For a brief shining moment in 2021, it seemed like there was a tiny chance that, thanks to the Build Back Better Bill, the United States would give its citizens at least some paid parental leave. It would have been only four weeks, but even that never happened. At the time, I wrote a column explaining how overwhelmingly popular paid leave was (and continues to be). I wondered if part of the problem was that only women and liberals were talking about how badly they needed paid leave after giving birth, and how, if we had more men and conservatives talking about their experiences postpartum, it might be more politically effective.
Christine Matthews, a public opinion pollster who had conducted focus groups with rural men and Republicans, told me five years ago about how much members of both groups wanted paid leave. “They’re talking about having jobs that are very inflexible, where they don’t get time off to support their wife who has had a baby or a serious illness or problem,” she said. You don’t necessarily have to be woke — or even believe that mothers of young children should work outside the home — to feel that a man needs the option of paternity leave to support his family.
This brings me to Scott Galloway, the prolific podcaster and author of the book “Notes on Being a Man.” He is very concerned about “the alarming state of American boys and men,” the country’s falling birthrate and the dating drought among young people. He theorized that the marriage rate is falling in the U.K., where he now lives, because economic anxiety “creates strain in relationships.” He positions himself as a masculinity whisperer who is much less toxic and more progressive than manosphere figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
You would think, given these priors, that he would be all for paternity leave. But on a recent episode of his Prof G Pod, in an interview with the writer and author Derek Thompson (who just got back from two months of paternity leave after the birth of his second child), Galloway said, “I think dads are mostly a waste of time or space” for the first few months of a child’s life. He continued:
I think there should be mandatory maternity leave, because I think the species needs to propagate. I’m not sure there should be mandatory paternity leave. I think it sometimes creates resentment. I think sometimes it’s abused. And so I’m a bit of a capitalist here. I think it’s between the company, but I don’t know if I immediately default to oh, the father needs to be there.
(There is not evidence that paternity leave is regularly abused in the U.S. Many men don’t even take paternity leave when it’s available because they are afraid they will be punished).
Galloway also commented that he doesn’t think men should be in the delivery room. “I thought that was so disgusting and unnatural,” he says. When I asked Galloway if he had a response to the backlash he has been getting over these comments, he said over email, “My comments were intentionally provocative in the context of a friendly/snarky conversation with Derek.”
Poor Derek Thompson tried to push back, and launch a defense of parental leave. “Most of the gap between prime age adult male and female earnings is a motherhood penalty. And so one benefit of paternity leave is that it puts men and women on relatively more equal standing,” to which Galloway replies, “By lowering the economic standards of the man?”
I’m going to stop them right there, because they’re both wrong about the economic impacts of parental leave, and they seem to be talking about it only in the context of white-collar, corporate jobs. Besides, we don’t have the best, most demographically representative evidence in the United States because we are one of the few countries in the entire world that does not have any kind of paid leave at the national level.
But we do have pretty good data from Quebec, where the provincial government introduced five weeks of paid paternity leave in 2006. A 2024 working paper from The Canadian Labour Economics Forum looked at labor market outcomes for 10 years after the birth of a child following this reform. Researchers found that while in the very short term taking leave reduced parental earnings, “in the medium to long run, we find that the reform did not impact earnings, employment or the probability of being employed in a high-wage industry for either parent.” Which is to say: Paid paternity leave in Quebec did not fix the motherhood penalty for women, nor did it substantially hurt men’s economic standards.
It gets worse. Thompson, who is still glowing from the birth of his second child, shares a very sweet story with Galloway about playing “monster” with his eldest child, a 2-year-old, and how he feels “an enormous upsurge of instinct for how to parent my child.” Thompson adds, “I love discovering a new piece of myself in parenting.”
Galloway doesn’t even seem to be listening to Thompson, because his response is, “The bad news is it just sucks for the dad. We pretend to like it.” Galloway thinks dads are full of it “when they say they like babies. They’re awful. As a new dad your job is to make sure moms don’t lose it, “and get some sleep and keep the baby away from bodies of water. That is literally your only two jobs right now, or the only two things that you’re any good at. At about 2 or 3 it starts to get less awful and then by 4 or 5 it almost becomes fun.”
Scott Galloway is entitled to his feelings about parenting babies, and I’m sure he’s not alone. What I am objecting to is the unsaid implication that it’s super fun for moms all the time, while also talking to a man who seems to be wholeheartedly enjoying his small children.
But again, there is research showing that men do not categorically find babies to be “awful,” and can develop similar kinds of instinctive reactions to the ones that mothers have. Darby Saxbe, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California who studies the neural and hormonal changes that happen when men become fathers, told me that there’s “quite a bit of evidence” that fatherhood is transformative for men, just as it’s transformative for women. “I find remodeling across the brain in areas that look similar to areas that have also been seen in new moms,” Saxbe, who is the author of the forthcoming book “Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives,” said.
Why does this matter? Galloway has expressed concern about the birthrate and the future of dating and mating. One important thing he thinks “you can do as a man is try to be as loving and supportive of your partner as possible.” So he should know what most people actually want and need. The episode with Thompson is called “Why Americans Feel So Unhappy.” Research suggests that fathers who take paternity leave have higher levels of life satisfaction, better health, better marriages and better relationships to their children. Nearly 20 percent of respondents to Brigham Young University’s 2025 American Family Survey said that “lack of supportive partner” was a barrier to having children.
When I asked Galloway if he was familiar with any of this research, he said, “My point wasn’t that paternity leave is bad — it’s that we should be honest about trade-offs and let families make decisions based on their circumstances rather than treating one model as morally superior.”
But most men and women in America do not even have the choice to take paid leave in the first place. On the podcast, Galloway said it should be left up to corporations, but as of 2023, only 27 percent of civilian workers had access to paid leave. If we continue to let corporations decide, most families will continue to scrape and fret about even getting through the first months of their baby’s life.
I don’t think it’s unusual for men to find childbirth uncomfortable or scary to watch, and becoming a dad can be a rough transition for many; there’s a whole genre of internet videos of dads passing out in the delivery room. But I don’t think saying that watching women give birth is “disgusting and unnatural” is the best way to start this conversation. Galloway told me in an email, “The broader point I was making — clumsily — is that we should be honest about the different experiences people have rather than prescriptive about what every father must feel or do. Some dads experience profound bonding in the first weeks; others find their stride later. Both are valid.”
I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment.
End Notes
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As a 40-something who is still trying to break a seven-minute mile, I have been loving all the stories about middle-aged Winter Olympians. Slate dubbed the Milan Cortina Games “The Old-Guy Olympics,” highlighting my fellow elderly millennials like the skier Lindsey Vonn (41), the skater Deanna Stellato-Dudek (42) and the snowboarder Nick Baumgartner (44). I’m … definitely not a professional athlete, but I am inspired by people my age pushing themselves to the limits of their abilities despite injuries and naysayers. Even though Vonn had a tragic crash and injury, she said, “The only failure in life is not trying.”
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
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