When I was a young person, I began my career
as an actress. Whenever my mother wasn’t free to drive
me into Manhattan for auditions, I would take the train from suburban New Jersey and meet
my father — who would have left his desk at the law office where he worked — and
we would meet under the Upper Platform Arrivals and Departures sign in Penn Station. We would then get onto the subway together
and, when we surfaced, he would ask me “Which way is north?" I wasn’t very good at finding North at the
beginning, but I auditioned fair amount and so my Dad kept asking “Which way is north?" Over time, I got better at finding it. I was struck by that memory yesterday while
boarding the plane to come here. Not just by how far my life has come since
then, but by how meaningful that seemingly small lesson has been. When I was still a child, my father developed
my sense of direction and now, as an adult, I trust my ability to navigate space. My father helped give me the confidence to
guide myself through the world. In late March, last year, 2016, I became a
parent for the first time. I remember the indescribable—and as I understand
a pretty universal — experience of holding my week-old son and feeling my priorities
change on a cellular level. I remember I experienced a shift in consciousness
that gave me the ability to maintain my love of career and cherish something else, someone
else, so much, much more. Like so many parents, I wondered how I was
going to balance my work with my new role as a parent, and in that moment, I remember
that the statistic for the US’s policy on maternity leave flashed in my mind. American women are currently entitled to 12
weeks’ unpaid leave. American men are entitled to nothing. That information landed differently for me
when, one week after my son’s birth I could barely walk. That information landed different when I was
getting to know a human who was completely dependent on my husband and I for everything,
when I was dependent on my husband for most things, when we were relearning everything
we thought we knew about our family and relationship. It landed differently. Somehow, we and every American parent were
expected to be “back to normal” in under three months. Without income. I remember thinking to myself, “If the practical
reality of pregnancy is another mouth to feed in your home and America is a country where
most people are living paycheck to paycheck, how does 12 weeks unpaid leave economically
work?” The truth is, for too many people it doesn’t. One in four American women go back to work
two weeks after giving birth because they can’t afford to take any more time off than
that. That’s 25 per cent of American women. Equally disturbing, women who can afford to
take the full 12 weeks often don’t because it will mean incurring a “motherhood penalty”—
meaning they will be perceived as less dedicated to their job and will be passed over for promotions
and other career advancement. In my own household, my mother had to choose
between a career and raising three children - a choice that left her unpaid and underappreciated
as a homemaker - because there just wasn’t support for both paths. The memory of being in the city with my Dad
is a particularly meaningful one since he was the sole breadwinner in our house, and
my brothers and my time with him was always limited by how much he had to work. And we were an incredibly privileged family
— our hardships were the stuff of other family’s dreams. The deeper into the issue of paid parental
leave I go, the clearer I see the connection between persisting barriers to women’s full
equality and empowerment, and the need to redefine and in some cases, destigmatize men’s
role as caregivers. In other words, in order to liberate women,
we need to liberate men. The assumption and common practice that women
and girls look after the home and the family is a stubborn and very real stereotype that
not only discriminates against women, but limits men’s participation and connection
within the family and society. These limitations have broad-ranging and significant
effects, for them and for children. We know this. So why do we continue to undervalue fathers
and overburden mothers? Paid parental leave is not about taking days
off work; it is about creating freedom to define roles, to choose how to invest time,
and to establish new, positive cycles of behavior. Companies that have offered paid parental
leave for employees have reported improved employee retention, reduced absenteeism and
training costs, and boosted productivity and morale. Far from not being able to afford to have
paid parental leave, it seems we can't afford not to. In fact, a study in Sweden showed that every
month fathers took paternity leave, the mothers’ income increased by 6.7 per cent. That’s 6.7 per cent more economic freedom
for the whole family. Data from the International Men and Gender
Equality Survey shows that most fathers report that they would work less if it meant that
they could spend more time with their children. And picking up on the thread that the prime
minister mentioned I'd like to ask: How many of us here today saw our Dads enough growing
up? How many of you Dads here see your kids enough
now? We need to help each other if we are going
to grow. Along with UN Women, I am issuing a call to
action for countries, companies and institutions globally to step-up and become champions for
paid parental leave. In 2013, provisions for parental leave were
in only 66 countries out of 190 UN member states. I look forward to beginning with the UN itself
which has not yet achieved parity and who's paid parental leave policies are currently
up for review. All you're going to see a lot of me. Let us lead by example in creating a world
in which women and men are not economically punished for wanting to be parents. I don't mean to imply that you need to have
children to care about and benefit from this issue — whether or not you have — or want
kids, you will benefit by living in a more evolved world with policies not based on gender. We all benefit from living in a more compassionate
time where our needs do not make us weak, they make us fully human. Maternity leave, or any workplace policy based
on gender, can—at this moment in history—only ever be a gilded cage. Though it was created to make life easier
for women, we now know it creates a perception of women as being inconvenient to the workplace. We now know it chains men to an emotionally
limited path. And it cannot, by definition, serve the reality
of a world in which there is more than one type of family. Because in the modern world, some families
have two daddies. How exactly does maternity leave serve them? Today, on International Women’s Day, I would
like to thank all those who went before in creating our current policies—let us honour
them and build upon what they started by shifting our language - and therefore our consciousness—away
from gender and towards opportunity. Let us honor our own parents sacrifice by
creating a path for a more fair, farther the reaching truth to define all of our lives,
especially the lives our children. Because paid parental leave does more than
give more time for parents to spend with their kids. It changes the story of what children observe,
and will from themselves imagine possible. I see cause for hope. In my own country, the United States—currently
the only high-income country in the world without paid maternity let alone parental
leave—great work has begun in the states of New York, California, New Jersey, Rhode
Island and Washington which are currently implementing paid parental leave programs. First Lady Charlene McCray and Mayor Bill
de Blasio have granted paid parental leave to over 20,000 government employees in NYC. We can do this. Bringing about change cannot just be the responsibility
of those who need it most; we must have the support of those at the highest levels of
power if we are ever to achieve parity. That is why it is such an honor to recognize
and congratulate pioneers of paid parental leave like the global company Danone. Today I am proud to announce Danone Global
CEO, Emmanuel Faber as our inaugural HeForShe Thematic Champion for Paid Parental Leave. As part of this announcement, Danone will
implement a global 18 weeks gender-neutral paid parental leave policy for the company’s
100,000 employees by the year 2020. Monsieur Faber, when Ambassador Emma Watson
delivered her now iconic HeForShe speech and stated that if we live in a world where men
occupy a majority of positions of power, we need men to believe in the necessity of change,
I believe she was speaking about visionaries like you. Merci. Imagine what the world could look like one
generation from now if a policy like Danone's becomes the new standard. If 100,000 people become 100 million. A billion. More. Every generation must find their north. When women around the world demanded the right
to vote, we took a fundamental step toward equality. North. When the same sex marriage was passed in the
US, we put an end to a discriminatory law. North. When millions of men and boys when millions
of men and boys and prime ministers and deputy directors of the UN, sorry, the president
of the General Assembly. That's what happens when I go out of the script. When men like the men in this room and around
the world. The ones we cannot see. The ones who support us in ways we cannot
know but we feel. When they answered Emma Watson’s call to
be HeForShe, the world grew. North. We must ask ourselves, how will we be more
tomorrow than we are today? The whole world grows when people like you
and me take a stand because we know that beyond the idea of how women and men are different,
there is a deeper truth that love is love, and parents are parents. Thank you.
