Reddit Cofounder Offers Tech’s Next Revolution: Paternity Leave

Serena Williams’s husband, Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit and Initialized Capital, once bought billboards lauding the tennis superstar as the greatest mother of all time. It was more than a gesture: Ohanian was issuing a public declaration of respect for parenthood.

It’s a message that Ohanian expanded recently on Valentine’s Day in an essay in Glamour MagazineOpens a new window  explaining his support for paternity leave and for upending social norms that expect the demands of women’s careers to rank below those of their partners.

“There is a lot of research about the benefits of taking leave, not only for the cognitive and emotional development of the child but for the couple,” Ohanian wrote. “However, many fathers in this country are not afforded the privilege of parental leave. And even when they are, there is often a stigma that prevents them from doing so. I see taking leave as one of the most fundamental ways to ‘show up’ for your partner and your family.”

Ohanian, whose venture capital portfolio features 100 companies worth more than $22 billion, is in a position to slip out on paternity leave himself. As head of a firm with a history of market success behind him, he can afford to take risks both with company structure and with such public gestures.

But there’s another element to his position that’s highly relevant to his perspective on parental leave: Ohanian’s roots run deep in the tech sector, which leave him both uniquely positioned and well-equipped to initiate the kind of changes necessary to make paternity leave the norm.

One of the most significant challenges facing human resources is retaining highly qualified, mid-career professionals who reach child-bearing age and feel they lack the flexibility or structure to continue pursuing their goal of having a family and a successful career simultaneously. Among women who have children, only 43% reportOpens a new window  voluntarily leaving the workforce at some point.

Part of the problem is lack of support. In the U.S. – the only developed country without a national paid parental policy – only 14% of civilian workersOpens a new window  have some paid family leave accessible to them after having children.

That percentage is highest in fields like finance, but drops to a dismal 5% for fields such as construction. For men, research has shownOpens a new window  that fewer than one in five are offered the possibility of paid paternity leave by their employer.

For working parents, benefits like flexibility and work-from-home options can be a lifeline to keep family life in order while continuing to contribute to their firms. Those are benefits that reflect a longstanding ethos of the tech sector, where a premium is placed on supporting the freedom and creativity to “move fast and break things;” to challenge stuffy office norms like business attire and to incorporate lifestyle elements into office culture.

In many ways, tech has already led the way, deliberately or not. Google and its parent company, Alphabet, offer on-site childcare optionsOpens a new window  at many of its offices. Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, wrote a book and started a networkOpens a new window  about women in the workplace that launched a thousand conversations about how to create a work environment that facilitates the ambitions of every member.

But rarely is paternity care so explicitly plucked out as an issue that ties fundamentally to the rest of the calculus of re-arranging work to benefit everyone.

One reason Ohanian’s public declaration of support for paternity leave was so powerful was that it came from one of the most successful and admired young men of the industry – and that he directly addressed and rejected stigma around taking a proactive role as a father in a young child’s life.

Just days after publishing his essay, Ohanian went public with a new collaborationOpens a new window  that he started with Dove Men to launch a $1 million fund for paternity leave and began a pledge to support paternity leave.

It’s a small start on an issue that stifles nearly every industry, but tech could be the unlikely torch bearer to begin a cultural shift. Call it disruption of the best kind.