Taking paternity leave is cool, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook has just proved that. The nabob of social media is taking two months off from work, as paternity leave, in time for the birth of his baby girl, to wife Priscilla Chan.
Mark made the announcement on his timeline, calling it “a very personal decision”.
Incidentally, Facebook allows its US employees to take up to four months of paid parental leave – time which can be used at once or throughout the child’s first year.
So that basically means Mark is taking less time off than the average daddy working at Facebook, but it’s still way more than the leave which Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took after the birth of her twins – a mere two weeks.
But here’s why Mark’s decision to take this paternity leave is a good thing. In those companies and countries, which actually do have a decent paternity policy, the employees still hesitate to take anything more than a week or two, for fear of falling behind in the workforce or damaging their career. And here’s Mark saying it’s okay; in fact, he says that it’s beneficial to the baby.
“Studies show that when working parents take time to be with their newborns, outcomes are better for the children and families,” wrote Mark in his Facebook post.
India still lags behind in that aspect. The government has come up with a 15-day paternity leave policy, but few private companies adhere to it. Some companies like Infosys give a paltry five days leave with extended options to work-from-home. But there is no denying that in the absence of a paternity leave policy, the burden of childcare falls vastly upon women, who have to juggle work and parenting in the face of unsympathetic bosses and equally unsympathetic family members.
Image Courtesy: Reuters
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