Assessment on Awareness and Attitude of Paternity Leave Grant to See Contribution of the Leave for Gender Equality: The Case of Ministry of Agriculture
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Date
2021-02
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Addis Ababa Unversity
Abstract
This study has explored the level of awareness and attitude that employees of ministry of agriculture have on paternity leave grant and contribution of paternity leave towards gender equality. To assess the picked title the author utilized mixed exploratory and descriptive approach. The specific objectives of the study were assessing awareness and attitude of employees at Ministry of agriculture on the grant of paternity leave ,to investigate the trend of paternity leave uptake ,to identify factors that affect father’s decision to take or not to take the leave and to assess if at all paternity leave has a contribution towards gender equality .The study used reconstructive feminism as a theoretical frame work as the study use the ten days paternity leave grant against the practice of paternity leave ,perception and gender norms attached to role division of men and women .In this study 156 male and female employees have participated in the survey for the quantitative part , which were randomly selected and for the qualitative part in-depth interview was conducted with 5 men employees selected purposively as they are fathers and have taken paternity leave grant .Moreover key informant interview was conducted with 5 purposively selected three employees who are employees of ministry of agriculture and two employees from federal civil servant commission .The data obtained from the qualitative part has helped the author to frame questionnaires for the survey . The raw data collected from the survey (quantitative part) was analysed using SPSS using Chi square test and data was triangulated from the in-depth, key informant and survey collected .The finding reveals that both male and female sampled employees have high level of awareness on the existence of the leave (82.7% ) of the sampled population are aware . From the sampled male, married and those with children who are eligible to take the leave which are 44 in number 17 of them have taken the leave. This is quite a good number which shows that there is a good uptake rate in the ministry. Therefore, uptake is strongly associated with awareness and marital status. With regard to attitude towards importance of the leave from the sampled employees (48.0%) have positive attitude towards the importance of the leave .The short duration of the leave also result in preference of fathers to go to other leaves like annual leave with better duration .Hence (84.7%) of the sampled employees replied as duration of the leave is not adequate and (54.7%) recommended that the duration should be increased to one month .Among the sampled female employees the finding reveals that (36.0%) of them have positive attitude towards uptake of the leave by their partners .( 54.7%) of men are positive to take the leave if the duration is increased to the recommended date. The contribution of paternity leave for gender equality was seen as being positive .But fathers have confirmed the load for the household task is levied on women and the grant world have contributed a lot to gender equality had the duration of the grant was raised to one month and above . The finding informed the author that fathers prefer to go on to annual leave than paternity leave as annual leave is longer than paternity leave grant and that it doesn’t require occurrence of a specific situation like birth of a child .Thereby the author recommend for the increment of paternity leave to insure better uptake .Furthermore , disseminating the existence of the law on paternity leave and designing a one size fit all procedure for the process of paternity leave grant in every ministry is important .
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Keywords
family leave, paternity leave, parental leave, reconstructive feminism, gender norms