In the last decade individualised well-paid parental leave has become a leitmotif of gender equality policies in Europe and most developed countries. This special issue aims to summarise present knowledge and contribute to the academic and public sociological debate from the gender equality perspective. Much is already known about how different regulations impact on the use of leave, and can serve different purposes. Still, we need to know much more about the transference of successful regulations and practices from one social or national context to others, the extension of care leave to other life phases, and how policy making takes account of research evidence. In September 2017 an International Seminar of the Leave Policies and Research Network took place in Madrid1, at which a broad range of contributions provided an up-to-date assessment of the state of the art and a rich research agenda, to which the following selected academic articles respond.