Paid Leave Alone Won’t Get Dads Home, but Two-Hour Class Might

Japan gives new fathers up to a year of paid leave. Barely a third of them use it. A new study points to the reason, and to what actually changes it.

For decades, the working assumption has been that if governments make paid leave generous enough, fathers will take it and the division of labor at home will sort itself out. Japan breaks that assumption wide open. Despite having some of the world’s most generous paternity leave policies, only about 30 percent of eligible fathers took any leave during the study period. When researchers ask Japanese fathers why, they keep pointing to the same thing: workplace culture. Unspoken rules at the office, not the policy written in the employee handbook, are what’s actually calling the shots.

A new discussion paper, published in Center for Research and Education for Policy Evaluation (CREPE, tested whether that culture could be shifted from the inside. Researchers ran a controlled experiment across four Japanese organizations, testing two workplace programs aimed at increasing men’s involvement in caring for their children. One of them worked, and the results rippled well beyond the fathers themselves.

What Researchers Did to Get Japanese Fathers More Involved in Childcare

More than 1,200 male employees took part, spread across 80 offices within four organizations: two private companies and two municipal governments in Japan. All four were broadly typical public and private employers, not hand-picked progressive outliers, though each had voluntarily joined a program aimed at improving paternity leave uptake. The experiment ran between August 2023 and March 2024. Offices were randomly assigned to receive a training program either early or late in the study period, allowing researchers to compare outcomes between the two groups.

Two separate programs were tested. The first was a two-hour online training session, developed and run by an outside nonprofit, held during normal working hours and paid for by the employers. Managers and regular employees attended separate sessions at the same time, so leadership and staff received the same message simultaneously. Male instructors, described in the curriculum as successful professionals and active fathers, led the sessions. The curriculum covered the real-world benefits of paternity leave for families, fathers themselves, and workplaces. It also addressed a specific blind spot: fathers tend to overestimate how much they already contribute at home compared to what their partners actually think.

A second program was simpler and cheaper. During the first follow-up survey, a group of non-management employees was shown charts comparing what they thought their coworkers and managers believed about paternity leave versus what those colleagues actually reported believing. The gap was consistent, and employees routinely underestimated the support available to them. This kind of false belief, where people privately back something but assume others don’t, is sometimes called a social perception gap. The question was whether correcting that false impression would be enough to change behavior.

What the Study Found About Weekend Childcare and Working Mothers

For the training program, the results were substantial. Fathers who went through it reported increasing their weekend childcare time by about one hour per day on average, a 16 percent jump compared to fathers in the control group. That extra paternal involvement did not simply replace time mothers were already spending with their children. Total reported childcare in the household went up, suggesting families were genuinely investing more time in their kids rather than shuffling responsibilities between parents.

Effects extended beyond the home. Spouses of men who completed the training reported working an additional 3.6 hours per week. Mothers also cut the time they spent on housework. Freeing up even a modest amount of a mother’s time at home, the researchers reason, can meaningfully shift what she can do professionally.

Training also changed how men thought about paternity leave. Participants showed stronger beliefs that leave benefits the workplace, and they were less likely to underestimate how supportive their coworkers actually were. A larger share also reported looking into paternity leave policies.

Researchers took steps to make sure men were not simply reporting what they thought the study wanted to hear. Surveys were conducted under strict anonymity, and the team used a standard psychological scale to assess any tendency to provide socially desirable responses. Results held up. One pattern stands out: the training raised weekend childcare but left weekday care unchanged. Because young children in Japan usually attend daycare on weekdays, fathers have little room to add care during the week no matter their intentions, so the weekend increase reads as a real behavioral choice rather than inflated reporting.

Why Telling Men Their Colleagues Support Paternity Leave Isn’t Enough

That second program, the one showing men how supportive their colleagues actually were, did work in a narrow sense. Men who saw the information updated their beliefs about their coworkers’ and managers’ attitudes, and the social perception gap shrank.

But that’s largely where the effect stopped. Correcting those false impressions did not translate into changes in intentions to take paternity leave, didn’t increase the likelihood that men would research leave policies, and didn’t produce measurable behavioral changes. Knowing others are supportive, the researchers suggest, may not be sufficient on its own to shift behavior. Deeper engagement, the kind that comes with a structured program, visible role models, and a clear signal from company leadership, appears to be what actually moves behavior.

A Low-Cost Fix With a Lesson That Travels

That two-hour session was funded entirely by the employers and run during work hours. Yet it produced measurable changes in how fathers spent their weekends, how mothers spent their workweeks, and how men in those organizations thought about leave. The authors describe it as a low-cost, employer-led intervention that can work alongside government policy to reach cultural barriers policy alone cannot.

Japan’s paternity leave gap is wide: generous policy on paper, with uptake far behind. That problem is not unique to Japan. Workplace norms that quietly penalize men for stepping back to care for children turn up in many countries, including ones with far more progressive reputations. The study’s core message is pointed. When generous leave policies sit unused because of office culture, the failure is not only in the law but in the organization, and organizations, it turns out, can do something about it.