 We could grab the last of their breakfast and waters, coffees, whatever you want and come settle in. That would be great. So good morning, everybody. My name is Bridget Sholte. I'm the director of the Better Life Lab here at New America. And we are so excited to be talking this morning about this project, our Men in Care project. It's been a long time in coming. At the Better Life Lab, our key mission is gender equality. And for the longest time, I think nationally, we've thought of gender equality as really focusing on women and women and their advancement in the public sphere, at work, getting a job, economic opportunity, advancement. And that's all critical. That's all really important. But then you look at all the statistics, and women are really stuck. Labor force participation has stalled. Women's advancement has stalled. Women are stuck in more middle and low wage jobs. And so the conversation is always, well, then what do we do? How do we fix women? Do they lean in? Do we negotiate better? Do you just need more confidence? And really, what we've been missing in a lot of that national conversation is the flip side of looking at gender equality, not just in the public sphere at work, but looking at gender equality at home and in care. So much of what holds women back at work is care, the care responsibilities, the care demands, which are frankly the key to what makes life worth living. And yet women are often punished for that or held back at work. And so a lot of what we wanted to understand here is then how do we move toward more gender equality at home when care is still so considered an expectation of something that women do? When you look at time diary data, women are still doing the bulk of child care, a lot of the housework, sometimes twice as much, spending twice as much time. And that really has a huge impact on their ability to spend time at work or compete in the public sphere. And at the same time, men are stuck at work, having a very difficult time sometimes making the time for care. So what we really wanted to do is dive into men's experiences. We wanted to understand what do men experience when it comes to care and caregiving? What are some of the attitudes they run into? Some of the barriers that they might run into that prevent them from giving care? And what are some of the incentives that we can begin to pour more oxygen into? Because we'll never have gender equality at work until we have gender equality at home. So as I mentioned, this is the first of a number of reports that we'll be releasing based on some nationally representative survey data and some very intensive focus group data. So this morning, what we'll do is we'll have a presentation from two of our report authors, followed by a brief Q&A about the data and any kind of specific questions that you might have about that. And then we'll be following that with a panel discussion where we can really dig into paid leave policy. We can dig into people's experiences. And that will also be followed by a robust question and answer. And then we'll finish up right at 11 and get everybody out and back to work. So we couldn't have gotten here without a lot of our friends and partners and supporters. I wanted to thank we have some of them here who helped us with the report and doing some of the reviewing, which really helped make this particular report better. We have had a lot of supporters and partners like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. So we're very grateful for all of our partners and supporters. So with that, I would love to turn it over to my team members and the report authors, Amanda Lenhardt, the deputy director, and Hailey Swenson, who is our director of editorial innovation and all things good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Good morning. I was so, so delighted to be here and have the opportunity to share this research with you. As Brigitte said, it's been a long time coming. We've been working on this for more than a year. And we're just so grateful to have the opportunity to share it with you. And as Brigitte said, this is from a larger study that looks at men in caregiving broadly. And this particular piece that we're going to focus on today looks at the policy side, men and family, men in leave, particularly paid family and medical leave. And so I wanted to start off today, just quickly running us through what's the paid family leave landscape right now in the United States. So as most of you in this room probably know, the United States is one of very few countries in the world that offers zero weeks of paid family leave to its residents. What do we have? We have the Family Medical Leave Act. It was passed in 1993. And it offers 12 weeks of job protected but unpaid leave to people under certain circumstances. So you must have worked for your employer for at least a year. And the firm needs to have at least 50 people in order for you to be eligible. So into this sort of relative gap, we have American states sort of jumping in and starting to offer these benefits. Right now we have four states with active paid family and medical leave programs. That's California, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. And we have about five more coming online. We have the District of Columbia, Washington State, Connecticut, Oregon, and Massachusetts. And it should be said that all of those policies and leaves across the state are quite different. They have different lengths of leave. They have different parameters around who's eligible. They offer different amounts of sort of wages and replacement. It should be noted that almost all of them offer partial wage replacement as opposed to full wage replacement for their residents. One of the things that was really interesting to us was we wanted to understand what percentage of people filing claims were men. And so the National Partnership for Women and Families did some research quite recently that dug into state-based data for California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. The states that have had these benefits for the longest. And in their findings, they found that from between New Jersey and across these states, from a low of 14% of claims in New Jersey to a high of 38% of claims in California, that men are generally not using these benefits in the ways that we think they might be able to. And certainly not to the degree to which they are offered to them. And so we wanted to dig into that. Why aren't men using paid family medical leave benefits when they have them? What are the barriers that they face to using these benefits? And how can we encourage them to use them? So we undertook the study. I'm gonna go through the methods very quickly. Multimodal study, large nationally representative survey of nearly 3,000 American adults with over samples of men, additional over samples of fathers of children, zero to eight, and over samples of men in professional caregiving roles. But those folks are excluded from this analysis. The second piece of our data collection was these online threaded discussions that we specifically used as a methodology because we know that caregivers are especially pressed for time. And we wanted to give our participants multiple opportunities to reflect and answer our questions. We talked to, in those groups, we talked to five groups. They were a group of adult men, a group of adult women, a group of fathers, again of kids, zero to eight, a group of men who were caregivers for an adult, and then again another group of men in caregiving professions who are also again excluded from this particular analysis. So what did we find? One of our major findings was that men and women have a large sense of anticipated need and it's equal across both men and women. So men and women see a future in which they will need to take leave. And I think it's important to note that these are not statistically significant differences where they exist. And that the anticipated need leave for needing to care for a family member is larger. There are more people in this country who say, at some point in the future, I'm going to need to care for somebody in my family. So as we think about leave and we think about leave policies, it's important to remember that parental leave is something that about 30% of people think that they'll be needing, whereas family care leave is something that more, about half of people believe that they'll need in the future. Whoop, that's my water bottle up there. And so how does that actually map to who has taken leave? And we see in our study about two in five adults say that they have taken any kind of leave whether that's for a new child or for a family member. And when we break it down, it's about half of parents say that they've taken, and this is of kids of any age, say that they've taken leave at any time to care for a new child in their lives. And about 28%, just under three in 10 of American adults say they've taken time off of work to care for a family member. And when we dig into that, we see that there are in fact some differences between men and women here. So even though the sense of anticipated need for leave is equal across both groups, men are slightly less likely to have taken this leave than women. It's similar, this slide shows leave for taking care of an adult family member, but when it comes to parental leave, we see a similar difference. It's about 55% of women say they've taken parental leave as opposed to about 48% of men. And it should be pointed out too, when we define leave in this study, we define leave very expansively. So leave here is taking time off of work of more than a day or two, and it can be paid for and done in any way. So our definition involves taking vacation days, taking sick leave, taking other kinds of time off of work, whether paid or unpaid. And partly that's because we know from other research that men tend to take shorter leaves. We know that people cobble together leaves in lots of different ways, and we wanted to capture a wide net of the kinds of leave that people were taking. Another thing that's important to note from this slide is that we can see that the leave taking kind of grows throughout life and that the people who are most likely to need to take the leave and to say that they have taken leave are sort of late midlife. Folks who have both had opportunities to take leave for children and potentially are now taking leave to care for others in their lives. And we see this in particular with what we call, what are sometimes called the sandwich generation. And this in our study is about 14% of adults that we talk to say they have taken both leave to care for a new baby and leave to care for an adult family member or actually even could be a sick child. And then when we see also that there's actually anticipated need for both of these kinds of leaves. When we talk to parents who have already taken leave, half of them say they see a need in the future to take leave to care for a family member. So I think what we take from this particular slide is that it's really important as we think about these leaves to remember that one, it's not one and done. People need to take multiple kinds of leaves for multiple reasons over their life course. And that if we're thinking about constructing leave benefits and constructing policies, we need to make sure that we allow people not just to take parental leave but also to take leave to care more broadly. And with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Haley to bring us into the rest of the fight. Thanks Amanda. So I wanna circle back to where Amanda started which is that we know men and women equally say they're going to need leave but in practice we know that they're not equally taking leave. So we put the question directly to our respondents, why do you think men aren't taking leave? We also asked them the flip side. Why do you think men do take leave when they take it? We gave them a series of options and then asked them to say, do you think this is a major reason, a minor reason or not a reason that in this case men are not taking leave? And I think we see really overwhelming support here for the idea that the main reason men aren't taking leave is financial concerns. That's overwhelmingly the top option that people said, this is a cross race, class, gender, this was the top choice, that what really matters here is financial pressure that men feel. I think this indicates some sense that men feel that breadwinner burden even given how far we've come, how common it is for women to be in the workforce that men are really feeling that acute financial pressure. The second top one is also related to the workplace, the idea that men don't take leave because they've seen other men be punished for it, they've seen men penalized for it, maybe in their own workplaces. So having that financial support when you're on leave, whether it's from your employer or a state-based policy or someday a federal policy seems really important to us, a lot of the other options that people chose and ranked fairly highly relate to norms around them. So maybe not just in the workplace, but what do their family and friends think about taking leave? Are they supportive? Do they need to take leave because there's nobody else to do it? That's one of the reasons. When it came to why people do take leave, people said gave really sound moral reasoning that they take leave because it's the right thing to do or they take leave because their partner needs them to do so and needs to stay at work. We can go forward here. In the focus groups, we heard much of the same thing. A lot of men that we spoke to, so that was three of the five focus groups where men doing informal caregiving or adult men in general, we asked them, did you take leave? And many of them said something like this, they took as much leave as they could, but it wasn't a lot and mostly because of financial reasons. This is a quote from one father who was in our focus group study who says really clearly, he's now self-employed, but at the time he was only able to take off a few days of work. He used his vacation time and he couldn't take more time than that because he couldn't afford it. He says really nicely in there, I wish that men also got maternity leave around the birth of a new child because most of the men in those focus groups found it really valuable, but the finances are an issue. Let me dig in a bit more deeply. There are some interesting gaps between men and women on why it is that they think men don't take leave. A lot of similarity on why they do take leave, like I said, the moral reasoning mostly, but women feel more strongly that a lot of these are major reasons men aren't taking leave and I think there's some really interesting gaps where we see the biggest difference between men and women and this is something we really like to dig into further because it's quite telling about a sort of gender difference about thinking through these very issues we've been talking about throughout the presentation today in terms of men needing more to step up more at home and women having more time for work. Some of the biggest gaps are around things like he just doesn't wanna be a caregiver or he thinks someone else will take care of it. Women much more likely by about 14, 12 point differences, much more likely to say those are reasons men are a little more skeptical. They don't think that's it. So when people are taking leave, are they being paid for it? And if so, how much of their regular salary? This is really important because as we've seen here, there's such a focus on finances for when it comes to men taking leave. We found that about six in 10 people who told us they took more than a couple of days off to take care of somebody received some pay, but at the same time, 35% receiving no pay at all. And if you're thinking through what that means, we know a lot of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. So these are folks who are still taking leave, right? They need the leave badly and if they're taking it even without pay, given what kind of financial pressures that will put them under. Now here's something really interesting. When we looked closer at this, we found that there's a gender gap here. So even though men are less likely to take leave overall, when they do take leave, they're more likely to be taking a paid leave than women are. Women are still taking more unpaid leave. Now we don't think that this is about sort of outright gender discrimination in the workplace that say men are being offered paid leaves and women at the same employer are not. I think there's a lot more complicated story going on here. One might be linked to the gender wage gap, the idea that sort of gender occupational segregation that men are already in higher paying workplaces offering more competitive benefits on the whole than women are. But also that a lot of women may not consider leave to be a choice but something that they have to do whether it's unpaid or not. Certainly around childbirth, you can see how that would happen. But I think that that's especially true when it comes to thinking of an individual couple deciding which one of us is gonna take leave. We know that because of the gender wage gap men in those couples are gonna be earning more. So if somebody has to take time off from work and not be paid, it could be reasonable to have a woman in the relationship do that. We also ask people, how are you covering leave when you take it since such a large percentage are not being paid their full salary while they're taking leave? And this is really troubling. I think a lot of people are relying on borrowing money, taking money out of their savings, taking from savings they need for health needs. Being very scrappy in order to afford their leaves but what we see here is those who are sort of not receiving any pay at all relying on all these strategies much more so. Probably not surprisingly. And then when we look at low income families, so these are households that make less than $30,000. We know these are the households least likely to have access to any kind of leave at all. They may not be covered by FMLA. They certainly probably don't have the paid leave offerings from their employers. Nonetheless, they're still finding ways to take leave. When they do take leave, borrowing money is a major strategy for them that those making households making $30,000 aren't faced with. So you can think about the long-term financial health of these families and the toll that leave is taking. So just to zoom back out and sum it up, we know that men are taking leaves at least when it's defined in these short bursts. So there is an interest in taking time away from work to help with care. That financial concerns are a majorly cited reason. Worklay support is something that men feel they need. Support from their family is something that they feel that they need. Those economic pressures may be stopping men from taking leave when they're not necessarily stopping women from taking leave. It's a different sense of priorities that we wanna be able to tackle and figure out a little bit more. And that those economic pressures may not be affecting high-income men as much as low-income men. And we really need to pay special attention to that, that not all men have the same resources, right? And so if we wanna get men involved, we wanna make sure we're including all men in that conversation. And finally, takeaways for 2020 and beyond. We want to make sure that our research here leads to certain actions that can ensure that all Americans have a better shot at taking the leave they need to give care to their families. For policy makers, it's really important that a policy for paid leave, especially as momentum grows at the federal level for a national paid leave policy, think about men and including men in that process because you can imagine the sort of gender equality fallout of having a leave policy instituted that only encourages women to take it. The further stigma around women taking time off from work and men not doing the same. We also need to account for multiple leaves. That's something Amanda touched on a lot. Men and women both, and men are actually more involved in family caregiving, caring for elders than we've seen in the past, really growing numbers. We wanna be able to take that into account. A policy that's just parental leave is gonna miss a huge level of need that both men and women are citing here. For employers, workplaces and managers, workplaces need to model taking leave, role models having sort of management take leave and talk about leave and talk about themselves as caregivers can be really important. And in the absence of that federal policy, workplaces that can step up and make sure that workers aren't losing out on their pay when they're doing this really important family work is critical. I think we ran a little over time, but do we have time? Let's take at least one question. There's a lot we couldn't dig into here that's in the report, so I encourage you to read the whole thing. But maybe we can clear up any confusion that came up or answer any questions here before we turn to the panel. All right, if there are no questions, then we will go ahead and invite our panelists and Vicki Shabo up for, I think, what will be a really illuminating discussion of many of these findings. Great, well, we are going to dig in here over the next hour or so into some of the themes that we saw in the research and really understand how those manifest in the lives of people, employers, and what those implications are for society in terms of gender equity, race equity, economic equity. So thank you all for being here. It's great to see such a lovely and diverse crowd, actually. Usually when we do events on paid leave, it's all women, so I think we're already fulfilling some of the promise here. So my name is Vicki Shabo and I'm a senior fellow for paid leave policy and strategy here at New America. And I'm going to introduce the panelists really quickly. And then we're going to dig in and we'll have some time at the end for questions. So to my immediate left, I'm one of the people who's bad at right and left. That's my immediate left. Is council member Robert White, who's an at-large member of the Council of the District of Columbia. He serves as the chair of the Committee of Facilities and Procurement and the Committee on Labor and Workforce Development. When he ran for office, he was a huge proponent of the paid leave law that was currently being debated in the district and has been a true ally and champion on the council as that policy is being implemented. Council member White previously served as ledge council to Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton in Congress. He holds degrees in philosophy and political science. He earned his law degree from the American University Washington College of Law. And perhaps most important for this panel, he is the father of two daughters, Madison and Monroe. Next we have Jennifer Philpot. She wins the prize for coming the furthest today. She traveled here from London to be with us. She is the chief people officer at Whiting Case, which is an international law firm. And she's responsible for the talent strategy, human resource operations and employee engagement. She's also actively involved in mentoring and developing people and was recently honored as one of EY's UK and Ireland's outstanding mentors of the year back in 2015. She's got 25 years of experience working in talent and marketing and has a degree from Baylor University in Texas. To her left is Dave Soharsky. And anybody who's read the report will see Dave threaded throughout the research. So thank you for sharing your personal stories about this part of the research product itself and here today with us. Dave is vice president for business development at National Health Rehabilitation, which is a national physicians group based in New Jersey. He's got extensive experience in healthcare administration and holds a BS in psychology and sociology from St. Joseph University in Philly and a master's degree from the University of Central Florida. And he lives outside Philadelphia with his wife and his daughter, Ellie. And I left your wife out of it, council member, but if you could have one. I'm sorry, that's great. No harm intended there. She's somewhat of a work. And last but certainly not least, the person with the shortest commute, he came from just downstairs in this building. We've got Joseph Reed, who is senior policy advocate at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which is a national coalition of more than 600 community-based organizations working for economic fairness. Before NCRC, Joe was a policy analyst at the Washington Bureau of the NAACP, which is where we met when he was instrumental in helping get the NAACP to pass a resolution in support of national paid family and medical leave. And he's worked on a number of issues in Congress around race and economic justice. He was also recently appointed to the Prince George's County Commission on Human Relations, which is fantastic. So he works on civil rights policy and enforcement at the local level as well. He's got a BA in public relations from Hampton University, a graduate certificate in legal studies from Georgetown University, and an MA in government from Johns Hopkins. And he, too, is a proud husband and a father of two children. So, welcome, everyone. You know, this research comes at a really critical moment. And even more critical in these next couple of weeks, there's a bill that supports to be a paid leave bill being introduced in Congress today that falls short of some of what we are looking for here from this research and policy. There's a White House summit next week. There's a lot of activity happening. Congress is also considering federal employees' paid leave as part of its final negotiations in the National Defense Authorization Bill. And those negotiations should be wrapping up soon. So, totally timely panel. This is a long-standing problem here in the United States, going back decades, becoming more and more urgent as the population is aging. The number of caregivers for older people and disabled children are shrinking here in the US. The birth rate is falling. And as we really recognize that in order to have a full and vibrant economy, we have to have labor force participation that reflects the full talent of the United States. And it's been exciting to see progress at the state and local level. As Amanda mentioned, there are now eight jurisdictions plus DC, nine jurisdictions, including DC, which have paid family and medical leave laws passed. Many of those laws have been expanded to be more reflective of what workers need in terms of wage replacement, family definitions, job protection, but there's still so much more work to do. And at the end of the day, this research really underscores that getting the policy design right, that creating equitable policies and a more equitable culture is one pathway to fulfilling the country's promise in terms of its economy, in terms of its human capital, and in terms of the kind of people that we wanna be in relationship with one another. So, often in DC, it's hard to remember that people are really at the center of policy. We get very wonked out with our charts and our graphs and our numbers and our data. And so I really wanna start here today at the human center of this issue. And I'm actually gonna turn first to Dave, who's, as the story as I mentioned, is really threaded throughout and illustrates so many of the rich findings in this data. So Dave, you were kind enough to share your story on the report. I'm gonna ask you to do the same thing here. You obviously come from a place of privilege in terms of race and education and all sorts of things. And yet you found yourself in an unexpected situation when your child was born, both with respect to the policy or lack of policy that faced you and also with respect to some of the cultural barriers that really come out in this research. So I'm gonna turn to you first to just tell us a little bit about what happened to you and sort of what you've taken from that. First, thanks for having me and I guess giving dads a voice. When I was asked to participate in this panel discussion and I guess this study, this focus group, I was, my first reaction was just shock that the people cared to know and to ask dads questions about paid leave, about family leave, about caregiving. And it was literally the first time some of these questions had been asked of me. What do you think about paid leave? What do you think about childcare? What do you think about your daughter's daycare? Like all these questions, these were literally the first time anyone had asked a lot of these questions. And I think going through that focus group and going through that conversation was in some ways uplifting and encouraging that my experience was shared among many men across the country, but at the same time disheartening and deflating that I guess the guilt, the inadequacies, the frustrations that I have recently experienced were shared among other men and other fathers. I guess before, during and after of my story, I work in healthcare, I've worked with several different employers, have never been offered or had any type of paid family leave, paternity leave, benefits. And it was never a part of the discussion. It was never something that I was told to look out for, to ask for, to negotiate for. I have no one in my personal or professional circle that had ever taken any significant time. My sister, who's a few years older than me, cobbled together some vacation time and some disability time and then took out her unpaid FMLA leave. Her husband, I think, took no time or took a week of vacation and that's it. It hasn't been a part of my social or professional circle. That is, it expected or encouraged that fathers should have time, should take time. And even in our, I guess, during our pregnancy, my wife's pregnancy, we did a lot of classes. My wife intended to give birth, have a natural birth with a midwife in a birth center and that was our birth plan and that didn't go as planned but we did classes at a hospital. We did classes with a birth center with a nurse practitioner and we did classes with a doula who had a very crunchy, different experience and different perspective on it but at no point in any of those conversations from different healthcare providers, from my wife's employer and her HR representatives from my team, was there ever a discussion about what to expect after birth? The education that I received as a father was let's shock and scare the dads and make sure they know physically what your wife's going to go through. Do you know how big 10 centimeters is and like that conversation and it was a chance for us to prep our dad jokes but that was it. I learned that Lamaze is out and there's different pressure points that we wanna focus on and there's different relaxing things that we wanna do, encourage our wife to do yoga and then my job was done. When we did breastfeeding classes, when we did early childhood classes, there was never really a conversation about how the father, how the partner should continue to support our wives, the mother, postpartum and I didn't, I guess for me it didn't feel like that was something that I needed to know about until you know. I was never, as a young professional, was never focused on FLMLA leave, on paternity leave until you're now, your wife is pregnant and you were expecting a daughter and now you're concerned about how this is gonna affect us financially and all those things. I guess our birth experience, of course it never goes as planned. My wife labored for 20 hours naturally in a birth center, failed to progress, they sent her to the hospital across the street, had another 15 hours, pumped her full of drugs, the entire birth plan got thrown out the window and the experience was very difficult after that. Our daughter was sent to the NICU, we spent about five days in the NICU. Our plan was, in the birth center, you're gonna go home within 24 hours, so we didn't even pack socks and underwear. The plan was, we're gonna give birth in this tub, it's gonna be great, we're gonna go home, we're gonna relax for a week and then life's gonna continue. That didn't happen as often as the case with birth plans. So it took three days for my mother to even show up at the hospital with a pair of underwear and socks for me. But I guess my leave wound up being a week and a half of vacation time. We gave birth, my wife gave birth on a Wednesday. I took the rest of that week, again, still in the hospital. We were home for probably five or six days back home before I needed to go back to work. Fortunately and unfortunately, I have a wonderful job with a great company that is continuing to grow and expand as a vice president of business development calls me to go in many directions in many states. It was difficult for me, nor was, I don't think I ever really expected that I should be taking time to be home with my wife. Because that birth plan didn't go the way that we wanted because of the complications in the NICU, my wife did not have a support system locally. We're in Philadelphia, my mother's an hour plus away. Her parents are in Fort Lauderdale. She had no support system and had complications with breastfeeding, had complications with this, had physical recovery, all of these things that nobody told her about, nobody told me about and now have a wife that was very seriously in a state of postpartum depression and had no support and has a husband saying, I don't know what to do, but I need to be in Dallas for two days. I'm sorry, I need to go back to work because I didn't know and I wasn't prepared for that. It was a struggle for us. My wife cobbled together three months of leave through vacation time, through some short-term disability. That almost didn't happen and we didn't find out about that until halfway through her pregnancy. There was a large crisis with her HR department to make sure that they reclassified her so she could have six weeks of short-term disability and then the rest of it was unpaid leave. So the expectation for me as the husband, as the father was to continue to work, to continue to provide, to continue to have a paycheck so that we could continue to survive as now a family of three. It was a troubling time. It was a very stressful time to feel like I need to be here for my wife. I want to be here for my wife. I was the one pushing her to have a family. I was the one who wanted to be the super dad and at the same time have a high stress and a high pressure job where my expectation is to continue to perform and continue to grow business and continue to my job. And I guess it was very difficult, still continues to be difficult. And just even in the last couple of days reflecting with my wife, she of course made sure to remind me of the times that it's four o'clock and sometimes I'd wake up and be grumpy and say I'm not gonna change our daughter's diaper because I have a job and I need to wake up and I need to go to work. And shame on me, and she's right to remind me of that but again, I think I and I think other men have unfortunately been conditioned to think about my job is to be the worker and I did my job, you're home all day so you could change a diaper at four o'clock in the morning and that is one time and many times that I've fallen short and that's something that I struggled with and continue to struggle with and I'm trying to be an equal partner in this knowing that I'm always many, many steps behind but that's my struggle that was our struggle I guess. Thank you, that was amazing. And I think you pulled out so many important points the point about not even being asked not being provided the information and then not having the policies to back up the needs that you then found and the needs that your wife had when she was ill and I wanna just reflect we're talking very heteronormatively here today this is a lot about opposite sex couples there's a lot of research that's not a lot but some research that's starting to evolve on same sex couples and I think it'll be interesting in the future to examine that I know Jennifer we can talk some about same sex partners in the law firm but before we do that Joe I'm gonna turn to you to zoom us only just slightly out so I wanna start with your own personal experience also becoming a dad in an organization where you I believe are the first person to take paternity leave and sort of what that meant to you both as a person and also as a professional in an organization that was fighting for race and economic justice and how you sort of parlayed your personal experience into the resolution at the NAACP and into the work you're doing at NCRC around economic justice and community investment. Right well this is an issue that's near and dear to my heart as you said I worked on this issue for years when I was at the NAACP and as I was working on it I was shocked to learn the statistics around pay leave I think most people are not aware we heard some of the stats in the report a lot of people aren't aware that 85% of workers in this country do not have pay leave now if you're like me you probably did that math in your mind I said okay 100 minus 85 oh my god the only 15% of people in this country who have pay leave which is ridiculous when you think about it all American workers are the backbone of our economy how could these companies not provide this sort of protection for the workers and again if you're and if you're African American that actually becomes much worse as we like most people most communities who actually are placed in that situation you have to choose between your job and your economic security or the health of yourself or your loved one and African Americans are trying to get the exact stat but if we were to lose a job on average it takes about three months or more after a job search to find a job now if you combine that with the fact that 30% of African Americans have no savings at all that becomes problematic the choice then becomes like logical I think I'll probably just stay at my job and just work it out or lose my job and do unemployment but again that only lasts for so long so knowing those stats I was so thankful to work at an organization like the NAACP where we actually had a pay leave policy and an NCRC where we had the same thing and when I was at the NAACP you were right I was one of the first people to actually utilize the new policy because I had been revised where you got more time and let me just take you on a trip back to when my wife first got pregnant this was a 2009th era, yes we can a different era totally different era, I miss it but I was a 20-something as our first child of course and my daughter was born on July 6th, 2009 her name is Julia she was supposed to come on July 3rd but that didn't happen it was three days of labor, three days my wife had to have a C-section after all those days of just being in labor and it was a tough process it was really tough and she, I think, is a teacher so again July 6th, she's in the middle of summer vacation so she has some time home but she wanted more recovered from a C-section and all the drugs they pumped it full of for the epidural she was able to get using the 10 sick days they gave her as a teacher 10 sick days for the birth of a child which I've told is actually good for a teacher which is surprising then she had to use all of her vacation days then she had to use FMLA and tap into the teachers union sick day bank where she would still get paid so she had to cobble all that together just to have her paycheck and for myself, I had just started a new job in fact I started two weeks after my daughter was born and this is a small consulting firm so they had no pay to leave and even if they did I probably wouldn't be able to take it since there were so few people there and that was like what you were saying Dave I understand exactly what you went through because I felt the same way I was working 10 hour days sometimes more than that there's a newborn baby in the house my wife is trying to recover from the surgery from giving birth to a child and I'm out talking policy just feeling bad but fast forward three and a half, four years later my wife's pregnant again this time I'm at the NAACP and I don't know why we like to have children around the holidays but my son was born a Joseph, Joseph Jr. he was born December 24th, 2012 yes, Christmas Eve baby, he's about to turn seven soon and my wife again, she's on Christmas break so at that point she has a little time but not as much time as the summertime to be on leave so she had to do the same thing FMLA, Kabul all this all these different policies together just so she can take all but thankfully since I'm at the NAACP now and they have a month long policy now which is pretty impressive I took a full advantage of that but because of my job I was working 12 issue areas at the end of the 12 issue areas I was afraid of falling behind all my work I decided and shout out to my former boss Hillary Shelton for doing this I was able to come in in the morning after taking my three year old then three year old daughter to daycare worked for a few hours maybe until about 11 come back home by that point Joe's cycle was he would wake up around 12 o'clock and we had to feed him again so I was in time for feeding him I could take the baby off of my wife's hand and I did not have to work on Friday at all and I was able to do this from January all the way to the end of March and my wife's leave ended at the very beginning of April so it ended up working out perfectly and that's a situation in which more men were able to find themselves in because I was able to bond with my son in a way that I did not get to bond with my daughter being home, seeing some of her first, everything and I just wish this policy was we had a national policy, such as the family act which you've referred to before and a few other pieces of legislation but this definitely is new well so interesting in both of your stories it strikes me the level of awareness and education that your partners needed as well as that you needed to be able to figure out how to cobble together all of those different pieces of time really speaks to a level of sophistication and engagement and an ability to speak up for yourself and to really figure things out which I think reflects why in this data we see so many people who say that they didn't take leave or that they had fewer experiences particularly if you look at less educated lower income workers, to your point Joe the ability to take flexible leave or to be able to work part time really hinges on the kind of job that you have and so if you think about workers who are frontline retail and sales and hospitality and jobs where you really can't work part days or work remotely or where schedule, control doesn't exist that's a luxury and so paid leave is one piece of a policy spectrum that we really need to be thinking about when we're thinking about how better to create gender equity and just livability in our existences around the times when families need care and beyond where you are also dealing with daycare and other issues, childcare and other issues. Jennifer I'm gonna turn to you so we're gonna zoom from the personal a little bit to the company level you're at white in case and you have both parental leave policy that is by American standards good as well as a cultural policy of encouraging and almost requiring people to take the leave or making it the default and I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about sort of the policy you have the work that you've done in particular with non-attorney professionals and others to encourage men in those roles to take leave and then just any of the data that you might have collected on the impact that your policies and culture work have had. Yeah and as I was sitting here listening to you will tell your personal story I thought there were a few holes in my bio that would be important to tell you about because I think it was really influenced my perspective on the work that I'm doing now with white in case my family moved to Mexico when I was three years old and I was brought up in a very traditional environment in southern Mexico as you can imagine there were very defined roles male and female both in the home and the school environment and then further through life I was then moved to the United States to both study university and work for the next 10, 12 years before moving to the UK 15 years ago for what I thought was going to be a three year assignment and ended up now has been 15 I'm also a British citizen and in a relationship with a British man with four children so I have three male step-sons and a step-daughter who have also influenced my perspective on things. Being in Europe that has a different mindset both in role models we have a queen and a female we did have a female prime minister really sort of shifted my view of a woman's place and what we could and should be doing but also the support that we needed in order to go out and conquer the world differently. I've been with white in case now for four years and when I came on board we immediately started the conversation around the culture that we wanted to have and the changes that we needed to be putting in place in order to achieve that and one of them was really to begin to define what we're calling our employee value proposition what's the deal? So what can our employees expect of us and what can we expect or what do we expect of our employees in return? As a result of beginning to define that we started looking at our policies now I'm not gonna say we were enlightened to the point of looking at parental leave policy part of the reason that came to the front was that we had a very vocal employee group we had a group of associates particularly in DC that had been raising the flag saying look even what we have from maternity isn't enough from a support perspective but equally we think you need to be thinking about parental leave and they had been talking about it before I arrived and to their credit they continued and they would talk to anyone who listened any of our executives who came through town myself, numerous calls, numerous meetings and always brought up. I think thirdly one of the other influencing factors were a couple of our executive committee members who were asked to be sponsors of both our women's initiative as well as the diversity initiative and they began to get informed the research helps, the numbers help the conversation helps and they understood that women can't succeed unless there is a level of support that's happening and that means you have to enable men to take that leave. I think one of the other factors around this was the change in laws and the fact that we were given advanced warning about the changing law in New York where it's our largest office in the United States we kind of needed to get our act together and that gave me an impetus to get in and start talking about this and I think paving the way. I think that the next one was around communication so this wasn't me walking into the board room and saying guys I need you to approve a new policy. I think years of experience having worked in partnerships at both Ernst and Young for 17 years and then coming into this one I knew that I needed to do a lot of stakeholder engagement so I started to pick off individuals one by one at the end of it I had spoken to 50 people before I ever walked into the boardroom. I spoke to every practice leader, every office executive partner, anyone in the United States who I knew had a loud voice either for or against and what I needed them to do was to hear the policy touch the policy they didn't have to agree with it we could at least debate it but I could check it off at that point. So when I walked into the boardroom finally after about 18 months of socializing this and the chairman asked me who knows about this I went down the list I actually started with that I was like I've got a list of 50 people who know about this and no one said no no not all of them said yes but no one said no I think it aligned with that communication in sort of that stakeholder engagement that we did I think when we finally launched the policy we did so with a great deal of guidance which I think was what you were mentioning we wrote guidance for both the employees as well as for the supervisors in the organization meaning partners as well as the business services professionals manager and above who would potentially have a team of individuals for the supervisors it was a bit around why we're doing this so purpose is really important and helping people understand that allows them to buy into it in the first place and then secondly the how we're implementing it and we added in a long list of dos and don'ts do ask these questions don't ask those and by the way one of the big don'ts was you can't refuse this when somebody comes in and asks for their 12 weeks of leave you must say yes what you can do is negotiate when it's taken and how it's taken particularly if they're the nine the non primary caregiver so we've allowed it to be taken in any block including one day increments you can take every Friday off for an entire year if that's what you and your supervisor are deemed to be in your best interest as well as the organizations in the guidance that we did for the employees we put in a lot of messaging around the support that we were also providing we have a very rich portfolio of benefits but our people didn't know about them they weren't transparent we hadn't published them online so there was a big question mark about what do I have we also put in there a lot around their responsibility about approaching their supervisor and making this easy for them as well so I think we circled the wagons provided them with the medical care the just-in-time daycare as well as coaching the profession of law is based on hours so the off-ramp and then the on-ramp back in to ensure that you get your hours up that ensures in turn that your success and we're still on a path to partner really really important so we provided that for both the primary and the non-primary caregivers as well and last but not least you know I I'm just going to say there's a level of persistence that is required I got knocked down in a few of those conversations but I think both my belief in this was the right thing for us to do as well as my willingness to get back up and fight another day because I was fighting for the right thing and I was fighting for the employees of the organization who also really really needed this and I thought that you know this is this is one of those first policies that could be a banner in the changes that we want to make across the board in the culture that we're trying to create and it really has been a catalyst we're now going to start looking at other policies and how we are either rightly or wrongly differentiating there and how we can equalize and do more from that support perspective that's really helpful and I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about any return on investment that you've seen so far whether you've got data or sort of anecdotes and how you're laddering up the story the positive stories about leave taking within the organization to help even reinforce that culture absolutely I think in the first instance it is the story it's only been in place for two years so I think we launched it in March of 2018 and made it retroactive for the previous six months so anybody who had a child in those previous six months had the right to come and ask for the 12 weeks of leave but what we have seen and I've got numbers here so the total number of associates that asked for leave in 2017 was 34 and it increased to 64 so that if I did the math correctly is about a 68% increase and the ratios interestingly enough in 2017 it was 40% male, 60% female and in 2019 it reversed 60% of the associates that asked for leave were male and 40% female now the numbers for business services not quite as good but strong and moving in the right direction we also have a smaller population of business services people in the US we had 22 people asked for leave in 2017 before the policy and 36 this year today so that was about a 40% increase and it's improved from it was 18% male and 82% female in 2017 and it's now 25% male and 75% female in that timeframe we've had two of the males who went on leave make it to partner so it's early days I mean the path to partner is long there are a number of individuals in the pipeline one of the initiatives that is coming out off the back of this is us bringing more career clarity to our associates and so beginning saying we need to start having conversations with them at about year seven in terms of what their path to partnership looks like and in doing that we also uncovered that we needed to ensure that we were doing even more for those that were taking the leave, the time out of the office and we weren't penalizing them either from a career perspective from a bonus perspective because you guys have been talking about the financial aspects of this so talking another year and I believe we can give you more data but right now I think there is certainly there are numerous positive stories and I think particularly for those you had asked me about hourly workers in business services there are a lot of really positive stories about both women and men having the time off because previous to this we were differentiating who got leave we were only giving two weeks leave to men and only senior men so someone who was an hourly worker who tends to be an administration didn't have the right to take the time off so now we just said we're taking all the differentiation off the table makes it really easy for me to administer from an operational perspective everybody in the firm has the right to ask it every employee in the firm has the right to ask for it that's great just on the numbers the business services and I could have asked you this before so you may not know the answer but what is the gender balance of people in business services so that we can better understand the ratios that you're talking about what are you taking do you know it is slightly I would say it's almost 50-50 if you discount the administrative support so the practice support the secretarial support which tends to be a fairly large number although changing rapidly as AI is coming into play and a lot of what may have been done previously is either being off short or we're doing more with technology so it's interesting to see how those numbers are shifting and as we have more men in the organization they're also taking that's great thank you so last but certainly not least in this first round council member white I know you come to this too with both a personal and a professional interest and we've talked a lot about parental leave so far and I know you have a parental leave story but I'm actually hoping you can tell us more about the personal caregiving and your father as a caregiver to you when you were a child because that's such an important piece of this we know from the research that the family caregiving piece is the piece that people anticipate that they will need more often than they anticipate that they will need parental leave because parental leave is a pretty limited number of years whereas family caregiving can happen starting from when you're a very young person until you're a very old person and there was some really good research that just came out last week from National Alliance for Caregiving and Caring Across Generations about sandwich generation caregivers showing that those are really older millennials and Gen Xers to me who are sandwiched and so we often think about parental leave for that population but it actually is family caregiving that matters for everybody so I'm hoping you can sort of talk about your own story and male role models around that but then really help us understand how that's influencing your advocacy as a lawmaker here in the district and how implementation of the paid leave law is going. So when 29 years ago when I was eight my mother passed away from breast cancer and a few weeks after that so now my dad who was not the primary caregiving you know he's doing a good job but he wasn't mine, I don't know what I mean but a few weeks after that I was in a severe car accident where believe it or not a car landed on top of the car I was in, it would crack my skull I almost died, I had to be medevac at the hospital I was in intensive care spent several weeks in the hospital and then obviously several more weeks at home recovering but my father like everybody else in my family have high school diplomas work hourly wage jobs so if you have a dependent relative who has an emergency especially something substantial and you don't have a leave policy what happens? We were lucky because of two things one my family has a village so there were people from church there were other family members everyone was kind of tag teaming to make sure that I was good and also I have a brother who was involved in the car accident as well he was not injured as badly but he was not and so he had to be taken care of as well so one thing that was lucky for us is that we did have a community the other thing that we were lucky about is that my father had an understanding employer and they're still parameters and one of those parameters is if you work a wage job you don't get paid while you're not working nor can you generally afford to take a whole lot of time off work and so that was a very difficult sacrifice for my dad, for my family and it's something that you don't anticipate but as I got older I look at my father and his siblings all of them really struggling to make ends meet and both my grandparents their parents had significant declines in health and then there's this situation that's very common for folks and very, very common for black families where life expectancy is lower incomes are lower as well and so you're trying to figure out how can you possibly take care of an aging or ailing family member where you can barely pay rent you don't have leave it just doesn't really make sense and nobody wants to go through these things but many of us will and we can't plan on it nor can you just depend on the hope that you'll have an understanding employer and sometimes even an understanding employer won't be able to necessarily figure it out so when I started campaigning which coincidentally my wife I've worked for DC government for our attorney general Carl Racine my wife found out that we had decided I was gonna run for office for the second time I lost the first time and so I had to submit my letter of resignation my wife found out the day before that she was pregnant with our first child she didn't tell me until I got home after I submitted my letter of resignation because she knew I wouldn't do it and so one of the main issues at the time in the city when I'm running for office is this paid family leave and I have this historic family perspective I also have a now pregnant wife who is an attorney for the federal government they do not have paid leave we're trying to figure out how we're gonna manage maternity leave and so I recognize that there's real I don't like to undervalue the difficulty of doing paid family leave on the local level this is something the federal government should be doing they can make money we can't we have to raise it and so it's gonna hurt somebody but at the end of the day what I had to always tell people is it's not a question of whether we need this there's just no question some of us are privileged to be comfortable that if something goes wrong we can figure it out we can pay for a caregiver we can take time off because we're at a high enough level but there are many people in the District of Columbia primarily people of color because the wealth disparity is outrageous here who just don't have that option and you can't have a city where people of color or people who work hourly wage jobs are the ones who can't take leave and obviously even others struggle so there's so many ways that we have to look at this and so the district created what is not a perfect program but the best that we can figure out so far of creating a leave program where parents can take eight weeks of leave for a newborn child where an individual and employee can take six weeks to care for a family member or two weeks to take care for themselves but the other thing is I watched, although I was young I watched my mother suffer with breast cancer she had to go to chemotherapy by herself I went with her because I wasn't in school at the time obviously if you suffer from cancer or another debilitating disease you're gonna have declines in health that will take you out of work for unknown periods of time maybe it's a day for chemotherapy maybe it's a week for something else maybe your kid is sick and it's difficult and not to pile on but one of the effects of the car accident I was in is I still get severe migraines when I was young I got them at least once a week and they were so severe that I couldn't stay at school so my poor dad having to tell his boss I gotta leave to pick up my son and my poor dad he had to not get paid so I don't quite understand how he managed to make ends meet but that's not the type of thing that we want people to go through and so as local elected officials until the federal government steps up we have to step up and figure it out implementation is going so so right now I mean it's hard to yeah it's hard to know exactly because we're still in the building phase in any project especially a major project some deadlines get missed and sometimes you miss a deadline but it doesn't push back the ultimate delivery sometimes it does and we're still trying to figure out if these are missed deadlines that are going to push back the delivery or not I don't think many people in the council have a tolerance for pushing it back because the need is there and we've made the promise to residents but there are some significant steps first we have to create a system to collect the taxes now we have started collecting the taxes we have to inform employees of what their rights are because we want people to take it if they need it and we also have to inform employees like I'm sure White in Cases Office in D.C. they know what the deal is with Pay Family Leave but that corner store where you might buy a soda they probably don't and so it's really kind of an educational process that the last thing I will say though is that I haven't studied this but I sense that there is a shift happening a generational shift though I'm, don't be fooled by my lack of hair and great beard I'm only 37 so I'm at the front end of the millennial generation and I see a difference in attitude like I'm proud like if you go on my social media you just see my little girls I love being a dad and I think that people are less consumed with traditional gender roles but that also means that our laws have to catch up so we have to figure this out because it's not, you know it's very difficult on women especially with the birth of a child but it's also an obligation for men that we have to one step up to the plate to be able to step up to the plate because raising kids is not a mother's job it's a parent's job and I think that there's a renewed kind of respect for that role but obviously we have to have policies in place that allow people to act on it Yeah, that's great so much rich conversation here and so much in the data actually too about perceptions about what encourages men to take leave around moral responsibility and it's sort of, it's your job you have to step up to the plate but also attitudes that hold attitudes or realities that people believe hold men back and lack of pay and fear of penalties are at the top of the list we've certainly touched on that I think you articulated so well council member the hourly workers real, I mean there's a complete catch 22 there between getting paid and being able to care and what does it mean if you can't if you're not getting your hourly pay how are you gonna pay the bills how are you gonna put food on the table how are you gonna spend money in your economy, which is relying on consumers to frequent the store down at the corner and you know Joe I know you've worked on that community development aspect too, I guess I'm wondering sort of what messages or strategies or messengers or just how can we kind of tell that story a bit more sort of the effects of lack of pay on the broader society and this wasn't in our canned question so I'm gonna open it up to anybody who might wanna answer that question but it really strikes me that it is this it's this triple conundrum of no pay fear that you're gonna be held back or punished which could lead to more no pay and then this perception that you know men are not encouraged or educated enough to take leave so I guess I'm just gonna open it up to all of us because we are actually running short on a little bit short on time and I wanna get to audience question how do you sort of grapple with these different features and what do you all think might be most effective in addressing some of this? Sure, you know, not you, yes. I was gonna say story teller. Yeah, you know even the article that you all wrote was fantastic in starting the conversation and we're doing a lot of that where we're featuring individuals who've done something different in the organization whether it was take the leave, pro bono work, whatever it may be and tell the story around it because people are really interested in stories and I think that the more that we do that the more can highlight the opportunity as well as the issues that surround it. Yeah, I mean I guess from a policy perspective and it really struck me Jennifer when you were talking about the stakeholder outreach that you did, that is the same stakeholder outreach that those of us who are talking to lawmakers do all that time. So I'm curious about sort of the role of storytelling in legislative advocacy or in policy change within organizations and how do we tell those stories about hourly workers, about workers who might not have the privilege to be able to cobble time together or figure out how to cobble time together. From an advocacy perspective, Joe, from an internal perspective, Dave and sort of from a lawmaker perspective. Councilman, how do you thread the needle with that storytelling that needs to happen in order to really make an impact? So I think that, I mean you just have to start telling the story in two ways and I think your answer is exactly right. One is just experientially, like I think when you, if you look at the commonalities between me, Dave and Joseph, like you're just gonna start seeing more of this and so I think there's just storytelling in real time. But then there's also storytelling that makes somewhat of a profound point. One of the advocates for paid leave here in the district told me that his mother had to go back to work the day after she had him. I hadn't yet, my wife had not yet given birth and I'm like, wow, that's pretty bad ass, you know? But then once my wife gave birth, oh, I just had a brand new, like I don't even understand how that's possible, like it completely blew my mind. But it's not, it's not exactly uncommon. You know, it's not that it never happens. And so I think that stories that really illustrate how devastating the lack of policy can be, they really go a long way. And I was gonna say like, and that's when you were telling your story, I was thinking about conversations I've had with policy makers, like people don't hear those stories. They need to hear that more, especially like people in members of Congress, local elected officials, like you said, so the more person with the story, the more effect it will have and change your policy. So that's definitely needed. And I think we all need to do a better job of probably messaging this to all lawmakers or policy makers so we can see some sort of change. I'm not a policy maker. Even just telling friends and family about the focus group, this discussion, hey, I'm gonna be in DC having a conversation. I've had male and female colleagues, friends, my wife say, why, okay, who cares? And that's disappointing. And again, so I guess not to approach it from the policy perspective, but I'm hopeful that employers and employees can be more empowered to have these conversations and understand the importance that healthcare providers can do a better job of educating and social workers and case managers in the hospitals can do a better job of educating families about the importance of taking care of family members, whether it's after a birth, during a medical condition, and just shifting the conversation so that when I change a diaper at a kid's birthday party, I'm not the father of the year because you did the most basic thing. And again, that's enraging to me and I'm sure for the other fathers here, it's very frustrating that the bar is so low for fathers that I pushed a kid in a stroller, I changed a diaper and that makes me a great parent. At the same time, we're expecting mothers to be perfect employees and to be perfect mothers. And that scale, when you sacrifice one in, you're penalizing the mom for not being a good employee at the same time, you're penalizing the employee for not being a good mother, that needs to shift. And I'm certainly trying to have those conversations with my friends in Balmain and hopefully that's where I can influence the conversation, I think. But yes, there is a generational shift as the council member said and hopefully we'll continue. I'm gonna take the last few minutes to open it up to audience questions. Yeah, I'll go here and then back there. So Vicki, you spoke about the sandwich generation. I call it actually the panini generation because it's so intense and we're sort of melting out from the sides. We speak, and yes, I'm an exer who never thought this was possible. You wanna introduce yourself off the stage? Sure, I'm Julia Beck, I'm the founder of the It's Working Project and we do. We capture stories from working parents and we use that data to better understand what it is that is challenging to them and then share it with the private sector employer so that they can understand that very small things like not having meetings after five p.m. so people can get to daycare make a huge difference. So zero cost, huge return, what's our deal? I love that you said that. So the panini generation. The issue is that as we move forward into the millennials and their parents aging, they will have much younger children than we do when we are caring for our parents. So the question I wanna put out there for all of us is when you have this intersection of as little as 10 years between being a new parent and needing to be an elder caregiver, how is it that the private sector will begin to bring the men into the equation because right now women actually are suffering greatly from depression and an inability to manage all that is on their plan? Also, I think that's a great question and also a great reinforcement of one of the key findings from the research which is that policies really do need to address both the parental lease piece and the family care giving piece and we're seeing some employers starting to introduce policies that are comprehensive or at least address both pieces of that but public policy in order to work for everybody as the states have done, really need to figure out how to do both pieces. I don't know if anybody wants to add to that. Look, I think that it's going to be similar to what we've been doing with parental leave, looking at the policies that we have in place for family leave full stop because that incorporates it. I know a number of organizations are providing support by means of insurance that covers either just-in-time care or support that can be brought in and we're looking at it more holistically around the world in our case but equally having to change the policies to not just be about childcare but for any kind of care outside of the home that's required. So I think that's the next conversation that will be had at least in our organization. I know others that I've spoken to similar. Sure, very quickly. So, gestation, 40 weeks, that's great. That's a lot of time to get ready to plan and if your plans don't work out, it's a lot of time to think about your plans and then if you're fortunate enough to have leave, there's time to acclimate to your new role. When there is an issue with an aging parent, it's as little as hours that you have to react. Or a car accident with a child. The car accident, exactly. And so, I just want to put that into the mix in terms of the difference between planning and understanding what's available to you because something like 40% of people, just they wake up and in that day changes their lives. Yeah, great. Let's go to, let's do the next two questions and then we'll do a final wrap up from the panel and for you. Hi, I'm Negar, a bio at the Behiis of the United States. Thank you for this wonderful panel. I was really struck by this idea of like what is the culture we want and then what are the policies that support that. And I was thinking of sort of Aijin Poo's Age of Dignity where there's this conversation about just our very attitudes about caregiving and how we're, as a culture, as a society, need to reorient. And then also struck by how there's such a lack of knowledge and even like being in that space of thinking of what caregiving involves. And I'm wondering whether there are ways to kind of open up the box and do kind of a more creative mapping of where do these conversations happen and with whom and at what stages in life earlier on and not just around a child but also around caregiving that there isn't planning for it. And maybe there's sort of more creative ways that we can also think about how that happens. And so any thoughts in that regard for you all? Well, let's go to the last question just so that we get it in and then we'll wrap up and answer the question. Hi, my name is Kelly. I am working on a book about men in the domestic sphere from 1970 to today. So trying to track exactly the changes that you're talking about. So I'm loving this. But I had a question mainly for Jennifer but for everyone too, which is about the concept of primary caregiver because in policies we still use this primary caregiver, secondary caregiver or tertiary caregiver or other caregiver or whatever it is, non-primary. And from what I see just from the family perspective, families are not making that differentiation. They're wanting co-caregiving. And then when they go to their employer, they're still having to designate primary caregiver and that creates some difficulties. So I'm wondering from the employer's perspective, is it important that there be a primary caregiver and also is it possible those categories might change? Absolutely, I think what you've highlighted is something that I am a firm believer of it and I don't know whether it's because I started my career in marketing and advertising and so words matter. I think now being in the legal professions, words matter equally in this space. But it was part of the reason that for the US policy, we remove the term. We're not differentiating any longer because we believe care is care and I think that's really important. And I think that we're gonna have to look at our policies equally outside of the corporate environment. It's now sort of my mission to start looking at what we have across Europe because I think there's a misperception that Europe is so enlightened and it isn't because we're still differentiating. I think except for the Nordics, even in the UK where you have up to a year with probably six or seven months of that paid partially by the employer, partially by the government, there's still a differentiation. So even as the non-primary caregiver, you have to decide who's gonna stay at home. We're saying we've gotta get rid of the language and I think that's coming, it's in debate and it's important that we look at it both within the government sector as well as in the private sector to change the language around it and then how we talk about it because that will influence the story. And some of this is stigma, right? The stigma that comes with it and as soon as we get rid of it, then that begins to go away as well. Yeah, great. Well, I think that actually leads very nicely into the question about where should these conversations be happening and let's use that theme as a wrap up for any final thoughts that you all have. We've heard lots of locuses of conversation in here already, workplaces, healthcare centers, birth training, policy spaces, boardrooms. But I'm curious, for any final thoughts on sort of how do we start to change the conversation, where do those conversations happen and what are your hopes and dreams for the future in 20 seconds each or less? Yeah. I'll start with you, Councilman, and then we go. Go down the line. Sure, so the conversations I think just have to happen in public. Real life really has to lead policy and as each generation grapples with different challenges than the previous one, that there have to be conversations and pushes for the government and the private sector to really adapt as well. And if we're able to continue to have these conversations, I think we'll be able to continue to make progress. It will always be difficult, but we'll be able to do it. Okay. I suppose if I had one wish, it would be that the conversation started happening on the golf course. That is the last bastion of sort of male culture. I think for me, the challenge for me is how do I use what we've started in the US with the policy that we put in place here? How do we use that as a framework for the changes we need to make across Europe, the Middle East, and in Asia, as well as a starting point in the US for the other changes around leaves and other policies that we have in place that need to be changed and looked at? Dave? I did not have a mentor, an employer, a friend or a family member who gave me education who told me that this is what you should do, that this is what to expect professionally. To take this time off, this is what you should expect as a family member. I'm hopeful that as the generations churn of new parents and new members that need this paid leave can continue to be advocates and a voice in their local circles, in their communities. And I think I'm hopeful that that is how we can encourage and shift the culture and shift those conversations so that it is understood as a 12-year-old, as a 10-year-old, as a five-year-old, whatever it is, that this is expected. Dad can take some time to take care of grandma and can continue that change. Wonderful, and Joe? I'll say form such as this is the perfect place to have these conversations, because I know I'm not sure the makeup of everyone here, but I'm sure that you're gonna go from here and have conversations with your family members. I have conversations at your job, which might lead to policy moving forward because the stigma, we touched on stigma a little bit before, but just as a man who took paid leave, I just remember being at the NAACP, even though it was a welcoming environment, a lot of people were trying to figure out, well, why are you taking leave now? Your wife is home, why do you need to do this? You're covered, that should not be the case. We're equal partners in this. I wanted to be there for my son, my daughter, and I believe every man wants to do the same. So hopefully a forum such as this leads to more discussion going on from here. Great, I feel like we could have stayed here all day and there's much, much more in the report to dig into and so much of what we all covered, I think, is reflected and you can really chew on it. If you read the report, my colleagues, Bridget, Amanda, Haley, Jadzaya, and Rosalind, who's not here, put a ton of work into this. It was a real labor of love and I encourage you all to read it. And with that, go forth and talk about this issue with all the people in your lives so that we can make change. All right, thank you all so much for coming. We'll be moving out into the lobby. We've got another event coming up quickly so if we could take our conversations out into the foyer, that would be great.