Who pays when employees go on parental leave?

The University of Copenhagen recently decided to introduce a joint parental leave fund from 2027, so that individual units will no longer be responsible for covering the difference between staff salaries and state reimbursement when employees go on parental leave; instead, the cost will be shared across the entire university. 

Dean Bente Merete Stallknecht, who is also the strategic sponsor for diversity, equality, and inclusion at the University of Copenhagen, calls this an important decision in a post on LinkedIn:

“As long as parental leave can be an expense to the individual units, it is a potential source of inequality, because women typically have longer periods of parental leave and are entitled to pay for a longer period than men. And even though we already have principles stating that this must not, of course, influence recruitment decisions, it is better to remove this issue from the equation altogether,” she writes. 

At Aarhus University, a project group is currently gathering information on various models for parental leave funds, both at AU and at other universities. The analysis is intended to provide the basis for a decision by the senior management team later this year on “whether and how parental leave funds at Aarhus University (AU) can be consolidated at faculty and central administration level or at AU level,” according to the project’s terms of reference.” This is part of an initiative to create a better working environment for staff with young children under the Action Plan for Diversity, Equality and Inclusion 2030.

Different models

In 2016, as part of the Action Plan for More Women in Research 2016–2020, AU’s management decided that all faculties should set up a parental leave fund at either faculty or department level. 

Arts, Aarhus BSS, and the Faculty of Health Sciences opted for a model comprising a central parental leave fund for PhD students and decentralised parental leave funds at departmental level for other academic job categories. 

The former Faculty of Science and Technology instead chose to set up a central parental leave fund at faculty level covering all staff categories entitled to parental leave, including academic and technical-administrative staff, both men and women, and both internally and externally funded employees. 

This model has been continued at the Faculties of Technical Sciences and Natural Sciences, although each now has their own fund. All departments contribute collectively to the faculty’s parental leave fund based on their total payroll. The faculty’s parental leave fund covers salary costs during the period in which an employee is on parental leave. This will free up funds for the department to hire a temporary replacement for the staff member on parental leave. If the employee is externally funded, the salary funds can be deferred until the employee returns from parental leave. 

The experience with this model has been positive, says Dean of Natural Sciences Birgit Schiøtt, who, at the time, as head of the department of chemistry, helped introduce the collective faculty-level fund:

“I haven’t heard any negative feedback in the ten years we’ve been using it,” she says, adding that she has the impression that it is easy to manage for departments, HR and finance alike. She adds that a centralised model ensures that responsibility for funding parental leave is placed as far away as possible from the hiring manager, which she considers to be a sound principle to work from.

When the parental leave fund was first introduced at the faculty, it was part of a wider effort to attract more women into research, the dean says:

“The reason behind this was a desire to eliminate any implicit bias from a recruitment situation, where one might unconsciously consider not hiring a younger woman,” says Birgit Schiøtt. 

“It makes a difference to the decision-making process that you can either hire a temporary staff member or ‘set aside’ the external funding used to pay a fixed-term PhD or postdoc until after parental leave; that used to be rather more difficult.”

The number of female employees has increased 

The dean notes that the proportion of female staff at the faculty has increased across all job categories. In 2017, women made up 36 per cent of full-time employees at the departments that now constitute Natural Sciences.” If we look solely at the figures for academic staff (excluding PhD students), the proportion of women has risen from 23 per cent to 34 per cent. She emphasises that this increase is caused by the overall efforts made to boost the number of female staff, and not just the parental leave fund.

Need for a better understanding of parental leave

Birgit Schiøtt has many years of experience as a research group leader and is therefore very familiar with the complex puzzle that must be put together when an employee goes on parental leave, even if the parental leave fund helps offset financial constraints. This includes ensuring supervision of the group’s PhD students, finding a qualified temporary employee for highly specialised units, and research grants that may need to be put on hold or extended, or collaborative projects that need to be refocused.

“The academic challenges are hard to avoid,” notes the dean.

“It is to be expected that there will be interruptions or adjustments to projects. However, a better understanding of parental leave and how managers should approach the situation to safeguard their projects as effectively as possible whilst also supporting their employees’ careers as much as possible, would generally be beneficial,” she says, adding that there is no single ‘best practice’. The environments and projects are simply too different for that. 

As a member of the senior management team, Birgit Schiøtt is involved in the decision-making process regarding a possible university-wide model, and although the experience of a centralised model has been positive at her faculty, she emphasises that she is open to the insights the project group will produce through its analysis. 

This text is machine translated and post-edited by Mie Skov Jeppesen.