The Paternity Leave Ripple Effect in the Finance Industry: Shaping Norms and Social Cohesion

ABSTRACT Paternity leave shifts work‐life policy from accommodating women's caregiving to legitimizing men's involvement in care. We examine how this is experienced in male‐dominated workplaces and interpreted by those around leave‐takers through interviews with fathers who took extended paternity leave in French finance organizations, and other stakeholders at work (colleagues, HR representatives, top managers) and at home (life partners). Following an interpretivist, context‐dependent approach, we find that participants associated paternity leave with changes in social relations, connectedness, and concern for collective well‐being. We theorize that, under certain conditions, these changes may coalesce into relational and collective experiences aligned with social cohesion beyond the workplace. We further theorize two pathways. In a transformative cycle, paternity leave may disrupt descriptive and injunctive gender norms, and experiences aligned with social cohesion occur. In a maintenance cycle, established norms persist, and such experiences largely do not arise. These divergent pathways depend on the favorability of nested contextual conditions: meso‐ (policy design, top management engagement, organizational climate) and micro‐ (manager, peer support), within the macro‐context of a male‐dominated industry. The study extends work‐life policy research beyond individual and organizational outcomes and identifies conditions under which paternity leave may challenge gendered divisions of labor within and beyond organizations.