National Committee member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Gan Huatian: Suggests implementing mandatory and steadily extending paternity leave for men.

The 4th session of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) will open this afternoon. GAN Huatian, a CPPCC member and professor at West China Hospital of Sichuan University, believes that the workplace invisible discrimination faced by women due to childbirth, the lack of a reasonable family sharing mechanism, exacerbates anxiety about childbirth. He suggests safeguarding women's rights, encouraging childbirth by encouraging fathers to participate in childcare, and cracking down on employment gender discrimination. In recent years, the birth rate in China has continued to decline. Although the country has issued a policy allowing couples to have three children, as well as a series of supporting measures, and the "Five-Year Plan" emphasizes effective reduction of the cost of family birth and education, many families still face a range of difficulties. One problem is the weak protection of women's rights, which intensifies anxiety about childbirth. Childbirth often leads to interruptions in women's career development, and some companies, for cost reasons, engage in hidden discrimination by insufficiently implementing paternity leave and childcare leave, and a reasonable division of childbirth costs between the government, companies, and families has not been established. He suggests that encouraging childbirth should safeguard women's rights and create a fair and inclusive "child-friendly" employment environment. Improve the mechanism for sharing childbirth costs, further optimize the maternity insurance system, reduce the additional costs to enterprises due to the employment of women of childbearing age through financial subsidies, tax reductions, etc.; encourage fathers to participate in childcare, promote the implementation of paternity leave for men, on the basis of ensuring existing maternity leave, mandatory implementation and gradual extension of male paternity leave and parental shared childcare leave. The implementation of male parenting leave should be included in the corporate integrity assessment system, and by advocating for male sharing of childcare responsibilities, alleviate female childcare pressure. At the same time, crack down on employment gender discrimination, strengthen labor inspection, open up channels for complaints and reports, and severely punish and expose employers who discriminate against women based on marital and childbirth status.