Fathers’ use of parental leave is a crucial policy issue in relation to gender equality and at the root of gendered caring norms and unequal divisions of labour throughout the life course. Using comparative mixed methods and a framework that conceptualises parenting as gendered and performative (Butler, 1999), this research contributes knowledge of the influence on fathers’ parental leave decisions of three dimensions of norms: policy, discourse and cultural norms; workplace cultures; and peer and family group norms. I compare the effect of social norms on the decisions made by fathers working for the same multinational firm in three countries: the UK, Sweden and Portugal. I argue that a Butlerian understanding can help answer the question frequently posed in the literature: why, when we know couples have egalitarian intentions prior to the birth of a first child, do couples slip back into conservative gender roles once the child has arrived (Fox, 2019; Grunow and Veltkamp, 2016; Miller, 2011)?

I provide a comparative backdrop to the three focus countries, to contextualise the path dependencies underpinning the enabling parental leave policy and culture in Sweden and the contradictory and ambiguous parental leave policies and cultures in the UK and Portugal. I use data from the 2017 wave of the European Values Study to demonstrate the differences in attitudes towards gender roles between the three countries. I find that overall, Sweden holds the most egalitarian values, followed by the UK, and then Portugal, where the data reflects ‘normative ambiguity’ (Wall, 2015).

I then theorise the extent to which each of the three domains of norms shaped fathers’ use of leave in the three countries, through analysis of qualitative data collected in 45 interviews with fathers. I argue that the widespread normative support for gender equality embedded in Swedish culture, alongside the enabling policy framework first introduced in 1974, contributed to the existence of a robust ‘citation’ (Butler, 1993) for fathers’ use of parental leave entitlements, which cannot fully exist in Portugal and the UK under the current discursive and material conditions. My argument, via a Butlerian critique of regulation that posits parental leave policy frameworks as both regulated by and regulating gender, thus contributes to the body of work foregrounding the centrality of non-transferable leave entitlements to fathers’ use of leave.

At work, despite conducting interviews with fathers at the same firm in each country, organisational culture was highly divergent between the nations. Bringing organisational culture studies together with Butler’s performative ontology of gender, I thus theorise organisational culture as gender regulation and conceptualise the ‘performative breadwinner’, articulating the inability of many of the fathers to cease reproducing the masculine ‘ideal worker’ norm. The micro-level insights documented demonstrate how fathers’ everyday experiences are shaped by cultural backdrop, peer behaviour and forms of social constraint that form the choice architecture that shapes individual decisions. The research offers an original, granular account of the iterative process through which ‘father-friendly’ leave entitlements, combined with discursive changes, contribute to wider uptake of leave entitlements, and how shifts in norms over time are made possible – or not – through citationality.