More than a century ago, the International Labour Organization (ILO) delivered a transformative win for women: paid maternity leave. In 1919, women delegates to the ILO’s first conference—permitted to speak but not vote—insisted that the ILO recognize women’s needs to recover from childbirth and care for newborns. Their hard-fought victory now underpins a global minimum of 14 weeks’ paid maternity leave.
But what the ILO recognized for women, it never extended to men. International law solidified maternity leave as a right while largely ignoring paternity leave. That far-from-neutral disregard helped entrench a worldview that feminizes care and diminishes fathers’ role in caregiving. The imbalance that persists today originates in how international law first conceptualized care, collapsing pregnancy, recovery, and caregiving into a single continuum assigned to women. Even progressive reforms remain incremental.
A gap between rights and reality
International human rights law sets out a clear vision of parenting as a shared responsibility. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) affirms parents’ equal rights and responsibilities in raising children.
But that principle never carried through into labor law. Over the course of the 20th century, the ILO steadily strengthened maternity protections—expanding leave entitlements in 1952, 1965, 1981, and 2000—but stopped short of creating any equivalent global standard for paid paternity leave. While frameworks recognized the family responsibilities of workers—for women in 1965 and for men in 1981—they failed to establish enforceable rights for men to take leave.
The result is not a gap but an imbalance. Women’s right to care is protected, while men’s remains optional. In practice, this means women are both supported and constrained—granted time to care but also assigned primary responsibility for it by default.
How international law has fostered an inequality
International law does not simply reflect norms; it helps to produce them. Domestic law has widely replicated the ILO’s model: robust maternity protections without provisions for fathers and partners to take leave.
Evidence from Asia and Latin America shows the deep internalization of this pattern. Maternity leave provisions track closely to ILO standards, typically offering around three to four months of paid leave for working mothers. By contrast, paid paternity leave remains marginal, averaging just 7.2 days in Asia and 6.5 days in Latin America as of January 2025.
This is more than just a legislative imbalance. The law signals norms, telling employers, families, and societies in general that caregiving belongs to women. These signals have clear consequences. In the European Union, only 67.4 percent of women were employed compared to 79 percent of men in 2018. Moreover, women were paid, on average, 14.8 percent less than men in salaries and 30.1 percent less in pensions.
At the same time, the ILO framework excludes entire groups of parents. Informal workers—who make up a significant share of the global labor force—often fall outside paid leave protections. Diverse families, including same-sex parents and multi-parent households, remain inconsistently recognized or excluded altogether. The result is a global legal architecture that continues to center a narrow model of family, with the mother as the default caregiver.
Europe’s partial correction
The European Union’s 2019 Directive on work-life balance for parents and carers represents the most advanced effort to address this imbalance. It aimed to move beyond a legal preoccupation with working mothers by promoting shared caregiving and increasing women’s participation in the labor market.
The Directive introduced 10 days of paid paternity leave and four months of parental leave paid at a rate determined by Member States. It also increased the number of months non-transferable between parents from three to two in an effort to combat a pattern of fathers in heterosexual couples transferring their available leave to mothers.
Yet the Directive falls short of its own ambitions. Allowing Member States to determine the amount at which parental leave is paid risks wage recovery levels too low to encourage uptake. Moreover, granting fathers just two weeks of paid leave, compared to a minimum of 14 weeks for mothers, ultimately reinforces, rather than disrupts, existing inequalities and maintains a clear hierarchy between mothers’ and fathers’ entitlements.
The scope of the European Union Directive further exposes its limitations. Allowing Member States to determine whether to cover same-sex parents weakens the Directive’s capacity to challenge traditional family norms and leaves many families without meaningful protection.
The Directive threatens to create a form of “symbolic” paternity leave: a limited entitlement that gestures toward equality while leaving the underlying structure of that disparity in caregiving unchanged.
Reclaiming the right to shared care
A century after the ILO’s founding, the gap between human rights commitments and labor law realities is no longer defensible. CEDAW already recognizes parenting as a shared responsibility. The task now is to embed that principle in binding labor standards.
This demands more than incremental reform. It requires adequately paid and non-transferable leave for all parents, extending protections to informal workers, and recognizing diverse family forms. It also requires confronting the role international law itself has played in entrenching inequality.
International law once transformed maternity protection from an aspiration into a global standard. It can—and should—do the same for equal parenting.
This article is based on “Unequal Leave, Unequal Lives: How International and European Law Have Entrenched Gendered Parenting,” which will be published in the European Journal of International Law 37, no. 2 (2026).