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1
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.
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2
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?
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Today, on International Women's Day, I would like to thank all of 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.
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4
Let us honor our own parents sacrifice by creating a path for a more fair, farther-reaching truth to define all of our lives, especially the lives of 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.
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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 all implementing paid parental leave programs.
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First Lady Charlene McCray and mayor Bill de Blasio have granted paid parental leave to over 20,000 government employees in New York City. 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 in 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.
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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.
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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.
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9
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 towards equality. North. When same-sex marriage was passed in the US, we put an end to a discriminatory law. North.
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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 without script, when 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.
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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.