Volvo
Family Bond

Equal parental leave is key to closing the gender pay gap.

But even in places like Scandinavia, many fathers take less leave than they’re entitled to. Research shows that men worry parental leave might hurt their careers (sigh, I know…) or make them seem less masculine.

Volvo asked us to communicate their new 24-week gender-neutral parental leave policy in a way that would encourage all employees to actually use it.

We turned to a behavioural nudge called the default effect.

Studies show that when an option is presented as the default, people are more likely to choose it. Defaults can override a lot of deep-seated psychological barriers – just look at organ donation rates.

We convinced Volvo to set the full 24-week leave as the default for all employees globally. This meant employees no longer had to decide how much leave to take. Instead, they had to actively choose to take less or opt out altogether.

As a result, the number of parental leave days taken went from 161 in the first quarter of 2021 to 4,577 in the third quarter.

We announced the news with a film, shared our research findings so others could learn and created a suite of social content to build support.

We received significant amounts of global coverage, including the BBC, Independent, Hindu Times, Gulf News, Bloomberg and Business Insider, among many others.