 I am going to share with you some reflections about our efforts to promote paternity leave in Brazil. Tatiana couldn't make it, but I've been involved in kind of our start of it, and I think there's some very interesting lessons from our policy advocacy failure, and I think that's what we need to call it just to fess up in terms of driving this in Brazil. But I think there's some interesting lessons of what it tells us of how challenging this is, but also how things can shift. But before I do, I mean, this is the day that we get to talk about our own experiences as fathers and taking leave, et cetera, so I would be remiss if I didn't start with a little bit of a story. I got into this field and got to Brazil by, I'm married to a Brazilian psychotherapist. 17 years ago, almost to this month, if yeah, it's gotta be this month, was in Chicago doing my PhD in child development. Supposedly a field that teaches you something about how to care for children. My wife was working full-time as a psychotherapist, had six weeks unpaid maternity leave at her employer. Parentheses, Brazil offers and has offered since the 50s. Four months paid maternity leave, paid fully. A woman's full salary since the 50s. So the day came for her to go back to work. I was imagining this relaxing time that I was gonna have time to work, read all those papers I hadn't read, the stack of books on the floor. I always laugh when I hear people I'm going to enjoy my paternity leave. Imagining all the stuff I'm gonna do on this time off. Organize my semester so I could be the caregiver. And then there's that fateful morning. It was a January day in Chicago. You nod and you know what the temperature is like. My Brazilian partner getting in the car to drive off saying what kind of a backward country is this? That I'm going back to work six weeks later. I'm leaving my child here in the hands of a man. So she called between every patient. So right I could watch 59 minutes and 47 seconds, patient over, she was calling. The third time she called I turned off the phone and just didn't take it after that. Which left her even more furious of how dare he. And there's that moment of panic thinking one she's gonna get on a plane and go back to Brazil today I'm pretty sure. And the other moment of panic going I've read all this stuff of Bronn from Benner and Piaget et cetera but I don't know a thing about what to do with the real life baby in front of me except for these last few weeks of a crash course. Anyway we survived we are still together. We have a healthy 17 year old who's in high school here in Bethesda Chevy Chase. I think she still likes to hang with me. I think it was a bonding experience that and if anything I look back and say my God you are never the same as a human being if you go through that moment of being the one responsible for this young fragile life in front of you. Fast forward a year later when we were back in Brazil and the kind of roots of creating promundo as an NGO I was doing interviews with young men who were struggling with getting out of or coming out of gangs in favelas in Rio. Nine out of 10 of those guys were young fathers. Those who were most connected to their children regardless of their relationship with the partner were kind of most solidly on a path of getting out of gangs. Their experience of involved fatherhood was a transformative far different than mine but a transformative experience for them in terms of getting their lives together and having a reason to stay out of this lifestyle and these challenging circumstances they had been in. And one of the icebreakers to get these gang bangers to have conversations with me were often about showing each other pictures of our babies and trading hints on what to do with a colicky sleepless baby. Who would have thought that would be an icebreaker for guys who just a few months before had been toting automatic weapons and causing untold harm to themselves and others. So promundo kind of that lesson that banged us over the head was to say we've got to plant the seeds for different ways of being men including how do we promote this notion of men doing the care work. We did that for many years as a program approach. Lots of stuff including images that looked like this the pictures we saw at the beginning from Baltimore of getting men to do practice what it's like with babies or with the child of a sibling, et cetera to say how do we get men and particularly young men and boys to do some hands-on caregiving and practice with that. But we also had in our head and I did particularly with that challenge from my Brazilian wife of sort of four months paid maternity leave in Brazil began asking so what's the story of paternity leave in Brazil? So as I mentioned before 90% of women who are in the formal workplace in Brazil have been using paid maternity leave since the 40s. Brazil has a pretty progressive labor rights set of laws that survived military dictatorship, et cetera, et cetera they have been there, been stable. The part for fathers since 1988, five days of paid leave. Now compared to the US that's not too bad. Still fewer than two thirds of men take it. A lot of men don't even know that it exists and it includes a weekend. So if your child is born on a Thursday you're back to work by Monday, right? So it's kind of barely a nod that we need men to sort of be there, smoke a cigar, help the woman come home from the hospital and then kind of set a lifelong pattern for men doing pretty hands off caregiving or not doing any caregiving at all. So together with this slew of partner organizations, 2008 we had been reading the stuff coming at a fatherhood institute. I think we met you guys in 2005, reading all the Scandinavian stuff saying, come on Brazil's got a progressive base of legislation on maternity leave. We can add paternity leave to it. It makes sense. Brazil wants to talk about it. We introduced a campaign that would translate as give me leave, I'm a father. And it makes the same play on words of leave and kind of let me buy, please excuse me, let me do this as a father. We got a member of Brazil's Congress, progressive member of Brazil's Congress, Maria de Josadio, to sponsor a bill. We put in all the stuff from the Norwegian studies and the Swedish studies showing the benefits of involved fathers in caregiving. And we were really excited about how much media attention it was getting. I'm not gonna show that, but anyway, Jose Wilker is we got four of TV Globo's actors, TV Globo's Brazil's biggest television station. It's about 40% of TV watchers in the evening are watching TV Globo, massive TV station. We got four of the actors to speak out and do a public service announcement with it. We were really excited that they wanted to speak about it. They talk about how five days is too little, it's a ridiculous amount. I wanna be here, it's my responsibility, it's right for me, it's right for my partner, it's right for my child. We got all the messages right. We used the Seahorse, as you know, the male Seahorse carries the child to kind of play on, hey men, can do this, this is cool. And then we were excited, it's gonna go to the air and TV Globo. The bill was moving into the hearing in the committee that was to review it and boom. First of all, TV Globo says we're not gonna show this ad because we as a big employer don't wanna pay the extra social security insurance for men to have a month leave. Ad does not go in the air. Number two, our key women's rights partners said, and they literally said it this way, boys, I remember this, the conversation, there was a couple of the NGOs that we were kind of youngish men, youngish men anyway, said boys, what are you thinking? Men aren't doing the caregiving. Who needs a man at home if he's not gonna help? And they cited data which shows that women, so the kind of national household data in Brazil found that women with a partner and children do about 23, 24 hours of domestic work, care work a week. If there's a male partner in the home, she does two hours per week more than if there's not a male partner in the home. So our women's rights colleagues held up this data and said, we want a man at home exactly to do what? So our key women's rights partners were also not very thrilled about this legislation and it went nowhere, got stuck there. And I just liked that picture because it did show the amount of amazing care work that some Brazilian men are up to. Now, I wish that we could say after we promised that we got this discussion going, look at the amazing changes. So data from 2001 to 2011, women went from doing 24 hours of this work a week to drop to 22. So women are doing a little bit less and this massive increase in men, 10 hours per week to 10 hours and eight full minutes. So you could basically say in all of our massive advocacy efforts in these last years, men are doing eight minutes more. So we're trying to figure out is that taking out the trash is that flipping the egg on the burner? Anyway, we do need to look and say, so what does it take to change here? Is it the policy? Is it the social norm? What does it take to get men to do more of this work? So since then, we've worked on a number of different fronts to try to plant the seeds for it. One is women's labor market participation continues to increase in Brazil as it has in much of the world, if not all of the world. Women's wages are slightly increasing. We have been thrilled that nonetheless, it was a fiasco even getting laughed at and some talk shows in Brazil did lead to some more discussion about it. There's now about seven cities across Brazil that offer 30 days paid paternity leave to all of their government workers, somewhat similar to what we now have in the District of Columbia. There's now six weeks for women and men, paid parental leave, adoption or biological birth in the city of DC. So we've seen this option of that some cities and some businesses have slowly began to do it. We're thrilled that last year, there is a new attempt to introduce legislation to propose 20 days additional paid leave on top of the five days that are already there. This time the language is not about men doing the care work but it's language around child development that the bonding stuff. So I was pleased to hear Doug, you're coming around the, it was Intel that's doing the calling it bonding. So the language that's in there now and that's part of our promotion but other organizations as well, it's around child development. This is good for children and women are demanding, we need better daycare options. Men are not doing as much of the demanding but women are doing more of the demand of we need better publicly supported and subsidized childcare. So we snuck it into that. It is now making its way through a committee. I'm not sure and I probably would guess that it's not gonna pass this first round but it's probably gonna make it further than it did last time. And we do feel like that something might happen. It might get watered down but maybe we'll go from five to 10 or maybe we'll make it to 15 but we do feel like something may happen there that it's getting some more news. And then we've jumped on interesting cases that have come along. So an adoptive father, a man who adopted a special needs child, a three year old, I can't remember what the special need was but adopted the child and took a case to court to the social security system and asked for and got 120 days of leave. The statement that comes from the court says we award you 120 days of maternity leave. So we had a field day with making us and other partner organizations making noise around do men are men mothers or do men provide other kinds of care and why do we need to call this anymore maternity or paternity leave? So we've been seizing on cases like that getting pictures out telling stories and at the same time doing a norms change and I think, you know, Adrian was really good to point out there's limitations of this stuff but nonetheless to say, getting stories of visible men in Brazil talking about their care work. I particularly like Charles Galvan he's a drummer or the former drummer of one of Brazil's premier rock bands called the Titans or the Titans. He stopped, he was on a basically 150 days a year on the road lifestyle as a drummer in a rock band and said my children will never be young again I'm gonna do studio work from here on out I wanna be at home. So getting stories like that, we gathered some other ones and we, you know, some lessons that we wanted to include get diversity in there including sexual diversity different kinds of men's caregiving so that we're promoting not simply the biological stuff but also caregiving in general as an ethic as what we want men to do in general. And one of the things that we have made some policy inroads about is getting Brazil's Ministry of Health Brazil has public health something we're struggling with in this country Brazil really does have a public health model a family health and a community health model that's rolled out reasonably well all kinds of problems but reasonably well across the country. Part of our advocacy was to say there's a women's health sector there's a maternal and child health sector there's a family planning sector there's nothing that really talks about men's health and we did some data together with the Ministry of Health that said we found that about 90% of men were going to at least one prenatal visit but most of the time they were either staying in the parking lot or maybe in the waiting area seldom were they invited in. So we in some advocacy with the Ministry of Health said make that prenatal visit a moment to begin promoting this ethic of care he already came he's somehow interested why don't you take that moment to design a way to kind of promote men's caregiving so they've created a men's prenatal health visit you come you're now invited into the consultation you see the ultrasound you get information there's materials developed for men and you're invited to come back the next week to do something that men seldom do which is to get a check up for themselves HIV testing, syphilis testing blood pressure, all that stuff it is now the single apart from emergency room visit it's the single primary reason that men come for any preventive care in the public health system in Brazil is via the men's prenatal health visit so we are thrilled that even though the paternity leave part has been tough some small inroads and this is a health system again that reaches 55% of a country of 200 million you've got a chance of really scaling up a small scale policy which is one of the reasons we feel a lot better that something may move on the paternity leave because there's a lot of noise made about men doing this this has become normal seeing men as part of the prenatal visit so I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit but sure yeah so the posters here trying to get sort of the different looks of men and it says it doesn't matter what kind of man you are be the kind who takes care of his health and so trying to get different age groups of men and different ethnicities of men coming into the health system their biggest public service announcement was you're expecting a new life a new life depends on you take care of your health so using men's connection to their and their concern about the birth that's on the way to take care of their own health so this is what we're working for next we don't think there's any way to talk about the she can do it if the he doesn't do it and thanks to our colleagues from Flint that we think this is the we now don't talk about paternity leave without talking about these three constituencies the child the woman and what's in it for men themselves and just as a final one we are basically trying to fill up the data that's out there we're getting it out to our partners and we think it does fill up quite thickly of saying we've got data of why it's good for women Brazil's GDP would be about 13% higher if women worked at the same rates outside the home that men did we're not shy about holding that piece of data up Mike Fagelson mentioned the data that we have about how children's lives get better Doug mentioned that as well we're getting that out there we're playing a lot on men's own health getting involved fathers tend to take more care of their own health they tend to live longer less likely to drink less likely to be arrested et cetera we're playing up on that one the economic case I think we've made and we're not shy about the I think it was Ann Marie who was talking about the father as the chick magnet there is data including from Brazil that finds and this is asking women this is an important one household surveys we've done as part of our images study been carried out in 12 countries a robust finding is that women with children who say their partner does more or does an equal amount of some of the care work report they're happier with their relationship and they're happier sexually happier sexually with him is what the question refers to not the neighbor or somebody else it's with him we do think that is okay to hold up and what we'll tell groups of guys is to say it's now proven scientifically that if you do have the care work we do look like Ryan Gosling in a wet T-shirt I don't think we have to shy away from that maybe in Brazil you can talk about sex in free ways we and we do bring that point up as well so I leave you with a very word heavy slide at the end just to say we're trying to and as part of a global the global men care campaign now active in about 30 countries we're trying to gather as much data about why paternity leave and joint parental leave equal is a key driver to gender equality so stay tuned to the space both new america foundation promundo dad 2.0 fatherly we're gonna keep and others in the room of course to keep sharing this data out there just a final note thanks very much to new america foundation for hosting us thanks all of you for coming far and weathering the cold out there and yeah thanks Elizabeth for helping organisms so thanks a lot