Promoting fatherhood at the policy and institutional level can produce more symmetrical definitions of women and men as parents than will exist without such promotion. But does the politicising of fatherhood really ‘make men into fathers’ (Hobson, 2002)? Men are facing a challenge to increasingly share the responsibilities of family life at the same time as women have become an important part of the labour market. From the early 1990s, fatherhood has been a focus area in the development of parenthood policies. In order to encourage more men to take parental leave, individual and non-transferable rights for fathers have been legislated.

Changes in gender relations at the institutional level are expected to change the gendered practices of work–family reconciliation. The way men and women think, act and feel is, however, also influenced by the workplace culture (Haas et al, 2002) as well as by family negotiations (Olsen, 2000). Thus the politicising of parenthood to promote fathercare does not necessarily produce radical changes in the division of paid and unpaid work in everyday life.

In the Nordic countries, parental leave schemes have been available for men since the 1970s, but men have not taken up the opportunities nearly as much as had been expected (Leira; Borchhorst, this volume). The daddy quota of parental leave has been the main instrument in promoting fathers’ take-up of the leave. The introduction of a quota has increased the number of men who take parental leave (Brandth and Överli, 1998; Haas et al, 2002; Rostgaard, 2002). The quota is a challenge to the traditional division of care work. Decisions about sharing or not sharing parental leave are no longer totally up to the parents. The idea of the quota is the same in all countries – this leave period is reserved for the father – but there is variation in the actualisation in different Nordic countries (Rostgaard, 2002). The timing and the policy arguments have been different. The length of the quota varies, as well as the level of individual care responsibility, in other words, whether the father is the primary carer during his leave. Variation at the institutional level is related to differences in the gendered division of labour and power in everyday life, that is, to the take-up patterns of parental leave and the effects these patterns have for women's and men's positions in the labour market as well as at home.