It’s partly because the last Labour government introduced one of the most gender unequal parental leave systems in the world. If you give mums nine months of paid parental leave and dads just two weeks, it’s fairly obvious who’s more likely to end up as the primary parent. British dads will never rise to the top of the international league tables on equal parenting until we have a political party brave enough to halve mums’ entitlements and give dads an equal, unequivocal right, to paid parental leave. The Coalition’s plan to allow mums to give some of their maternity leave to dads from 2015 are an important step forward, but fall significantly short of the “use it or lose it” approach to paternity pay that the Nordic states have pioneered.