 I do think that when they chose moderators for these panels they had a particular look in mind. Dan Koice and I were kind of comparing hairlines and glasses and v-neck sweaters and thought, all right. So, welcome. My name is Doug French. I am the co-founder of the Dad 2.0 Summit, which is an annual social media conference devoted to amplifying the voice of modern fatherhood. And basically, to explain it, we do have a, ultimately we talk, we do a lot of content campaigns with brands. We do a lot with our branding partners. Our title sponsor this year for the last three years has been Dove Men Plus Care, which is interesting when you consider that I met with MenCare this morning. And Dove Men Plus Care has a Super Bowl ad coming up called Care Makes a Man Strong. So there's a lot going on here with men and caring that I find very gratifying, because we're going to talk about a bit of the spectrum of how men are perceived in the media and how that really helps move the needle to affecting real change at the policy level and in the opinion level and the hearts and minds of the young people that we're all trying to raise. And just basically what I'd like to do with all the dads, the influencers in my conference are about, are trying to leave our sons particularly, but our daughters as well, but have our sons inherit a more enlightened idea of what masculinity is than currently what kind of passes for it. So, and since there is just the two of us, you may be expecting Mark Sherwood. He is the executive at Sachi and Sachi behind the Cheerios How to Dad campaign. He is a Snow McGuiden back in New York. But we are forced to have another co-founder with me. This is Simon Isaacs, who is the co-founder of Fatherly, which rather than have me describe it, it's better from his own words. So Simon, take it away. Sure. So Fatherly is a parenting site, an online parenting site focused on guys and guys with kids. So the story essentially is what you probably think was my wife, she at the time thought she was pregnant and she started signing up for all of the baby centers and babbles and what to expect. And so I did too as a sensitive new age guy and realized that everything out there is pink, purple and turquoise and that there's nothing out there for guys. And why does this matter? It matters because if you look downstream the majority of bachelor's degrees, master's degrees and PhDs are all focused on women. 60% of kids are growing up in dual-income households with the rise of women. There was a book many of you might be familiar with called The End of Men, but I think that we're actually all seeing is the rise of dad. And there's nothing out there. There's 4.2 million mom blogs and thanks to the work of Doug and so many others. There's a growing community of dad bloggers and what we saw is the opportunity to provide real support individual where a consumer focused platform focusing on dad. And after a year of testing and scaling and we just raised a big seed round and are now growing pretty well. We are so hot right now. And you will see during the Super Bowl you will be, it'll be a dad of Palooza, you will see lots of ads. Many of them are available for viewing now online. Yeah, I think right now it's about six ads. Dove, Toyota, Nissan, Coke to a lesser extent has a dad component to it. BMW has a dad component. It's a 150 million person audience who's going to be exposed to advertising. And I'm going to basically, I'm going to DVR the game and fast forward through the football and watch the ads. Deflated balls notwithstanding. I think, so when we talk about the perception of fatherhood, I think a lot of what again moves the needle is what people see on TV. I think it's a very powerful thing. Obviously we all would like to believe that parenting is first and foremost leading by example and trying to, because great great men are not born, they're built. And that's a lot to do with again with Dove Men Plus Care as our title sponsor. And our media partner is Esquire Magazine. So speaking about the last panel, we were talking about what makes it cool. We were very excited because if you saw Esquire Magazine's fatherhood issue for Father's Day in June, it was superlative. I mean they brought in all sorts of really well-respected, interesting, funny, non-bro-like men to talk about fatherhood and caring in a very specific way and it resonated very well. And I basically camped out in the hallway at Hearst magazines until they agreed to be our media partner. And they're going to be in San Francisco with us in three weeks to help bring the idea of fatherhood to a men's perspective. I mean as a dad blogger, and as I've been, I was dad blogging, I imagine since about 2003, and there was about three of us. And to see, last year we had a parents magazine talk about fatherhood, which was terrific, but to have a men's magazine embrace fatherhood in this way is truly extraordinary. And that kind of speaks to the perception of how you see fathers and how they're portrayed in mass media, like on television shows and advertising and in magazines. And I think that's a huge part of how we just shift perception to the point where, I mean I remember growing up and reading that women couldn't always vote. Why is that? What's that about? And to the much the same way that my kids will grow up wondering, there was a time when gay people couldn't marry each other, what's that about? It's all perspective. And I think years from now, when we approach, when we work toward the ideal of a gender-neutral meritocracy when it comes to parenting, that's what I think perception is a big part of that. And that's a lot of why when dad 2.0 started four years ago, there was a big controversy with Huggies diapers and how they were marketing to moms by saying, boy, if dads can handle them, anybody can. And they came to dad 2.0 after the blowback and they confronted that head-on, came to meet with us, changed their whole program around and received great ROI on that. And that was a great case precedent. To the point now, if you look around, we have, part of our job is to be kind of a watchdog and look at what sort of ads are out there. You don't see a lot of doofus dads anymore. You see a lot of dads who love what they do and are presented in a very specific, not over earnest way, not over macho way. There's all sorts of nuance to it. So the next step is to talk about effecting change in this town and talking about paternity leave and talking about mentoring. And to that regard, yes. And fatherly, we're going to talk a lot about the Venn diagram in terms of how fatherly and dad 2.0 are working together to try and make this happen. Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. I mean, historically, let's sort of look back and there's a interplay between both sort of what's happening culturally as well as what's happening politically and economically. So how did we get here is part of the question. Why when you open the New York Sunday Times or the Washington Post, it's like there's a story about stay-at-home dads and there's a story, you know, it's just every week you see this and story about paternity leave. So part of it is guys have to lose their jobs at a, you know, guys lost their jobs during their session, didn't get them back in time as much as women did. We have the rise of the women's movement. We have everything else that's happening. We have like it or not. We have the sort of what you might call the lean in. And so there's that component. Then to Doug, to your point, you also have this incredible transition in culture and that probably the best place to look at it is on television. And so you start with like leave it to beaver and then you move through and you get to albundi and then you keep going and you get to Homer Simpson and Tim the Toolman Taylor. And now you're at like we have Parenthood and Transparent and four million other depictions of what modern-day fatherhood is. You tweeted that, right? It was like decade fatherhood through the decades. Yeah. It's really interesting. Also on TV ads are the same thing. And so, you know, we can go on fatherly and sort of take a look at that. But I think there's this interplay between culture, policy, and economics that is happening. And the question now is what do we do with it? And where does it all go? And it's something that now I think brands are trying to wrestle with. Brands are very much focused and have been really focused on marketing and selling to mom, right? There used to be this belief that 80% of all purchases were handled by women. Last year, 52% of all grocery shopping was done by men. So brands are trying to figure out how they connect. And that's part of why you see where you're going to see it on Sunday. There's families trying to figure this out, right? If 60% of kids are growing up in dual-income households, parents are juggling and trying to figure out who's on first and who's on second and who's picking up the kid and who's doing the grocery shopping. And then of course there's all sorts of implications for family welfare. So I don't know where I'm going with rambling with all this, but we're at this sort of really interesting sort of nexus point between culture and politics. Well, I think when you see a lot of, when you see how extraordinarily well dads are being portrayed right now, I mean, we point to a number of, and again, I never like to point to things as successes because I'm just a, I like to keep, I really like to stay grounded on things and I rarely, I rarely linger on things. But I think if we do point to what we've, how we point to what our success is so far, especially from a blogger's point of view and a part of it as a grassroots effort to kind of confront the headwind that is fatherhood and fatherly behavior, not fatherly behavior but fatherly behavior. Because there are plenty of unfortunate stories about what some dads are still capable of doing and that's the headwind we're fighting. And so we want to amplify the voice of the middle. Again, our journalism lives in extremes and it's more newsworthy to say you won't believe what this dad did. And there are terrible stories out there that get a lot of headway and, and our anchors on our boat. And I think what I'm keeping a lot of sailing metaphors alive today. But I think more than anything else, if you keep that drumbeat going and you, and you have dads talking about ordinary strikes of life, how it's not so much that they do for their kids because that's, because it's expected, but rather because they love to do for their kids. And that's the data that we're seeing. We're not doing this because we feel obligated to. We're not helping out mom. We're doing this because we love to do it. And the data are coming out saying that a number of men who are working on work-life balance or as it's being upgraded to work-life integration, because now management, you know, now business schools are looking into this and trying to present bottom line issues to, to whether it's employer employees. When you look at that and work-life balance, that's something that lots of men are taking that box. I really want to be home for my kids soccer game. I want to make dinner for them. And that's part of the corporate culture. And that comes from the perception. And that's why we love, as a man, again, I've been blogging now for 12 years, but the millennials, the younger dads, they don't, they don't deal with stereotypes. They don't care about them, nor do the young moms. They know that it's just a question of let's divide and conquer, assuming we can get away with one income, but let's see if whoever stays home stays home, and whoever works, works. And if we can do two, let's play to our strengths, let's divide and conquer, and do the best we can. And I think that's what is, is so much of this is just evolution beyond what didn't work, doesn't need to work anymore. It doesn't need to be part of the conversation anymore. Sure. I mean, at the same time, I think we're painting a very rosy picture of sort of based on what's happening in our audience and what's happening in the, in the, in the cultural space that things are going great. And in many ways that they are. We do a lot of work with Fortune 500 and Fortune 50 companies syndicating fatherly content in through their corporate intranets, helping HR and ER and employee resource group teams who are trying to figure out how do you support working dads and working parents do so. And what you hear from them is, and there's a lot of amazing progressive companies who are offering incredible benefits programs, but many dads aren't taking advantage of them. And, you know, there's all sorts of statistics on the sort of stay at home dad side where, you know, 60 plus percent of guys would like to be a stay at home dad at some point. And more than 68 percent would never do so because they feel like they, you know, there would be some stigma around it. Most of that stigma, I would say is probably self stigma. And that I think is what happens in the workplace. And so changing culture is the way that you get guys to opt into that corporate dads group or flex time or taking advantage of all of these things. And so that is where the advertising and television media sites and bloggers and other influencers and any other way that you can shape culture becomes really, really important. You know, but it's, it's very pervasive. And so in a couple of, well, hopefully I have at least four weeks until my daughter's born. He's so adorable. It could be any day. I have between age and, you know, the truth is, it's just no other word for it. My apologies. But I mean, we're having a child. Yeah, totally. Exactly. Exactly. And I don't know what the heck I'm going to do as a as an entrepreneur, which is another conversation of what does paternity leave look like in the age of the modern job? What does paternity look like for a freelancer for a Uber driver? Those are decisions that people have to make on their own. And the only way to affect that is not going to be at the, at the policy level, although I think there was a really nice point about if you do shape policy, you can have policies shapes culture. But we do need to address that. I think I'm going to be taking two weeks, but again, as an entrepreneur, I run and own several companies. That means I need to figure it out and I'll need to do a little bit here and a little bit there and baby in this arm. Exactly. Laptop and this and and and how to be a Heisman carry. Heisman carry and yet not and be present to all of it. So I love you, honey. Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think and because we are when we talk about perception, again, I think you you build men to believe a certain different way. And so and the stigma, as you mentioned, is a huge part of it, not least. And I think when you talk about, we talk a lot about paternity leave. And again, that's a that's also a very important point because paternity leave right now only speaks to a certain certain layer of workers. And that's it's for for many others. It's a pervasive problem that we have so much more to talk about and get through. But when you look when you talk about someone like Daniel Murphy, the second baseman for the Mets, who took his three days of paternity leave during the baseball season, and boomerous ison gave us the ultimate gift by asserting on the radio that he should have made his wife get a C section before the season started. And and then and then the world descended on boomerous ison and boomerous ison got a quick education. And that's if we can expose the dinosaurs for what they are, you can see when that when when people react in that very life affirming way to tell the man to back off a bit and then recognize that or when you see something like, you know, Intel last week launched, they have a new policy of eight weeks of bonding leave. They don't call it paternity leave or maternity leave or any of that. It's they want to call it for what it is. You're not there to help your wife. You're there to bond with your kid. And we're going to talk about that at dad 2.0 next month about how bonding, even at that early stage, is the launching pad for a lifelong relationship with your kid. And that's what bonding leave is for that's paternity leave. It's not like honey, can I get you a glass of water? It's I'm your father. I want to meet you. So when you see even word choices like that, or when the platform gets raised to that, and you may have seen right when Daniel Murphy had the trouble when he was actually here speaking about that at the White House for the working father summit last summer. And then Chris Hayes was on paternity leave at the same time. And he called out Bruehmer Seisen and Mike Frances and said, no, I'm here to bond with my kid. I'm not here to help out. When that gets elevated to the platform as it is, and as it will, that's where I think the perception really shifts for the irrevocably. So two points on that. One, I think there's an incredible role of influencers. So that's something that we do five minutes. All right. So on the influencer side, you know, we have conversations weekly with everybody from Tata, who's Jay-Z's right hand, who happens to be a dad. And we talked to him about his whole life, not just about fatherhood, but everything in between because that's the gray area that dads live in. We talked to Arnie Duncan about, you know, parent-teacher conferences and what it's like to be a secretary of education. Going to that, we talked to pro athletes. We talked to, we have talk coming up with John Bon Jovi and Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Kimmel and so on and so forth. And hopefully, and it's about, and I guess this goes to my point, it doesn't always, if you want to shape culture around fatherhood and paternity leave, we don't necessarily just need to focus on father and paternity leave. Don't talk to a guy just about as being a father, but talk to him about being a guy who is also a father and have that stuff be integrated. We don't need to have these, it's awesome that Esquire does, you know, my only thing with Esquire is do integrate that father's day kind of content across the year because that's who your audience actually is. And so it's finding that intersection between men's interest and parenting that I think, and if we can sort of integrate that and not just talk about paternity leave or not just talk about the stay at home dad, but talk about awesome guys who are also dads and how they are learning things in their home that they're bringing on the field or in the office and vice versa, that becomes really interesting. That's a great point too because I think, you know, we work in PR a lot. The dad-to-summit parent company is XY media and we create content campaigns using dads as with moms have been doing for years. And we used to only get like the floodgates would only open in May for June campaigns for, you know, for dads and grads. You know, it's like, well, there's Mother's Day and like, and the dads are with the graduates. You know, and we don't see dads and grad stuff anymore. And so as the PR pitches to us become a year-round thing, I do think, I mean Esquire did make that foray, let's do this once and see what happens. And like anything else, you can forgive them for dipping their toe in the water to the point where I think they will follow suit. I think we'll see that there will be a tectonic shift. We have about, if you'd like, if you want any comments or questions, we have a few minutes before we go. Yeah. Okay. I'm Monique Moore. I'm a clinical psychologist and I specialize in helping working families and especially new parents. I think there's a little bit of an elephant in the room here from the boots on the ground perspective, which is that a lot of women are finding their narratives of what it means to be a woman and a caretaker challenged as more men step up to the role of father. And what I hear in my practice a lot of times is men wanting to get more involved and women really shutting them out. So I think sort of a corollary to this fantastic movement and discussion is how do we help women redefine what it is to be a caretaker and a woman and a mother. And in some ways I think that issue is a little bit more complex. And the second thing is I will testify that I have been seeing marriages break over the issue of household responsibilities. Again, it's a different issue, but everyone's struggling for time now. And if you can put in a few plugs for men helping to do the dishes and laundry and encouraging them to be masculine men and helping on those fronts too, I know a lot of wives and mothers be tremendously appreciative things. Totally. Well, I think to the quick point, I think number one, as it is now, the bar of what it means to be a successful mother and woman is ridiculously high and the bar for a father is ridiculously low. Nobody dies and dad's a hero. And our goal is to try and see how those, you know, society, one of the ancillary benefits I hope of this is that the pressure on moms to be perfect will come down. And it's interesting, when you look at the blogs, the blogosphere, there are so many mom blogs that are like crappy mom, shitty mom, mom needs a cocktail, drink, you know, and there's, there is that element of- And then there's superhero dad. Yeah, you don't see like terrible dad blogs because we can't afford that number one, but number two, it's a way of women saying, take us off this pedestal and let's not buy into what the pressures that are imposed upon us. And I think that's going to be a shift as well when you see as this gender-neutral meritocracy hopefully glacial moves toward something we can point to as a more enlightened way to look at this. But it is changing and 36% of men are the primary, say that they are the primary person who does laundry. I don't know the statistic on dishwashing, but it is changing and actually you can even see if you want to see how it's changing again, advertising is always a good place to look and you can see lots of ads where guys are engaged in that. So I do think that we're seeing it, I think on your point on complexity, I just think it's all complex. I think work-life balance is complex, I think the workforce conversations are complex, childcare conversations, who does the dishes, who takes the kids out. I think it's just families, we are at a very awkward point in all of this and families are really struggling and of course breaking up over all of these different tensions. I do think that you make headway into the complexity when you climb these simplistic foothills. When people just in the back of their mind are thinking there were two billion fantastic ads about dads during the Super Bowl or my dad was home when I was a kid or my mom worked and my mom doesn't know where the laundry department detergent is, which you see a lot of that going on. The dads in our group are like, I'm not sure I can leave my wife alone with the kids while I'm at dad 2.0. And anytime you can upend stereotypes and upend perceptions of what you think that should be, that's basically how there's no default. The default is we are a unit, let's play to our strengths. I'm a co-parent, I'm a divorced dad and thankful for it in many ways. There comes a great time when you're happy that she's not your wife anymore but she's still the mother of your kids. So first hand it's all about partnership and like, okay this has to get done, how do we do it? That's the pattern that we aspire to in the longest term, I think we're going to affect some long-standing and particular change. Thank you very much.