 I'm the President and CEO of New America and this is an event I've been waiting for and a subject so close to my heart. And so before I launch into some opening comments on Baternity Leave, I do want to thank our sponsoring partner in our event, which Probe Mundo, which is a global organization that works to engage men and boys on issues of global equality. And Gary Barker here in the front row who is the International Director and Founder. When I met him just in person, I said we are retweeters. I've been retweeting him for a long time and reading him and saying absolutely and why aren't more people saying this. So what I want to do is talk about how Baternity Leave helps women and then how it helps men and then how we get there. And there are many different ways to get there. I'm just going to give you one way. So let's start with how it helps women. And the standard narrative or a standard narrative is Baternity Leave would help women because it would level the playing field in terms of how people take time off when children are born. It takes two people to conceive a child still no matter where that act may happen. And it should take two to raise them and this normalizes the idea that when children come into the world and need to be raised, it's a joint responsibility. And that that would then reduce the stigma around women taking maternity leave because it would become family leave, maternity or paternity. And critically, if more men took paternity leave, more men would start saying, well, why are you discriminating against me when I come home? Come back. Why are you assuming I'm no longer as committed to my career? Which is what happens to women all the time if it were something where men were also taking that leave and also discovering the immediate, gee, I guess you're not as committed to your career as I thought you were, which will happen even more for men than for women because it's rarer, then that will help break open these attitudes overall. And I think that's true. But I think it's just a small part of the story. I think the other piece that no one's talking about is that we need paternity leave so that men can bond with their children in ways that will make them want to be the primary caregiver, at least for some part of that child's life, and that will then make it more socially acceptable to men and to women for men to be in that role. And we need that because if we really want women at the top, the very top, I just came back from Davos, so that level top, all those CEOs, the only way we're going to get there is for men to be supporting women the way women support men. And that's the piece that no one's talking about. And all the most powerful women, this, that, and the other that I go to that we all celebrate, the women CEOs, and it's so great, nobody ever says, would you please explain what your husband does? At least 50%, and it's very hard to get statistics precisely because women don't want to talk about this, at least 50% have a husband who is the primary caregiver. We should not be in the least surprised about that. There is no male CEO with a family I've ever seen who did not have a wife who was a primary caregiver. She might have been a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, some other wonderful thing. She might have continued to work, but she's the available parent. I can't be here unless my husband is the available parent. It just doesn't work. Women don't want to talk about this because they think it's emasculating because there's just a part of their story they don't want to tell, and yet it's an essential piece. And so we've got to normalize that for men as well as for women. It starts early on, right? Why is my husband willing to play that role? He's not just willing. He wanted to play that role because I had four months, we were both academics, so I had a semester of maternity leave, and he had a semester of paternity leave. And by the end of his semester of paternity leave, our son was calling for him rather than for me, which he definitely enjoyed. I enjoyed less, but that's the deal, right? I mean, that's what you get. You get to be the center of some small being's existence for good or for ill. And he felt as competent as I did, taking care of our son. Indeed, I would argue in some ways he was more competent. Neither one of us had the baby manual, and he did a lot more reading than I did. So paternity leave is essential to establish that bond where the guy says, hey, not only is this pretty wonderful to engage with a child and bond in the way that you do, but also so the guy feels every bit as competent as the woman does. And that over then going forward, they really are equal partners. So paternity leave, by starting that process and legitimating it and allowing and saying, yes, this is just as normal for a guy as it is for a woman, long term puts more men in the position where, as I put it, they can support their wives with care rather than cash. Because we're good on men support their wives. That's good. That's part of the traditional male idea of a man as a provider and a protector. He supports his family. My point is there are many ways to provide. There are many ways to support. Care and cash are the two big ones. Somebody's got to bring home dollars or whatever currency you're in, and somebody has to convert those dollars to nurture and shelter and clothing and food and education. And if you don't have those two things, nobody survives. So they're equal, care and cash. And traditionally men provided the cash, women provided the care. Now women can provide both. The next phase is that men have to be able to provide the care and have to be fully legitimated and valued to do it. And paternity leave is a big step in that direction. So that's how I think about why paternity leave is incredibly important for women. Because I think in the end you can't get women to the same place men are unless you let men get to the same place women are. And that's not the way we normally frame it. And that involves all sorts of issues around how we think about what's masculine and how we think about what's feminine that I won't go into right now. But then let's talk about what paternity leave does for men. And I've already said that it allows a man to develop the same kind of relationship with his child that it does for a mother. Now we have all these myths about, they're not myths. They're half truths about children need their mothers. And in fact I hear this all the time. I've got one guy who drives me back and forth often and he's always telling me, you know, children need their mothers. There's just nothing like it. It's got to be the mothers. I just don't believe that. I mean I do think children need their mothers. But I also think children need their fathers. And I think they need their fathers every bit as much as they need their mothers although it is a different relationship. Now of course that difference is also going to vary according to what kind of a man you are and what kind of a woman you are. And as we know the differences in trod gender are greater in the end than the differences in ter gender. So there's going to be lots of different ways. But allowing a man to bond with his child in that way that a woman does early on is, you know, it's one of the great experiences of your life, right? And what has to happen for this to really develop is the guy has to be solely in charge. Because there are countless examples of, you know, the guy, somebody just came up to me a week ago and said, you say that a man can bond with his child just the same way a woman can, but my daughter just had a child and my son in law says that child has eyes only for his mother. And I said, has your son ever really been the primary caregiver or is he helping, right? Is he doing what his wife says to do? And he said, oh well he's helping. And I said, yeah, well that's why, right? He's never actually the sun and the moon and the stars for that child. The mother's there and he's sort of the additional, well not surprisingly the child looks at the mother. The data shows that where men really are the primary caregiver, they have the same kinds of bonds and they have similar hormonal changes. It's not oxytocin, but it's similar hormonal changes to a woman. Now, that's something all men should be able to experience. It's the right to be a father and to be a father in a full and engaged way, the same way women expect to be able to be mothers. To get there, we are going to have to reduce female sexism. Because when I talk to groups of women, which I mostly do, I offer the following hypothetical. I say, if you walked into your office and your boss said to you, I'm biologically better at this, but I think you can do it if I just give you enough instruction. And if when you travel, I will call in every hour to make sure you're doing it right. Not enough of you or parents, because every woman who above a certain age starts laughing when I give them that hypothetical, because she knows that's the way we treat our husbands. And I speak from experience. I mean, I did that until my husband finally said, I'm happy to be the primary caregiver, but I'm doing it my way, not your way. That is also what the husband of the first prime minister, female prime minister of Norway, Gro Bruntlen, said, four kids, she was asked to be in the cabinet at 35, he said, great, I'll do it my way. Women, and again, I'll include myself, we do tend to assume, we've been socialized to assume, we do bear the child, although we don't actually know what we're doing once the child is delivered, I mean, it doesn't come with an instruction manual, we figure we got to figure it out. We do tend to think that we know how to do it. And we know how to do it the way our mothers did it. But there's nothing to say that's right, right? When I'm taking care of my kids, the house is a lot cleaner. I think they're better nourished. I do think that eating with forks and knives rather than fingers is preferred. And I'm quite certain that is a good way to raise a child. When my husband is in that role, few of those things happen, but they learn poker. They watch endless movies around a particular theme. They do all sorts of really exciting sort of fun things that I actually wouldn't think about, and who on earth is to say that one or the other way is better? Ideally, we both have both, right, in the perfect world. So what I want to say about what it does for men is it empowers them in the family sphere in the same way that women have been empowered in the work sphere. And women often work differently than men, not always, again, this is not biological essentialism, but we have lots of things to bring to the workplace, and the workplace is a better place because of it. Men have that same thing to bring to the family. So let me just conclude with how do we get there? This would be great for women, this would be great for men. One way to get there is the way the Germans have done it, and I just listened to Ursula von der Leyen, who's now the Minister of Defense, but was the Minister of Family, who is a conservative. She's said, she put in expanded maternity leave and paternity leave in Germany, she is an absolute crusader for women's rights and men's rights and paternity leave. She herself has seven children making it very hard for her conservative peers to attack her, because she's there as the ultimate family woman who is making this argument. What they did was to put in a year's worth of family leave, ten months of that you can divide however you want, two months of that, if the guy doesn't take it, you lose it. So it's user lose. And what that's done, it's transformed paternity leave from this thing that only very few number of guys did and was not regarded as particularly masculine, to how idiotic are you to leave money on the table, right? You got two months of salary at 80% and you're not gonna take it. So 30% of German men up from five, and this has only been a few years, are now taking paternity leave. And this is Germany, this is a pretty hard culture to crack on this score. So 30% of German men in Scandinavia, as we know, where they've had similar kinds of paternity leave policies, not only are a majority of men taking paternity leave, but the culture in companies is changing such that a Finnish CEO said to me, I'm beginning to look at somebody who didn't take paternity leave and wonder what's wrong with him. And that's where I'm gonna leave it. That's where we ought to get to, is you had a child. You have the opportunity to take time out. You don't do that because you'd rather work and the culture sends you that message. What's wrong with you and what's wrong with us? But we're gonna fix that today. So that is all I have to tell you. I would, as I said, this is one of my very favorite subjects. I'm gonna hand over now to Dan Koyes, who is somewhere in the room, I hope. I'm not gonna hand over quite yet. Here we go. So Dan Koyes who slates a culture editor and equally importantly a father, or more importantly, equally, we'll go with that. Equally, I think that's how I feel. Who is going to talk about how paternity leave impact or he's gonna moderate a discussion about how paternity leave impacts the life of the child. So thank you very much. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Dan Koyes. As Amory said, I'm the culture editor at Slate. I also co-host Slate's parenting podcast, which is called mom and dad are fighting. Please listen. So when my two daughters were born, I took unpaid paternity leave both times. I had to argue my way into it because I worked at two companies, not Slate, where people didn't have kids usually and definitely dudes didn't have kids. So that was traumatic. And my actual memories of those weeks are somewhat shaky. Like it's sort of all a haze of late night feedings and arguing with my mother-in-law and worrying about how much the baby weighed. And so I don't remember a lot of it. And so naturally I would really like some reassurance that that time was well spent. So I've brought this panel here to reassure me personally while also to talk to all of us about paternity leave and how it impacts the life of a child on any number of fronts. So let's meet our esteemed panel that's starting right next to me. Joe Jones is founder of the Center for Urban Families, a Baltimore nonprofit service organization with the goal of enhancing the ability of women and men to contribute to their families as wage earners and of men to fulfill their roles as fathers. He currently serves on President Obama's task force on fatherhood and healthy families. Hello, Joe. Dr. Liz Peters is a labor economist and demographer with over 30 years of experience in social and family policy related research. Her work focuses on the impact of public policies on child care choice, work family balance, family decision making, family formation and dissolution, child support, child well-being and father involvement. Peters is currently the director of the Urban Institute Center on Labor, Human Services and Population. Hello, Dr. Peters. And Mike Feigelsen, Feigelsen or Fagelsen or Fiegelsen? Fagelsen. Fagelsen is the executive director of the Bernard Van Leer Foundation based in the Hague and focused on improving opportunities for children up to age eight who are growing up in socially and economically difficult circumstances. Mike has degrees from Wesleyan and Princeton universities. He serves on the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Behavior. Hello, Mike. All right, so we have three great panelists here. I have a bunch of questions for them. You guys have questions for them too, I hope. We'll open the floor up to questions toward the end. So first, I want to talk to ask all of you. This is something that Anne-Marie touched on in her opening remarks. How does paternity leave fit into sort of a growing or evolving view of what fathering really is, both America and worldwide? How do differing views of what being a father means? How does that affect paternity leave and how people viewing? Joe, why don't we start with you? Well, you know, it's interesting. First of all, thank you all for having all of us here. I can't tell you how exciting it is to be in a form where we're talking about dads in a very positive light and thinking about what it means for strong families, strong communities, and a strong America. Paternity leave is one of those things that personally, when I remember when my youngest son was born and I was working for the Baltimore City Health Department within maternal and child health and with an emphasis on maternal and child health. And we had really cajoled the health department to think about what it meant to work with the dads who were the fathers of the children born to those mothers that the health department was tasked with working with to reduce infant mortality. And when my son was born, because I had this interest in fatherhood, I knew I wanted to spend time. But I felt so awkward asking for time off to do it. And so when I think about that and then fast forward to my organization, which was last year celebrated, it's 15-year anniversary. And preparation for this, and to be honest with you, I really knew that as a result of my leadership, we had promoted wanting guys within the organization who had children to spend time with their families. But I really couldn't regurgitate to you what our policy was around it. And so I went back to our HR folks, and I've got a great COO. And she took my mandate and moved forward. And we now, every dad who has a child or adopts gets two weeks of paid paternity leave. Now, we're a nonprofit with emphasis on non. So for us to be able to stretch and do that is, it takes a bit, but that's our commitment. Because we want to make sure that when we talk about our tagline, so the name of the organization is the Center for Urban Families, our tagline is helping fathers and families work. So we don't want to be an organization that promotes responsible fatherhood. And internally, we're not supporting dads to spend time with their children consistently across the board, but particularly doing those very early and important days after the birth of a child. So for us, it's both personal, it's both real, and we want to model that kind of presence within the nonprofit sector. Do you find that the younger employees at your organization, the dads of the younger dads, do they take that as a given that they should be so involved with their kid's life that paternity leave is like a no, you don't even have to think about it? It's kind of hard to work for me at that unit. Fair enough. I just believe it's a fundamental tent of who we are as an organization. And some of that has to do with my role as being the founder and still being there after 15 years. But leadership doesn't matter. And if my organization, God forbid, I got hit by the bus. I don't want to get hit by the bus. But if I did, and we had to make an immediate shift to new leadership, with that individual person still bringing the same kind of perspective. So I do think leadership matters, and we need to cultivate new leaders who embody those kind of principles. So COO's who will actually take those vague proclamations and make them into policy. Not just COO's, but janitors as well. We want everybody in the organization to feel and perpetuate that thought. Liz, in your research, talk to us a little bit about some of the findings that you guys have collected and discovered from research around the world about how paternity leave really materially affects the life of a child. Is there, do you have a sense of the real studies that show the positive effects that paternity leave can have on a child? Well, I think I want to actually put paternity leave into the broader context of work-family balance. Because as we briefly discussed before this, there is not a lot of research, especially in the US, on paternity leave per se. But work-family balance, there's a lot of work on that, much of it relating to women. But more and more, there is work that's looking at the role that dad can play in the family. So there's a lot more research on child care. The dad's providing child care. We know that when moms are employed, 30% of the kids are in some dad care while the mom is employed. That's one of the largest forms of child care for kids 0 to 5. So we know that's big. Again, we know a lot less about paternity leave. But that's what starts it all. So the purpose, I think, of paternity leave, the several purposes are one to facilitate that early bonding between dads and their kids. The hope is to shape habits and behaviors so that dads will continue in those kind of roles over time. So one recent study that was done by Leonard of Hamnishie and Jane Womfogel showed that dads who took longer paternity leave were more likely to be involved with their kids in caring for their kids, diapering and bathing and so forth, nine months later. And they were trying to control for everything. So there's a little bit of research, but not very much research on this yet. But I do want to put it into the broader context of work family because I think we not only want to be talking about paternity leave, we're going to talk about paid sick leave and other ways to facilitate dads and moms to be able to care for their kids. Mike, on a global level, what kinds of research do you see about the tangible effects that paternity leave and work-life balance can have on kids? Most of the stuff we see is in Europe and it basically has a positive impact on almost anything that you can imagine. So we see it in terms of lower levels of violence in the family, kids doing better on test scores later in life, better health outcomes for children. You see better health outcomes for the fathers themselves. You see families making more money, though women are into the workforce. There's one study that I thought was particularly interesting. I have a nine-month-old daughter and I think of this study frequently. It found that when children saw their fathers involved in domestic work, they'd be more likely to choose for careers like engineering. And so every time I'm walking out of the or other careers that are outside the house and not stereotypically female. And so she's her name's Mila and I'm making a habit of ironing in front of her. I mean, she's very young. But the research that we do have in a lot of it is from places like Sweden and Finland and Norway. And of course, everyone says, but that's Sweden and Finland and Norway. It's a rich country. It's a small country. I mean, it just indicates that everything is better. This vision of growing up Mila being like, I'm not going to iron that. That's man's work. But if I could just say, your initial question, I think the point about paternity leave, because we work in a lot of countries where even if you say it wouldn't matter, it's such a large informal workforce in some places, it's a norm setting device, I think, like any legislation. On the one hand, saying it's OK to be involved. And the other saying it's your responsibility to be involved. And I think that those two messages are very important, not just for the kids, but for men and women. And in my particular case, when I come back to the US, I live in the Netherlands. I just came in. I have to adjust myself and remind myself I'm in the United States. Because in Europe, two weeks doesn't sound so great. Although in the Netherlands, it's only one. But I work for an organization that's focused on early childhood development. And my daughter was born. I had six weeks paid leave. And then two weeks into my paid leave, the chair of the board called and said, then executive director has resigned. Would you like to do this? And I said, I would love to do this. I cannot do anything until my paternity leave is over. And he said, of course not. That conversation has never occurred in the United States. I suspect it may have occurred in Promundo, one of our co-hosts. But I guess the point being that these sorts of policies, and again, the Netherlands as a country, is not actually great on this. They have one week. But the permission and the sense that it's your responsibility, I think, sends a message to the whole society. So even if it's not going to be implemented for the whole country, it's still important to begin to set norms and laws to this effect. Joe, you mentioned, and Liz, you also mentioned this notion that paternity leave is a way of sort of setting a certain baseline and developing a certain understanding in fathers of the level of involvement and engagement that they can have with their families and their children. Joe, in your work in Baltimore, do you see at a community level a growing acceptance of that notion that fathers are not just people who support financially or who protect, but who are actually engaged in the lives of their kids? So you're asking me the days of John Wayne and the Rifleman, Chuck Connors and all that. Has that changed? I guess, yes. Well, it's interesting, because going back to the founding of our country, we've always had this perception of men going to work and going to war, being providers and protectors. And our stories are replete with folks who say, I know my dad loved me, but he never had the capacity to actually verbally say it. And so it really is, how do we change that narrative? And I do see over the course of the last 10 to 15 years that narrative being changing, that narrative changing with respect to what's happening in the community, where you now, it's not so much an aberration to see a young man, and I'm talking about a brother, right? A brother with locks in his hair, pushing a baby carriage down the streets of Baltimore City, right? That would never have happened 10 or 15 years ago. But I do want to share one thing, and this is Dateline. Dateline, I'm not going to read the entire letter, but I just want to read an aspect of it. Dateline, June 16, 1995, memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies. Subject, supporting the role of fathers and families. This is from President Bill Clinton. I am in firm belief that the future of our republic depends on strong families, and that committed fathers are essential to those families. I'm also aware that strengthening fathers' involvement with their children cannot be accomplished by the federal government alone. The solutions lie in the hearts and consciences of individual fathers and the support of the families and communities in which they live. However, there are ways for a flexible, responsible government to help support men in their role as fathers. Therefore, today, I'm asking the federal agencies to assist me in this effort. I direct all executive departments and agencies to review every program, policy, and initiative, herein referred to collectively as programs that pertains to families to blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. Every agency included the Office of Personnel Management, and there were a group of us that were invited by the White House to review the reports that came into the White House through the Vice President's office. And even the Office of Personnel Management says, how the heck do we do this? And it tied into how do you change policies so that even within federal government, when guys are having babies, paternity leave is one of those things. So we can begin to see, like in 1995, which I would consider to be the period around the modern day era of responsible fatherhood, how some of the groundwork was laid for us to be having discussions like this. I don't know back then if we would be holding a conversation here around paternity leave. So we have evolved, we have advanced, but we are nowhere as near close to being equitable in terms of how we support moms to be nurturers and caregivers and our expectations for dads. I'd love to see a dad, when he's holding his child, that when a dad goes into the hospital when his child was being born, where the staff will engage him, support him and encourage him to be there. I remember when my son was born, I went to cut the umbilical cord. They looked at me like I was crazy. They wanted to push me off to the side and ask me that I had a constitution to really do it. And so I think that changing that narrative about what the possibilities are for dads is critically important. Within a presidential campaign, the largest expenditure in terms of a line item is around marketing and communications. To change the hearts and the minds of people, we've got to change the narrative. I think those kind of investments in terms of changing the narrative go into supporting what happens on the ground and within communities. How did you do when you cut the cord? I think I did OK. I mean, when these were a little shaky, I wouldn't tell it back then, because I had to be a man. But you know. I almost passed out. But to Mike's point about the evidence, the evidence says my son went on to become an engineer. So you know, I noted him down. So I just shared one other piece of evidence that my staff prepared some talking points for me for this. And I was reviewing one. And we have a research and evaluation officer who I'm always critiquing because she's not sort of thinking about political strategy. And she surprised me. So I just want to share one. She said, what are dads the most afraid of? Dads of girls. She said, they're girls getting pregnant when they're younger. And there's evidence to suggest that if dads are getting involved, that's less likely to happen. I'll tell you on the count of side, one of the biggest fears of our dads is they don't want to be in the house alone with their daughters the first time that that thing happens. Read between the lines, if you don't completely get me, right? I think we're allowed to say you're referring to menstruation. You said that, not me. I think if you want to change the narrative, and this has to do with what are dads afraid of? What are they interested in? A lot of the narrative that I hear that we see, it's not working from where men already are. It's not thinking about what they naturally want and then trying to appeal to that. It's saying you need to change. And I think that we would be much more effective if we said, you can still be powerful. You can still demand respect. This is how you get it, as opposed to making men feel like they might lose some of those things. And so the way that we market to men to work from their self-interest, just from an efficacy standpoint, I think will work a lot better. The day when a man holding his baby in ironing is a symbol of toughness, that's when things will have changed. I think it's also important when trying to change the narrative to be also aware of the potential constraints. And one thing that occurred to me when I was thinking about this is that the situation is often very different for middle class families versus lower income families. There are different kinds of constraints for lower income families. One constraint is kind of the norms. And I think this whole nurturing father thing really started out much more of a middle class phenomenon. And the red winner was really an important narrative and I think still continues to be in the low income communities. And so not that low income dads aren't nurturing, but I think that this red winner thing is so important maybe because they struggle so hard to put bread on the table. Other constraints for low income families are that the kinds of jobs that they're in are they certainly don't get any kind of paternity leave. The administration has been trying to make the business case for parental leave. And I think they can pretty convincingly make the business case for high skilled jobs. You want to reduce, turn over, you increase morale for high skilled jobs. For low skilled jobs that a lot of these low income dads have, that case isn't nearly as strong. So you're going to have businesses being less willing to have family friendly policies. And I think the third thing that's different about low income dads is that you have a higher likelihood of not living with their kids. And you've got to figure out how to deal with it. Not that they don't. Again, there's a lot of these dads that do. Half of the kids that are born outside of wedlock, the parents are cohabiting at the time of marriage. But still, there's a higher proportion of dads in lower income families not living with their kids. Some of them are still involved. Some of them are not. And the ones that are still involved, I think we need to be thinking about how do you offer paternity leave for them? What kind of logistics are there in order to make that eligible? And how does one develop a policy around that? So I think it's important to think about the constraints that may be different for different types of populations. What? Do any of you have any thoughts on ways that, other than just mandating from the top down through legislation, which may or may not ever happen in this country, what are ways to encourage, both to encourage lower income fathers to seize these opportunities and to encourage the kinds of places that lower income fathers often work to offer these kinds of opportunities? Are there ways to incentivize that or ways to make that happen? I know from Alvin's point, part of what we do at the center for our families is to connect dads back to their children. And as she was mentioned, some of these family types are very complex. But we also want them to be connected to the labor force, both the men and the women that we serve. And we really work with our key employer partners, not just to give a person the opportunity to work, but to understand what we're trying to achieve in terms of strengthening families. And we want them to be involved and engage and get exposed to the programming that we do. So it's not just a transactional relationship where we're asking the employer to hire somebody. It's really getting to know the families and the individuals that we serve. And I think when you can make it more human, right now, particularly with some of the way in which folks apply for employment now, online profiling, software that will not even get you to a face-to-face interview unless you can do all the right things in terms of submitting an online application and filling out a profile, when we get away from that human connection, the way in which we see some people makes it very difficult for us to promote the kind of policies that says we want to be a company that changes and reflects the complexity of the people that we hire to address some of the things that was mentioned in terms of how do we not look at the nuclear family as the only way in which we provide parental or paternity leave and support for families and people to take time off. And I think it's easy for us to default back to what we need to do for moms. And it really is difficult for a lot of us to think through what it means to engage dads in these kind of complex policies and changing dynamics within the workforce. And I think that we just got to continue to drill. Conversations like this are absolutely necessary, but I don't think they can stop here. They have to happen in communities where people actually live. And I think we have to think about what role the face of the community has in these kind of conversations as well. Mike, as your organization, I know that you guys give out grants to lots of different organizations around the world. Are there organizations you know of that are doing work in these specific areas that you would recommend or that people ought to look into? I'd certainly recommend Promundo. And we do work with them. I mean, we work in a lot of environments where paternity leave as such is not a real possibility. So we're trying to find other ways to involve dads. And maybe I'll share one example of something we're doing with the Private Sector Foundation of Uganda, which is a coalition that lobbies for better business conditions in Uganda for all Ugandan businesses. And over a period of time, we persuaded them that investing in early childhood was a way to get better business conditions for the country. And started talking to them about how to involve fathers more. And in this environment, I was telling Joe about it. We're working in pretty extreme poverty, less than $1 a day in rural areas. And what they did was they set up these savings and loans groups. It's literally a box with three keys. And people come together and they save money, open it every week who needs money, who's paying back, et cetera. The fathers with some external stimulus in this process that belong to this setup, what they call the Responsive Fatherhood Club. So they would meet together just before or after the loan repayment meetings and talk about what they could do to get dads more involved, in this case, in going to maternal health visits or in not being involved in domestic violence. And so these guys on a volunteer basis go house to house, do theater, these kinds of things. And we've seen more men involved in maternal health visits, less violence in the home, more dads involved. So I think that it doesn't matter what income level you're at. There is a way to do this. I think this is proof of that. And there are other examples from around the world. But whether you can do it through legislation or leave, that's what will vary. All right, well, we have time for some questions. If people out here in the crowd have questions they want to ask us, if not, we'll just stare at you. Yes, in the back. Ariane Higavish, Institute for Women's Policy Research. I have one comment on low income families. I think if you look, for example, at California, where paid family leave became available, you can see because of the economic necessity, the uptake for low income fathers was, I think, as high or certainly not much lower than for middle income or high income fathers. So I think the economic issue, the helping families or helping fathers maintain their bread winner role while they're doing that is enormously important. And on some things, one needs statues or some way to provide this, as you say, the business case is much less strong for people who are seen as replaceable in the labor market. And I think, similarly, you find also because it's the low income families where everybody, if families are co-residential, where everybody has to work, I think if you look at time use data you also get more sharing in a way. So I just think it's to keep the economic issue in mind when designing policies but also in the way we presented. My question is much more data related. What, you know, to improve the evidence base, even to know how many fathers take leave, what do you, where can we insert this? I know the SIP had a module on first time mothers which is about to go, should we have a module on first time fathers, you know, should we include those data in the American Community Survey? What's your kind of dream to say, okay, let's have an evidence base which is a little better than minus three at the moment? Well, one of the places where people looked to initially get evidence about whether mothers were taking time off was the current population survey. That's done, that's the data set that's used to collect unemployment statistics and they ask, what were you doing in the last two weeks? And so you could get information from mothers about whether they had a job but were not at work and so forth and so kind of expanding that. I mean, so there's a base for you to be able to see what's happening to both men and women. But I don't know that anyone's used that for men. That's interesting, so it just now occurred to me. Maybe I'll have to take a look at it. But I think something like the SIP as well, maybe asking explicit questions about paternity leave and the one study that I had mentioned, the napalmnasci and well-fogul study had used the data from the early childhood longitudinal study, birth cohort. So it was focused on a very young children, actually from birth on and asked a lot of questions about involvement of both parents right around birth. So I think that's kind of an ideal vehicle but it was a single snapshot. So having something like that on a more ongoing basis would help us not only understand what parents are doing with kids but also the well-being of kids and the kinds of programs that are affecting them. I'm all for more data. Great. Hi, Elaine Soekerman of Gender Action and also Promando's Board. I wanted to just answer the IWPR women's question with another thought. And that is I'm also involved a founding member of the Caring Economy Campaign and it is collecting data of the type that you're seeking through something called the Social Wealth Economic Indicators. They're pretty new. Some of you have heard of Rianne Eisler. She founded this. She wrote The Real Wealth of Nations and The Chalice and the Blade, et cetera. And I think that you could find these new social wealth economic indicators that originally have been gathered for developed countries because the data is more accessible. The data are more accessible but also we're moving toward expanding them to developing countries. So you could find that on the Caring Economy Campaign website. Look at us all working together to solve these problems. We have time for one more question or comment from Anne-Marie Slaughter. Just a quick comment and a very specific question and the quick comment is just, I think it is important to emphasize that the whole model where dad disappeared and was not around his kids and worked in an office all day is a function of post-industrial revolution economics. Prior to that, I mean, where you had certainly agricultural economics but even low level sort of guild manufacturing, that was often done out of a household, right? And we're moving back to that in many ways as young as in the businesses where both parents can be at home and can be engaged in different ways while working. So I think it's important to note this has not been since time began. This is a particular historical artifact. But my question is to Joe and it builds on your question about how you make this cool for men because I completely agree that as long as guys think this is women's work or this is emasculating in some way, you've got a much harder chance. So how do you, so one thing, a guy with a baby is often a chick magnet but that's probably kind of tough to advertise. So what is the way we say this is cool? And I'll give you one example and I'd love your example. I came home and said to my 18 year old who's then 16, I was talking about a woman who had said she's a billionaire and she had two guys turn her down when they found out how much money she made and finally Sarah, the woman who founded Spanx and finally she's now married. And I said to my sons in the morning, said, so like if you were gonna marry a woman who was a billionaire, would that be a problem that she'd out earn you? And they looked at me like I had two heads. So they were like, but my oldest son said, mom guys who are worried about that are really insecure about something else. And I thought that's great, you know, that's the way but how do we do that? How do we make it cool? Yeah, you know, this whole notion of cool and you know, I think, you know, Mike, you know, kind of alluded to it when he described, you know, you're not giving up something to take on this notion of being a nurturer. We try to, and this is kind of underhanded, right? You gotta, I'm an ex-offender, right? And a recovering addict. So some of my default is back to those old days, not to the bad side of it, but just the strategies that happen on the street. And so when we engage guys, we always want them to understand that they're in a safe environment and they can explore, they can make mistakes. And we actually do things that kind of change the narrative, you know, and I think we're gonna see an example of that at the end. It's only one minute long, but it will, when you see it, you will get a sense of the tactics that we employ to be able to get guys to understand that it's okay to really think about how you're gonna engage your family and particularly your child. And this whole notion of coming from the street where you gotta be a tough guy all the time, that that's not necessarily the way in which, you know, you have to carry yourself, but you gotta give guys the opportunity to create a new training ground. So many of the guys that I'm talking about that I work with, they've grown up without dads in their lives. That notion of manhood is skewed by what they see within pop culture, what they see on the street, what they get from their peers, which is often a similar experience. And so changing that dynamic, just because you turn 21, there's no switch that you will automatically flip and you take on these other attributes that are much more mature and lead into nurturing. The problem is we don't have enough spaces in our country where men can really take advantage of those kind of conversations, like, you know, what Mike was talking about in this loan program where at the end, they kind of talk about, you know, response of fathering. I do think that there's a lot of promise with, you know, President Obama's recent announcement of my brother's keeper, there's a strand of parenting in there. We should uplift that. We should really force the administration and others to really look at that critically as a vehicle for us to think about how you change that narrative. Because if you don't, I think what we're gonna have is to continue to have struggles and conversations like this in over the years. We'll be back here in five or 10 years and we'll have incremental change. But, you know, we won't have the kind of substantive change that we wanna have to, you know, we wanna take some of the burden off of you. You know, you ladies, I'm gonna say you guys, that would have been totally not cool, right? But I do think that we play a complementary role. It's not that dads are any better than moms or any better than dads. We pay a complementary role to one another, whether we live together or not. All right, thank you to our panelists and thank you all for listening. They think that it means I need to contribute financially. They just don't believe that changing diapers is a part of parenting. I just wanna see who gonna be the champs and who gonna be the chumps. Ha ha ha ha ha. We only got 30 minutes. Yep. Whoa. Ha ha ha ha. Eww. 45 seconds and counting. Chris looks like he's in the front. He's doing well. Everybody's working gently and proficiently cause this is the loving care and child that they love so much. It's not a neck brace, man. Come on, man. Ha ha ha ha. Three, two, one. We're flipping the script a little bit now. You know, now we want, we want men not just to be providers and protecters. We want them to be nurturers.