SWS Seminar: Satu Helske (University of Turku)

Abstract

Well-designed parenting leave policies can support greater father involvement and shared caregiving, yet progress remains uneven within and between countries – partly because fathers with more resources are more likely to use their entitlements.

Workplace contexts play a key role, constraining or incentivising leave-taking through ideal worker norms, gender norms, and organisational policies. So far, however, these contexts have been mainly studied as snapshots, even though practices and norms may co-evolve over time.

This study examines how fathers’ leave-taking behaviour and workplace norms mutually shape one another over time. We argue that workplaces are adaptive normative environments in which individual decisions and prevailing norms co-evolve through feedback processes.

Drawing on threshold models of collective behaviour, we conceptualise fathers' leave-taking decisions as being shaped by the workplace's normative environment. Unlike classical threshold models, which focus on observable behaviour, we treat this environment as latent and allow it to evolve alongside individual decisions. Fathers who challenge prevailing expectations and take leave despite unsupportive norms may be especially important in driving change.

The study has three main aims:

1. To identify latent workplace contexts and examine how they influence fathers' leave-taking decisions.
2. To assess how workplace contexts shift from being unsupportive to supportive of paternal leave-taking.
3. To analyse how fathers' leave-taking behaviour contributes to transforming workplace contexts.

We use Finnish full-population administrative register data with employer-employee linkages. The analysis focuses on small and medium-sized workplaces and fathers with children between 2007 and 2021.

Methodologically, we apply a novel approach: the feedback-augmented non-homogeneous hidden Markov model (FAN-HMM). In this framework, workplaces move between latent normative states that shape observed leave-taking patterns.

The model is non-homogeneous because transition probabilities between states depend on workplace characteristics, which may change over time. It is feedback-augmented because each father's leave-taking behaviour can influence these transitions. This allows us to capture the reciprocal and dynamic relationship between individual behaviour and workplace norms, something conventional cross-sectional analyses cannot address.

Structural causal modelling is used to formalise identification assumptions and address potential confounding.

Preliminary results from a three-state model identify workplace contexts that are:

• unsupportive,
• partly supportive, and
• supportive of paternal leave-taking.

These contexts produce markedly different leave-taking patterns. We find evidence that fathers' leave decisions contribute to contextual change and that such transformation processes vary substantially across industries.

By modelling the co-evolution of individual behaviour and workplace norms, this study provides new evidence on how, where and through whom workplace cultures shift towards shared caregiving.

Short bio

Satu Helske is a Senior Research Fellow at the INVEST Research Flagship Centre and Collegium Researcher at Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku, Finland.

She holds a Title of Docent in Sociology and a PhD in Statistics. Her current research focuses on the causes and consequences of fathers' parenting leave at the micro, meso and macro levels.

Helske leads a research team studying fathers' use of parental leave and has received several major research grants, including an ERC Starting Grant (2026) and project funding from the Research Council of Finland (2020 and 2025).