The Institute for Advanced Family Studies (IESF) at UIC Barcelona helped organise the second edition of the Expert Meeting on Fatherhood, an international event held on 29 and 30 June at IESE Business School and coordinated by the Institute’s director and lecturer in the Faculty of Education Sciences, Dr Marc Grau. The meeting was held in cooperation with Harvard University and the International Center for Work and Family (ICWF) at IESE Business School, as part of the 6th HRF Experts Meeting.

The event brought together international researchers and experts from the fields of social policy, health, organisations and family studies to examine the current challenges of engaged fatherhood and its impact on the wellbeing of men, families and gender equality. Participants included leading specialists from research centres and universities around the world, who addressed topics such as paternity leave, work-family balance, fathers’ involvement in child-rearing and the social consequences of father absence.

This meeting builds on the first edition, held at Harvard University in 2018, when Dr Marc Grau was a research fellow there and also coordinated the event. That research project resulted in the publication of the open-access book Engaged Fatherhood for Men, Families and Gender Equality (Springer, 2022), which has now been downloaded more than 245,000 times and has established itself as a leading international reference in the field.

The conference’s scientific programme included presentations and debates on emerging realities in fatherhood, public policies to support fathers, the sharing of caregiving responsibilities, men’s health, the impact of the pandemic on family organisation and strategies to promote greater involvement by men in family life. Dr Grau also presented the paper Negotiating Fatherhood at Work and Home: A Process Perspective on Fatherhood Enactment, focused on the processes by which men negotiate and develop their role as fathers while balancing family and professional responsibilities.

UIC Barcelona’s involvement in this initiative further cements the IESF’s position as a leading research centre in the study of family change and family policy, while strengthening the University’s international profile in a field of research it has actively promoted for many years through research projects, publications and partnerships with renowned academic institutions.