in the four MNCs. Furthermore, interview data provide insights into father employees’ and managers’ experiences of the policy. The thesis consists of three empirical papers that, together with the introductory chapter, emphasise the following three overarching research aims: (i) Investigate how the four MNCs communicate the offer of global paternity leave within the organisation, (ii) explore how father employees who have taken paternity leave perceive and experience such a policy, and (iii) find out how the leave policy is implemented. A critical insight from the first paper, Standardising Fatherhood across Cultures: A Linguistic Approach to Studying the Communication of a New Global Company Policy in Multinational Corporations (Bamford, 2022), is that there is tension between focusing on the aspect of gender equality and that of inclusion when justifying the new measure. The paper contributes to the cross fertilisation of linguistics and diversity management communication and demonstrates the importance of linguistic choices when communicating diversity management strategies. A critical insight from the second paper, Global Paternity Leave in four MNCs: a facilitator of paternal agency? is that the leave contributes to empowering fathers to become more involved parents. Specifically, the paper contributes to the literature on paternity leave by classifying leave-taking fathers along two dimensions: whether they took full or reduced leave and whether they experienced shared or sole care of the child(ren). One critical insight from the third paper, Global Paternity Leave as a DEI initiative in four Multinational Corporations, is that for the policy to be successful, the leave needs to make sense to the individual father and must be supported by the corporate structure as well as the work culture. The overall contribution is threefold: (1) to extend the diversity management (DM) literature towards a corporate measure advocating inclusion beyond typical minority groups; (2) to extend our understanding of male agency; and (3) introduce a framework for successful global paternity leave implementation across the four MNCs