Parental leave policies in Canada are designed for both parents, but fathers use them at roughly half the rate of mothers. From 2012 to 2017, Statistics Canada found 88 per cent of mothers took maternity leave, parental leave or a combination of the two, compared with 46 per cent of fathers.

When fathers do take leave, it is typically for shorter periods than mothers. One reason for this is a fear that doing so will harm their careers. But recent research, including our own, suggests this fear is often unfounded and that, under certain conditions, men may actually benefit from taking a longer leave.

Men’s use of parental leaves has long been seen as a tool for advancing gender equity in the workplace by normalizing its use by people of all genders, and in the home, by giving men more opportunities to take on a meaningful role in child care.

But it can undermine it in the short term if it benefits men and not women. In fact, past research has shown that women are often penalized for taking parental leaves.

Our findings point to a less visible source of workplace gender inequity: advantages men experience that women do not. When engaging in the same behaviours, men accrue incremental advantages that help propel them into leadership roles, while women do not. Over time, these small differences can compound.

To understand why men benefit from taking a parental leave but women do not, we examined what taking parental leave signals in the workplace. We focused on the role of communality — a set of traits........

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