Although in principle this can be taken by either the mother or the father, in practice only 7.5% of beneficiaries are male: there is a very large gender employment gap among those with children aged 0-3 in Estonia (European Commission, 2016). Increasing the length of parental leave would therefore likely reduce labour market attachment among mothers, and potentially have undesirable longer term impacts: although parental leave of up to a year has been shown to increase mothers’ labour market attachment, further extensions are likely to reduce wages among mothers in the longer term (Rossin-Slater, 2017). Therefore, it has been decided to introduce an additional month of parental leave that will be available only to the father on a non-transferable basis. More flexibility to allow parental leave to be used over a longer period has also been proposed.