All In

How Our Work-First Culture Fails Dads, Families, and Businesses—And How We Can Fix It Together

Josh Levs

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062349637
• Subtopic: Business General

When journalist Josh Levs was denied fair parental leave by his employer after his child was born, he fought back—and won. Since then, he's become an advocate for modern families and working fathers. In All In, he explores the changing face of fatherhood and what it means for our individual lives, families, workplaces, and society.

Fatherhood today is far different from previous generations. Stay-at-home dads are increasingly common, and growing numbers of men are working part-time or flextime schedules to spend more time with their children.  Even the traditional breadwinner-dad is being transformed. Dads today are more emotionally and physically involved on the home front. They are "all in" and—like mothers—they are struggling with work-life balance and doing it all.

Journalist and "dad columnist" Josh Levs explains that despite these unprecedented changes, our laws, corporate policies, and gender-based expectations in the workplace remain rigid. They are preventing both women and men from living out the equality we believe in—and hurting businesses in the process. Women have done a great job of speaking out about this, Levs—whose fight for parental leave made front page news across the country—argues. It's now time for men to join in.

Combining Levs' personal experiences with investigative reporting and frank conversations with fathers about everything from work life to money to sex, All In busts popular myths, lays out facts, uncovers the forces holding all of us back, and shows how we can all join together to change them.

PART I

The Parental Leave Battle

Paternity Leave

A Men’s and Women’s Right

Jay and Kristi Ramsay were excited about the arrival of their second child when they suddenly had a big scare. Thirty-seven weeks into Kristi’s pregnancy, the baby stopped moving. The placenta wasn’t working. Jay was at work when he got the call. “I frantically jumped out of my seat. I was in panic mode, in tears.” He told his office he had a family emergency and ran to his car.

That night, doctors induced. The baby girl was born—fortunately, alive and well. Jay swung back by work the next day, but his boss told him he should go be with his family. So he stayed out for the rest of the week and returned Monday morning. Apparently the three days he took off were too much. When he returned, he was called into a private meeting. “My boss told me I ‘should have known better’ and ‘should have planned better,’” he says. “‘Your taking this many days off work? We have so much to do here.’”

Jay was lucky. Just that morning he had learned a new job offer was coming from another company. So in the heat of the moment, he did what virtually all parents would want to do, but can’t. “I just leaned forward to her and said, ‘I fucking quit right now.’ And then I jumped up, took my laptop out of my bag and slammed it down on the desk, as well as my cell phone, and said, ‘What else do you need from me, so I can get the hell out of here?’”

“I think it’s indicative of society in general,” Jay says, speaking at his home in Decatur, Georgia. Some people, he says, think, “Why is the man worrying about the birth of his kids? That’s not his concern; that’s the woman’s job to deal with that. Just keep your head down and work.”

Many people are shocked when they find out that the boss in this case was a pregnant woman. But equal rights activists aren’t surprised. Gender discrimination is “policed by men, but also, significantly, by women,” says Joan Williams.

Our laws aren’t helping matters. We don’t even provide women with the basics, let alone men. Four in ten workers can lose their jobs for taking time off after having a baby. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires that larger employers allow caregivers—whether female or male—twelve weeks off after a birth. About 40 percent of workers are not covered by FMLA.¹ Worse, some workers entitled to FMLA aren’t given it. One in five employers admits not fully complying with FMLA.² Who knows how many more just don’t admit it.

For workers who do get FMLA, the law doesn’t call for any pay. And there’s no federal system to provide money during that time. Most families can’t afford to halt one income, especially the dominant one, which is most often the father’s. A study found so few dads actually take FMLA that “they’re almost undetectable.” Among that “minuscule” share of dads, most get some pay.³

Just over half of U.S. employers offer some paid maternity leave, usually financed through short-term disability.⁴ Only about 14 percent offer any paid paternity leave.⁵ That includes places that pay for as little as one or two days. And it’s getting worse. Employers are cutting back on paid leave.⁶

College professor Josh Azriel is among the millions of men who got no paid leave. He used vacation time. Josh and his wife, Michelle, adopted a child after what he calls a “hellacious two years” of trying to conceive. He would have loved eight or ten paid weeks to help take care of Mia and reduce some of the stress on his wife, he says. “We would have balanced each other out.”

Just like most dads of newborns, Josh was soon back at work and running on empty. “A newborn is supposed to be fed every four hours. So I did the 8:00 P.M. feeding and the midnight feeding. I would come home and do a lot of the cooking, the cleaning, and Michelle held Mia for her first year. She rarely put her down. I took on a lot of the tasks of running the home. You get into a routine. It’s the feeding, the changing of the diapers, responding to every cry. And you have to take care of yourself, pay the bills, clean the house. Stuff is just falling, left and right.”

It’s the zombie effect, and you’ve probably seen it in your office or at the grocery store—the overtired dad with the disheveled shirt and stained tie, somehow managing to get his tasks done. He’s the guy with the two diet cokes in the briefcase or gym bag he’s carrying around, along with a stash of clean diapers, wipes, and a pacifier, just in case.

The days when most couples had grandparents nearby helping are no more. Young couples move away more often, and older Americans are putting off retirement longer, either because they want to or have to financially.

Dads want to do the caregiving. We love holding our babies, changing them, doing feedings, taking them for walks. It’s one of the best feelings on earth. But with no time off from work and loads of responsibilities clogging off-work hours, many men aren’t given enough time to.

On the flip side, when dads do get paid paternity leave, the benefits are far-reaching. Those who take it are more deeply involved in their children’s lives for years to come. And kids with more involved dads are more likely to excel in all the big ways—in relationships, confidence, academics, the works.

“Those investments we make in infants and young children are some of the most important a society can make,” says Heather Boushey, executive director of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “Letting parents stay home saves on child-care costs and means kids are healthier. And if dads get engaged, they stay engaged for a lifetime.”

Numerous studies show that the best way to engage fathers is through paternity leave. “By drawing fathers into the daily realities of child care, free of workplace constraints, extended time off provides the space necessary for fathers to develop the parenting skills and sense of responsibility that then allows them to be active coparents rather than helpers to their female partners,” a study found. That more equitable division of labor often lasts throughout the child’s life. Getting started on the right foot requires letting dads be home for more than three weeks, because then “the initial stress and chaos of the immediate post-birth period begins to subside, and patterns and routines develop.”⁷

To see this in action, look at Lance and Jessica Somerfeld, of New York. They managed to stay home together for three months. “We navigated that landscape, and I think it’s one reason why we’re more successful as a couple now,” Lance says. “The two of us really had no experience with anything in the parenting world. You know, we were those people on an airplane who would be like, ‘There’s a kid kicking my seat. When’s the brat going to cut that out? I’m going on vacation now!’ Then all of a sudden the roles are reversed, and it’s my kid doing that to someone else.

“The two of us were going up that creek without a paddle. So we were able to really communicate with each other and develop a style that we were comfortable with. We were playing to our strengths and realizing the areas that we weren’t so good at, so the other one could pick up the slack.”

Lance had worked on Wall Street, rising up the ranks. When he got married, he wanted a better quality of life. “I lost that fire to be a CEO of a major corporation. I had a very understanding and loving partner, and she was extremely supportive of my taking a leap of faith and trying teaching.” He gave up a six-figure salary to teach sixth grade at a public school. When Jessica got pregnant, they both wanted one parent to stay home, and she was among the 23 percent of moms outearning their husbands.⁸ So Lance stayed home.

“I was scared shitless, but I was willing to take the leap,” he says. Meanwhile, Jessica’s work gave her three months of maternity leave, two of which were paid. “We were able for two months to tune out everything else and focus on being good parents and keeping things alive between us as a couple. I learned that I had to be just as good a husband as I was a parent.”

Most couples won’t be able to stay home at the same time. But men should have the option of staying home for caregiving the same length of time women have. It’s best for everyone. “In the long run, the true beneficiaries of paternity leave are women, and the companies and nations that benefit when women advance,” Liza Mundy, of the organization New America, wrote in the Atlantic. It’s “a brilliant and ambitious form of social engineering: a behavior-modification tool that has been shown to boost male participation in the household, enhance female participation in the labor force, and promote gender equity in both domains. The genius of paternity leave is that it shapes domestic and parenting habits as they are forming.”⁹

When men can take paternity leave, women have the option of continuing to advance their careers without handing off the kids to others just a few weeks after birth. Most working women who stop their careers after a birth say a central reason is that their husbands had to keep working.¹⁰ And when men get a chance to be caregivers in those early weeks of a baby’s life, some decide to give up their jobs, work fewer hours, or work from home—all things that give women more freedom to succeed in the workforce. Sheryl Sandberg calls paid paternity leave necessary to help make men “equal partners and equal parents.”

It boils down to simple, basic lack of equality. If policies keep pushing women to stay home and pushing men to rush back to work, how will women keep working up the ranks? Imagine a husband and wife who work for the same company, and she outranks him. If she gets paid leave and he doesn’t, the company is giving her an incentive to stay home and him an incentive to stay at work. The chances are that a man will fill in for her while she’s out, since in general in America far more men are in higher positions. She loses that time to advance her career; the dad loses the chance to be caregiver in those critical initial weeks; and the child loses out on having two parents equally well equipped and experienced to handle all the caregiving tasks. The business also loses out, because it doesn’t get to keep the best talent regardless of gender.

This may all sound well and good, but a big question hovers over it. How would we pay parents for weeks spent not working outside the home without breaking businesses or introducing an exorbitant new tax? Easy. First step: learn the surprising ways billions of dollars are already flowing.

Follow the Money

Our tax system is a joke. If you weren’t already familiar with it and I told you about it, you’d be convinced I was making it up. I’d basically have to say, “On this long form with tiny print, subtract line 45e from line 36b and multiply by the number of people in your household, unless you’re a redhead in California, in which case you should divide line 46c by the square root of the circumference of the nearest round object on your desk.” We’re this close to needing a protractor and Ouija board to do taxes in this country.

I say this having covered these issues for years and explained tax implications of the unbelievably complex Affordable Care Act live on TV over and over. But once in a while, something that actually makes simple sense makes it through Congress. And that could happen with paid parental leave for both moms and dads.

Support for it rises far above the partisan bickering that plagues Washington. One poll found 83 percent of adults, including 87 percent of women, support paid leave.¹ Another found 89 percent of dads consider it important.² (That figure was a bit inflated, because many of the dads polled were lucky enough to actually have the benefit.) There’s a “bipartisan voter mandate for family-friendly workplace policies,” the National Partnership for Women and Families says.³

The few people opposed to the idea just might change their minds when they learn the facts. Having spoken with people across the political spectrum, I found that those wary of giving parents paid leave assume it would hurt businesses or require some exorbitant tax. But in fact it can be done in a way that helps businesses profit and saves Americans money.

To understand how all this works, we have to start with something big businesses don’t like to talk about. What many people refer to as “maternity leave” isn’t what you think it is. At some companies, birth moms actually are not given any paid time at all for the purpose of bonding with their children—but dads are.

Here’s why. These employers are actually using their disability insurance to pay birth moms during the disability caused by pregnancy and birth. Technically it’s like paying a man who broke his legs and can’t work. Companies have different plans that determine how much pay their employees get during any disability.

“About 40 percent of employers are covered by disability insurance. It’s kind of no skin off their nose” to cover women after a birth, says Heather Boushey, of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “Bigger employers already have to give you unpaid time off through FMLA, and your pay is covered by the insurance. They’re not doing anything extra, just what they have to do.”

And even on this front, things are getting worse. “Employers have become significantly less likely to provide full pay during leave for maternity-related disability,” the Families and Work Institute found.Only 9 percent of companies provide full pay, down from 16 percent in 2008.⁴

Until its big policy change, Time Warner was one of these companies having its c...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. The Parental Leave Battle
• Part II. Beyond Leave: Fixing the Struggle Between Work and Life
• Part III. Fixing Pop Culture
• Part IV. Fatherlessness
• Part V. Sex
• Part VI. The All-In Life
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Praise
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher