Tableau 1 : Nombre de jours payés de congé paternité dans le secteur public en 2019 (Confédération, cantons, villes)235
Tableau 2 : Évolution du congé paternité dans les cantons et les villes236
235 TRAVAIL.SUISSE, Factsheet, p. 3.
236 TRAVAIL.SUISSE, Factsheet, p. 4.
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Tableau 3 : Règles sur le congé paternité dans les CCT importantes (2019)237
Tableau 4: Nombre de jours de congé de paternité payés en fonction de la proportion de salariés soumis à une CCT (2019)238
Tableau 5: Congé paternité accordé par les grandes entreprises en semaines239
237 TRAVAIL.SUISSE, Factsheet, p. 1.
238 TRAVAIL.SUISSE, Factsheet, p. 2.
239 BUSSY/JACQUET, p. 1.
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Tableau 6 Congé paternité dans les grandes entreprises en jours240
240 TRAVAIL.SUISSE, Factsheet, p. 5.
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C. Interview de Johan EGGER, Senior Manager dans une multinationale ayant son siege à Genève241
Clara: If you agree to it would be great to have just a quick presentation about yourself because I’ve read that you grew up in Sweden and that you took your paternity leave when your daughter was born but I guess there might be other interesting things to know about you.
Johan: I can tell you a little bit about my paternity leave experience, but I’ll start with a little bit about myself. My name is Johan Egger and I grew up in Sweden […]. I started with the firm I work for in 2005 in Geneva. I’ve done a couple of years in Stockholm, but I’ve been here most of the time.
About my paternity leave experience, growing up in Sweden, where paternity leave is the rule rather than the exception, I knew I wanted to take more than the two weeks my employer offered at the time […]. Growing up in Sweden I had seen, both formally and informally, the positive effects that paternity leave has on society and on families. So, in the Nordic countries, more than 90% of men take a paternity leave. And research has proven that it not only builds a stronger father – child relationship but it also builds more equal homes. Fathers who take more paternity leave are also more likely to carry a more equal burden of childcare tasks long after the leave has ended. I believe it’s not only an investment in your child, it’s an investment in your family and in society as well.
Paternity leave is also proven to contribute to more fair and equal workplaces. What you often see is, in many career driven companies, with benchmarking of people, if a woman has been out for a long period of time after giving birththat can be perceived as a disadvantage for her. People won’t intentionally do so, and I would like to think that they disregard it, but it’s still a fact that if someone is out for a long period of time it may at some point be held against her or him either in performance or formally. By men being out, not only do you improve equality in the home, but you also help building it in the workplace.
Actually, according to a really good article in the Economist, one of the best ways to improve women’s career prospects is paternity leave. Because it makes men more likely to take equal responsibility, it makes men more likely to be home when the child is sick, it makes nicer men, I think. But also in the workplace it evens out some of the elements.
[…] So, at the time I knew I wanted to take more than two weeks of paternity leave. I wanted to figure out what I could do long time ahead. I wanted to take two weeks after my daughter was born but I also wanted to take two months after my wife had been out, not at the same time as her. Because the idea in my mind is that the child should get an extended period at home with the parents. I wanted to take my extra-two months right after my wife. I started planning for it almost a year before. Before my daughter was born, I started to ask my employer what the rules were.
First, I had to understand if it was possible. And when I engaged with HR, I was not only surprised that it was possible but something that my employer was very supportive of.
241 Note : le présent dialogue reflète uniquement les positions personnelles de Johan EGGER et non celles de son employeur.
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The second step was a little bit scarier, because I had to talk to my managers […] and I was concerned about how they would react. I was concerned that they wouldn’t consider me as dedicated to the business as I had been, I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to come back to the role I was in, but I was very positively surprised. Both of my managers were [ok with this project] as long as I organized myself for the time I would be out.
So with that in place, I could plan the next eight or nine months, where I knew I would be out in March and April 2017. Where I could close projects before that date I did, where I could delay projects after that date I did it had other people trained to cover my job.
On the 1st March 2017 when my wife got back to work is the date I started my paternity leave. I think it can easily be qualified as the best time of my life. What you get when it’s just the two of you [you and your child] is just incredible. When your partner is not there, you’re forced to take full responsibility. There was no wife I could ask because she was at work.
Clara: Does that last on the long term? One of the arguments of the initiative committee is actually that if you change the dynamics at the beginning of the child’s life than it lasts on the long term.
Johan: Yes, and that’s an argument the Economist is making about it. […] It’s difficult for me to judge because we are one family with one child. I do believe that we’re quite an equal family, as my wife is from Denmark so we were quite equal from the beginning.
But I feel that those two months gave me confidence on educating our daughter much earlier and I think it’s still a benefit now. At some periods she still wants “Mom” and at some periods she still wants “Dad” just like kids in general. But I do feel that both of us know how to take full responsibility.
I came back to work and again I had a lot of good surprises. I was not surprised that the firm worked well without me obviously, to be honest most of us are not that critical. I have never felt that my managers thought less about me because I had taken some time off, which was a good reassurance. I’ve also gotten positive remarks from female colleagues but also from men and fathers-to-be have often reached out to me to talk about my experience. What was cool about that was that they were not from Scandinavia. One of the guys who did it after me was Italian, another one was Swiss and that was really encouraging.
After that, my employer really wanted to be an early mover and they spent time looking for what the good approach would be. I was involved in defining the policy and shared my experience. Other men shared their experiences too and we were all very well received. Last year my employer put into place a policy of 8 weeks of paternity leave fully paid. If you take your paternity leave, you have to take at least 7 weeks at once because the idea is that you take a good amount of time to get to know your child. Now I know a lot of men are taking it and it’s changing quite fast. And what I find is happening pretty quickly in my company and hopefully in other companies moving in the same direction is that it’s gradually becoming the default choice to take your paternity leave.
We’re only two years away from what used to be a scary choice but now it’s becoming the rule. If you can get 8 weeks with your child fully paid, you need to have a pretty good excuse not to take your paternity leave! […] So if you don’t take your weeks, you’re
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basically saying it’s more important to be at work than to be with your child. That shift of minds is going to travel up in the organization and more and more people are going to be progressive. And that’s quite exciting.
Clara: One of the major arguments of the Federal Council is that a paternity leave would be too expensive and too complicated to organize especially for small firms.
What do you think about those arguments?
Johan: From the company point of view, paternity leave is a smart investment. I work on Gillette, in my day to day job. So I study men a lot. We do a lot of research on men. One of the things that is more and more obvious when you talk to GenZ men, so 18-24 years old men, money is less and less of a criterion when considering companies for a career.
I’m not saying it’s not a criterion, I’m saying it’s not the only one. It was a really important criterion for Gen-X, still quite important to Millennials, but with GenZ, they want the company to stand for something more. I believe that a company taking the stand and stepping forward for equality in the workplace and in society is an incredibly powerful story to recruit strong talents. I believe GenZ will consider a company that has paternity leave more attractive than another one, given that the salary is the same or even if the salary is a little bit lower. I think it’s a smart investment.
Beyond recruitment, it also buys loyalty. When I came back from my paternity leave, I was more loyal to my employer than ever before. Because they have really shown that they care about me and my family. That made me want to work harder, that made me less likely to go look for another company. So, I think having paternity leave is better than adding an extra-bonus or giving a better salary.
For the State, it’s interesting. For Switzerland more specifically, one of the easiest things to spur economic growth would be to have more women working full time. In Scandinavia the participation rate of women in workplaces is much higher than it is in Switzerland.
And the reason for that is that unfortunately the childcare and education system is not set up for households where both men and women work full time. The system as it is leads to a higher proportion of women not working full time.
I think investing in paternity leave means investing in more equal families. It means investing in a more equal society where men and women take a similar burden – a more equal burden because perfectly equal is a long road to go, even in Sweden where they made a step in the right direction – will increase a female participation rate in the workplace. That will pay for everything. A society that supports women working will pay [for the increase of costs of paternity leave]. Then it’s true that if the Mom is not home to take care of the child, someone else will take care of the child and that has a cost too. The math is difficult, but I think that there are only examples of countries that show that the investment is worth it. I would not get stuck on Swiss francs alone, though I think paternity leave can be beneficial for the economy, Switzerland can invest more in workplace equality, in more equal homes and in a more equal society. It’s an investment in women as much as men.
Clara: Do you think paternity leave can lead to reverse gender stereotypes in the long term?
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Johan: Yes. I think it sets us up for a more modern society where men and women take more equal responsibility and where women are not held back by old day-to-day habits.
And you know, on the whole employment question, I was interviewed by LeTemps and what was interesting is they asked me if I would work for a company that did not offer paternity leave and I said no. If someone offered me 0 days, which some companies still do in Switzerland, I wouldn’t want to work for the company because it says a lot about their culture. What time are we living in?
Clara: The Federal Council says that the same goals of gender equality could be reached by developing nurseries and out-of-home care. What do you think about it?
Johan: I think that childcare structures and an education system set up for two working parents can help. I don’t think that’s wrong. In the public schools in Geneva, there is no schools on Wednesday for example. There are some private schools that help parents but not everyone has the opportunity to pay the fees. So, it means that one parent has to be home on Wednesdays. And in most cases that will be the women.
So, the woman in the couple will work 80% and the man 100%. So, when employers look for who to promote, they will rather promote a man that has been working full time for ten years than a woman who works at 80% only. The woman will then be held back and that will go on and on and on. A lot of those things around schools and childcare systems to help parents work full time can help. But I think you need paternity leave on top because otherwise it will still be the women who compromise when there is a need to take care of children when they’re sick for example. And I think that strongly encouraging men to take responsibility early will make them more likely to take some time when their kid is sick etc… which will then eventually lead to women not being held back systematically.
Clara: One last thing: what do you think about the initiative of four weeks and what do you think about the two weeks counterproject?
Johan: it’s a difficult question. I would love to see a parental system and not a paternity system where you mandate a part to each parent and you leave the rest for the family to decide, as it works in Sweden. What’s good about that is that you have a certain number of days locked on the woman and a certain number locked on the man and then each family keeps some freedom depending on who earns more, has more flexibility or similar.
That would be my dream scenario because it’s balanced system.
[Regarding Switzerland], I would prefer two weeks to pass than four weeks to fail. It’s certainly a step in the right direction. Of course, I would love the four weeks initiative to pass. But if it doesn’t, two weeks is still better than nothing, right? And I think it’s encouraging to see that a lot of companies are accompanying that step. While the government is still not as progressive as we could wish, a lot of companies drive some change in society. But what companies cannot do is parental leave for example because couples don’t necessarily work in the same place. So that’s’ something state action only can do.
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Clara: Thank you so much for your time, it’s been such an interesting conversation and you just gave me a lot of material for my research.
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D. Interview de Marie DRY, Consultante à la Banque Mondiale
Marie DRY a rejoint Women, Business and the Law en janvier 2020. Elle est diplômée de la Faculté de droit de Sciences Po Paris, où elle s'est spécialisée dans les questions d'égalité des sexes. Dans le cadre de son Master en droit économique, elle a étudié les droits de l'homme et la discrimination fondée sur le sexe à la Harvard Law School. Elle a travaillé comme stagiaire pour un cabinet d'avocats spécialisés dans le droit du travail et a rédigé des recommandations visant à améliorer l'égalité des sexes dans le cadre de la réforme des retraites françaises de 2019. Elle est titulaire d'une licence en sciences politiques de Sciences Po Paris.
Clara: Hi, Marie, thank you so much for joining me today. To start, could you please tell me how does the Project Women, Business and the Law work and how do you collect all the data that you use for your projects?
Marie: Basically, the project has been around for about 10 years and the aim is to look at the laws in different countries and find about whether or not they can be discriminatory and whether they can impede on economic empowerment of women.
To collect our data, we work with local experts, lawyers, judges and civil society organizations and we ask them questions about their legal framework. So, for example we will ask them: do women have an equal right to get married as men? And they will give us an answer with all the legal basis that supports it. And then, we review all that data that we collected from local sources and local experts.
Then, at the end, we confront the data with all our questions in the indicators and we answer with yes or no. A “yes” triggers a point, a “no” is no point. All the questions are based on international treaties and conventions and most of them will be embedded in the CEDAW Convention and on literature saying that those items that we have are important for women’s economic empowerment and economic development in all countries.
Therefore, we have eight different indicators and the way they are designed is that they're supposed to follow a woman's life. We have and indicator on mobility, then finding a job etc., and then it goes all the way to equal retirement pension.
Then we score and rank countries every year and we explain all the data and where it comes from and we highlight all the reforms that we capture. Last year, WBL created a historical dataset going back 50 years from 1970 up until 2020 and looked at all the questions that they ever asked to capture all the reforms that happened.
Clara: What happens once you scored a country? Do you write a recommendation to countries and on what basis do you do so?
Marie: The WBL is a research team so we don’t write the recommendations because as we’re grading all the countries, we don’t want to be too close to governments in order not to be in a conflict of interest the following year, when we grade the country again.
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So, the WBL has an advisory team with a separate group of people that engage with countries and governments to advise them on the basis of our indicators. […] It’s a very comparative approach and study that is performed thanks to good practices that we highlight in each country. So, the advisory team recommends countries to act as another
So, the WBL has an advisory team with a separate group of people that engage with countries and governments to advise them on the basis of our indicators. […] It’s a very comparative approach and study that is performed thanks to good practices that we highlight in each country. So, the advisory team recommends countries to act as another