It's not just about dads - paternity leave is political

Should I Delete That?

Alex Light & Em Clarkson

Society & Culture, Unknown

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The UK has the worst paternity leave offering in Europe and the wider implication of this affects everyone, whether you have kids or not.

Today we spoke to Alex Lloyd-Hunter from The Dad Shift and Rachel Horne from Pregnant Then Screwed about their joint campaign ‘UK Paternity Leave is a Mother F**KER’

We spoke about how the UK’s paternity leave offering is disastrous for mums, dads and kids - but also the devastating wider cultural impact it has on the gender pay gap, discrimination and the workforce.

We have a window of political opportunity now as the government is undertaking a review of parental leave. Get engaged with The Dad Shift and Pregnant Then Screwed to see how you can help make a change.

PREGNANT THEN SCREWED

THE DAD SHIFT

Follow @dadshiftuk on Instagram

Follow @pregnant_then_screwed on Instagram

SIGN THE OPEN LETTER - The Dad Shift are calling on the new Secretary of State for Business Peter Kyle MP to prioritise making a paternity leave policy that's fit for the 21st century

The government have also opened a new consultation called 'Make Work Pay' looking at building enhanced dismissal protections for pregnant women and new mothers. Pregnant Then Screwed will be sharing information on how to engage on their pages in the coming weeks.

If you want to get in touch you can email us on [email protected]

@shouldideletethat

@em_clarkson

@alexlight_ldn

Should I Delete That is produced by Faye Lawrence

Studio Manager: Elliott Mckay

Video Editor: Celia Gomez

Social Media Manager: Sarah English

Music: Alex Andrew

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	So we have the worst potential leave in the whole of Europe. It's two weeks, paid less than half a minimum wage if you're employed. They have no choice, but they feel guilty walking out the door on a mother that is pleading for them to stay because they are struggling so much. And they have no choice. Hello and welcome to shut to delete that. I'm Alex Light. I'm M Clarkson. and we've got an important episode for you today. Really important. So pregnant men screwed are an organisation that I suspect many of you guys have heard of. We know we've got a mostly female demographic. The dad shift you might not be aware of yet. They're new to me, but I love what they're doing. They've done some really cool campaigns over the last weeks and months around London.
0:40.9	They were responsible for putting papooses with little babies on them,
0:44.9	strapping them to all the old male statues.
0:46.9	Did you see that?
0:47.8	Yeah, was that them.
0:48.9	Yeah, which was really cool.
0:50.6	They are currently spearheading a campaign with Pregnant and Screwed about paternity leave, about statutory, well, parental pay.
0:58.5	We know it's not good enough for maternity leave, but we often don't talk about the fact that paternity leave is woeful.
1:05.5	We get two weeks off statutory in the country.
1:08.8	As we'll get into, this informs a lot of how we societally view gender roles.
1:15.7	It is a massive contributing factor in the gender pay gap.
1:19.4	There is statistical evidence to show that this is a fucking disaster, quite frankly.
1:24.4	And we do get into that, but we just wanted to have a little conversation between
1:27.7	us before we started with the facts and the stats about why we wanted to do this episode
1:33.7	and give it a caveat because it is quite a heavy conversation. It is a heavy conversation.
1:39.0	And I think halfway through you got worried that we were being very off-putting to people who do not yet have kids.
1:47.0	So we want to stress very heavily that we love having kids.
1:50.9	Yeah.
1:51.3	But having kids isn't always the easiest.
1:54.2	And there are things set up within our, within the system, within our society that make having kids quite hard.
2:01.9	Sometimes it can be hard.
2:03.2	And this is one of those things, is paternity leave.
	...

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