To answer that question, my colleagues and I drew on survey data from over 12,000 U.S. respondents, collected in biannual interviews from the time they were teenagers until they were in their 40s. Our main research question was whether men who reduced or restructured their workplace commitments could expect lower earnings than men who didn’t. We controlled for a host of other variables to isolate the specific effects of taking time off to care for family members.

Although the magnitude of the earnings loss proved to be greater for women, we found that men who reduce their work hours or take time off for family reasons were also likely to experience lower earnings over the course of their working lives. In other words, taking time off for family carries financial risk for men, just as it does for women.

This conclusion is hardly surprising, but it does suggest a different way of thinking about the earnings gap between men and women. Today’s jobs still seem designed for the 1950s, when one partner was the sole breadwinner and the other was fully devoted to caring for home and children. Based on that model, ideal workers are still expected to be totally committed to their careers with few obligations at home.

But as Joan Williams, director for the Center of WorkLife Law at UC Hastings, and others have suggested, these inflexible, all-or-nothing workplaces drive women out of breadwinner roles and men out of caregiver roles.

In our research, U.S. women were over 10 times more likely than men to report that they’d modified employment for family reasons. And we speculate that many fathers, facing pressures to conform to masculine breadwinner ideals, refrained from even admitting to their employers that they wanted to modify their schedules for family reasons.

Were these men right to be cautious? Or do the benefits of paternity leave outweigh the loss of long-term earnings? To answer that question, we need to focus on countries like Sweden and Norway, where over 80 percent of men take paid family leave. Researchers have been able to study how this time away from work affects family earnings, labor market participation, and domestic satisfaction for both men and women.

As Liza Mundy notes in the January/February Atlantic, men who take parental leave tend to remain more involved in childcare as their children grow up. And they tend to share more equally in household labor, which increases women’s satisfaction. When fathers are involved in childcare, women enjoy more wealth, power, and authority in society at large. And studies show that their children enjoy some social and cognitive advantages, as well as more gender-balanced worldviews.

Research also shows that Swedish fathers who used a higher proportion of leave went on to spend fewer hours on the job and more time with their children on workdays. They were more likely to be involved in direct physical care of children, and more likely to report satisfaction with the amount of contact they have with their kids. Small sample studies of Nordic fathers taking parental leave, including one of Finnish fathers, find that the men most value the opportunity to develop closer relationships with their infants.