Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng has revealed that the government did consider giving paternity leave as part of the enhanced Marriage and Parenthood package.

However, it stopped short of doing so due to how men in other countries did not take up the paternal leave that they were offered. For instance, only 1% of men in France did so in 2004.

Instead, the new offer of infant care and childcare leave that both fathers and mothers can take is supposedly a flexible arrangement to signal the importance of shared responsibility in parenting.

But if men are not expected to take up official paternity leave, why should they be expected to absent themselves from work to clear leave that they can ask their wives to take?