Parental leave has not lost its relevance on the political agenda. The continuing discussion is still about how to produce 'equality' if you change parts of it. In Austria we have a maternity leave since 1957. The credit belongs to feminist movements for maternity protection at the end of the late 19th century. So first it was a woman's prerogative. This prerogative on maternity leave was defended in the discussion of the shared parental leave in the 1970s for a long time. Only in 1989 a

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... us among the major parties SPÖ and ÖVP was reached. The socio-political argument that women and men should have the same possibilities to join the labour market and to be envolved in the educational work was the decisive factor for the commencement of the shared parental leave. However, the statistical data on labor force survey in 2014 have shown that Austrian families prefered – 24 years after the commencement of the parental leave – the traditional male-breadwinner model instead of egalitarian arrangements. So fact is that the socio-political aim to break with traditional gender roles in the course of a shared parental leave was not achieved accordingly.