TRUE OR FALSE. Has the number of beneficiaries of parental leave been divided by ten since 2015, as Aurore Bergé claims?

Emmanuel Macron wants to transform parental leave into “birth leave”. The Minister for Gender Equality affirms that the number of beneficiaries of this long-term leave has been divided by ten since 2015 after the reform implemented under the mandate of François Hollande. That’s not true, it was divided by barely more than two.

Emmanuel Macron wants to reform parental leave to transform it into “birth leave”. A shorter but “better paid” break, to allow “both parents to be with their child for six months if they wish”, announced the Head of State during his press conference at the Élysée, Tuesday January 16. Parental leave is different from maternity or paternity leave: it is a long-term work stoppage, compensated 428.79 euros per month, to allow parents to look after their child. On the occasion of this announcement by the Head of State, the Minister delegate for Gender Equality, Aurore Bergé, took the opportunity to criticize the latest reform of parental leave, implemented in 2015, during the mandate of François Hollande: “The number of people using this leave, the number of women and men who take leave, has been divided by ten since this reform”, she said on Sud Radio on Wednesday. True or false ?

The number of beneficiaries of parental leave has been divided by just over two since 2015

Aurore Bergé is wrong in the figures. If we take data from the National Family Allowance Fund (Cnaf), in its latest National Observatory on Early Childhood, around 460,000 parents opted for parental leave in 2015. In 2022, there were 22,700. The number of beneficiaries was therefore divided by barely more than two.

This drop in the number of beneficiaries was also visible well before the reform, from 2006. It is an underlying trend. Parental leave is attracting less and less. The main reason given is the low amount of compensation. The parents assure that they are not in financial difficulty. Parental leave is also a system considered to be “hardly readable” And “poorly adapted to certain developments in society”as the General Inspectorate of Finance writes in a report dating from 2019.

A drop in the number of beneficiaries, an underlying trend but also a “mechanical effect”

“There was also a mechanical effect with the reform”, explains to franceinfo Hélène Périvier, who co-wrote a study on the subject for the French Observatory of Economic Conditions (OFCE). The law on real equality between women and men passed in 2014 and implemented in 2015 modified the duration and distribution of parental leave. For a first child, the maximum duration increased from six months to be shared between the two parents to six months for each parent, and from the second child, the reform reduced the duration of parental leave for the same child from three to two years. parent, which requires the other to take part of the leave to cover the period until the child turns three. The idea was for the fathers to take over for the third year. But, in fact, they didn’t get into it at all. Mathematically, the total number of beneficiaries has therefore fallen.

The idea of ​​this reform was, as today with Emmanuel Macron’s proposal, to mobilize men more in the education of children and domestic tasks. But it didn’t work. Less than 1% of fathers request parental leave, according to OFCE data. The recourse rate increased a little after the 2015 reform, but remains very low. According to the OFCE study, for full-rate parental leave, fathers’ use increased from 0.5% to 0.8% regardless of the number of children.

Less than 1% of fathers take parental leave

Researchers offer several explanations. Firstly, the amount of compensation, which does not encourage men to stop their employment. Many fathers also do not know that they have the right to this long-term leave. Others don’t ask because they think it’s “a woman’s affair”, to use the words of the OFCE study. This is what researchers call “the gendered effect of parental leave”. Finally, at work, fathers’ colleagues do not request this leave, which discourages them from doing so.