The transition to parenthood is a major life-course event that shapes women’s labor market participation and men’s involvement in caregiving. ‘Greedy’ work has been used to explain these gendered patterns, as demanding jobs hinder couples from enacting a more egalitarian division of labor. While studies have investigated how ‘greediness’ affects mothers’ employment and salary, especially in the US, far fewer examine fathers, who may be constrained from fulfilling caregiving roles when pressured to prioritize paid work. Additionally, such studies tend to conflate individual – and contextual-level processes. This study fills this gap by exploring how overtime – at the individual, workplace and organizational levels – relates to parental leave uptake among fathers and mothers. It utilizes extensive survey data linked to administrative register data covering the entire Swedish population. Findings showed that fathers’ individual overtime work was unrelated to parental leave uptake. However, working in a workplace or organization where colleagues worked overtime led to lower leave uptake. For mothers, overtime at any level was unrelated to leave uptake. By examining how parental leave uptake is embedded within three interrelated frameworks – devotion schemas, the ideal worker norm, and greedy institutions – we gain a comprehensive understanding of how overtime work shapes parental leave uptake.

Although parental leave policies for fathers have been introduced in European countries, fathers typically do not take leave beyond a few weeks. Even in Sweden fathers take substantially less leave than mothers. While interview studies have documented fathers’ reluctance to take leave due to concerns about burdening their colleagues or client loss, quantitative research has largely overlooked how workplaces accommodate fathers’ absences. Using Swedish full-population employer-employee administrative data, this study constructs the novel indicator internal substitutes—i.e., the number of colleagues in comparable roles who can cover the workload of the absent father. Applying stepwise multiple regressions and occupational fixed effects models, this study found that leave duration increased with substitute availability, from a few additional days when some substitutes were present to nearly one and a half weeks when many were available. This association persisted when comparing fathers within the same occupation. In contrast, internal substitute availability was unrelated to mothers’ parental leave length when accounting for unobserved occupational heterogeneity. These findings reveal that seemingly gender-neutral workplace practices have gendered implications. Achieving equality in parental leave across Europe requires not only providing individual entitlements but also addressing the workplace practices through which leave is managed. 

Sweden is widely regarded as a forerunner in gender-equal family policy. Yet, Swedish fathers take only a third of the available parental leave days. Workplace context can shape the feasibility and acceptability of fathers' leave-taking: managers influence workplace norms, allocate resources, and signal whether extended leave is supported. Because fathers calibrate their leavetaking to what they perceive their manager finds acceptable, managers' education—linked to more gender-egalitarian attitudes—may signal greater acceptance of extended leave, and thereby shape how much leave fathers take. Using Swedish employer-employee linked administrative data covering the full population, I estimate multilevel models linking managerial education to fathers’ leave length, net of each father’s own education. Results show that having a higher share of tertiary-educated managers was positively associated with fathers’ leave length, and this effect was stronger among tertiary-educated fathers, suggesting in-group favoritism. These findings suggest that the management team might condition the extent to which fathers convert leave entitlements into actual days taken.