In a push to get fathers to spend more time with their children, the Finnish government has announced plans to give the same parental leave to all parents. The new paid allowance will be of 164 days per parent.

The most generous country is Sweden which has 240 days of parental leave after a baby’s birth. Finland wants to promote wellbeing and gender equality.

Aino-Kaisa Pekonen, Health and Social Affairs Minister told reporters that “a radical reform of family benefits” had begun, with the aim of strengthening the relationship of parents from the start.

“This enables better equality between parents and diversity among families,” she said.

As of now, the maternity leave is of 4.2 months. Whereas the father gets 2.2 months until the child has turned two. From now each parent would get 6.6 months’ leave and a pregnant woman can get an additional one month allowance.

Last month, the Finnish PM, Sanna Marin said that Finland still had some way to go to achieve gender equality, and also said that only a few fathers were actually spending time with their children during their young age.

The current government is a coalition of five parties, all led by women. Four of them are under 35 years old, and all have them have made gender equality a priority.

While speaking at the 50th annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos last month, PM Sanna Marin called for states & companies to do more to ensure women were treated fairly, saying gender equality “doesn’t happen by itself”.

The EU has also headed the same way, asking the member states to provide each parent at least four months’ leave, including two months that can not be transferred.

According to the Unicef report which came out last year, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Estonia, and Portugal offer the best family-friendly policies. Whereas, Uk, Ireland, Cyprus, Greece, and Switzerland are at the lowest of 31 rich countries.