More and more men are receiving parental allowance. The number increased last year by 10,000 or 2.1 percent to 482,000, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on Wednesday. In the case of recipients, on the other hand, there was a decline of 32,800 or 2.3 percent to almost 1.4 million women.
As a result, the proportion of male recipients of all parental allowance receipts rose to 26.1 (2021: 25.3) percent. “The continuous increase in the proportion of fathers has continued,” it said. In 2015 it was still 20.9 percent.
“Even if it is fundamentally gratifying that the proportion of fathers has increased minimally, the proportion of fathers who receive parental allowance is still alarmingly low,” said the scientific director of the trade union-related Institute for Economic and Social Sciences (WSI). the Hans Böckler Foundation, Bettina Kohlrausch.
It is particularly problematic that the already much shorter entitlement period for fathers has actually decreased slightly. “Most of the care work is done by the mothers,” said the professor. “This unequal distribution then usually continues over the life course and leads to considerable social risks for mothers.”
More incentives are therefore needed for a fairer distribution of parental leave, for example by increasing the number of non-transferrable parental leave months.
As in the previous year, the leader in a comparison of the federal states with a proportion of fathers of 30.2 percent was Saxony in 2022, followed by Thuringia (28.4 percent), Bavaria (28.3 percent) and Baden-Württemberg (28.3 percent). The lowest proportion of fathers in 2022 – also like in the previous year – was in Saarland (20.8 percent).
The proportion of fathers indicates the proportion of male recipients of all parental allowance receipts. It would therefore be exactly 50 percent if both the father and the mother of all children received parental allowance equally.
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