Despite this notable growth, only 43.3% of the workers who took the leave were from SMEs that had less than 300 employees. Meanwhile, 56.7% of the men who took parental leave were from companies that had 300 or more employees, marking a gap that continued to widen between firms of different sizes.
In 2018, the number of men from large companies who took parental leave took was at 16.1% while those from SMEs were at 10.6%. While the former rose by 14.4 percentage points, the latter only increased by 8.4 percentage points.
This marked the ongoing challenges of employees from SMEs when it comes to availing parental leave. In several online forums which housed communities about parenting, many users shared their struggles in workplace pressure and job insecurity. There were many men who expressed their concerns in losing their roles once they came back to work.
The researchers underlined the need for developing methods to encourage more men who worked in SMEs to use their parental leave benefit.
To gather its data, researches from KIHASA analyzed the Ministry of Employment and Labor’s employment administration statistics and published their findings in the report.