Closing or Widening? Parental Leave and the Gender Gap in Child Care.

This article examines the impact of Quebec's 2006 parental leave reform, which replaced the federal Employment Insurance (EI) program with the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP). QPIP introduced higher wage replacement rates and a non-transferable "father quota" of paternity leave aimed at increasing fathers' participation in parental leave. Using a difference-in-differences approach with administrative and survey data, the study finds that the reform increased fathers' leave take-up by about 48 percentage points, primarily concentrated around the reserved quota duration, but had only a modest effect on mothers' leave participation and no effect on the timing of mothers' return to work. Despite increased paternal leave-taking, the reform did not lead to greater planned shared child care after mothers returned to work; instead, reliance on informal care by relatives and friends increased, while plans for joint caregiving with fathers declined slightly. The findings suggest that short, non-transferable paternity leave boosts initial paternal involvement but does not substantially alter long-term caregiving roles or maternal labor market outcomes, highlighting the importance of policy design aligned with household dynamics and the potential need for longer paternal leave to promote gender equality in caregiving.