Valerie Jarrett Quotes

I think it's incredibly important to spend the first year with your child, and it should be made possible for all women.

Paid leave is a not just a mother and child issue, it's a societal issue we have.

Family-supportive policies, which enable women to remain and progress in paid employment and encourage men to take their fair share of care work, are crucial to achieving gender equality at work.

The piece of legislation that I'm so excited and delighted to be doing is shared parental leave.

Paid family leave, for instance, has strong backing in scientific literature as an effective means of enabling families who want kids to have them.

Avon is a unique place to work; we've got family-friendly policies. We have more senior women in high-level management than any other company; 46 percent of our officers are women.

And whereas women had to fight to find their way into the workforce, men are now fighting to reclaim their place in the family structure.

I think the rules will change and I think more and more young women are going to decide that having a family and taking care of a home is not a bad choice, but how do we subsidize it - not necessarily European-style socialism. It'll have to be a new more creative, dynamic and local solution.

I'm proud to be Secretary of Labor. But I'm even prouder of two more important titles: dad and husband. I've been able to be all three. I want all working people, no matter what their jobs are, to be able to meet their obligations both at work and at home.

Quite a lot of British women stop working when they have children, and that is rarely the case in Denmark. We have a very flat, structured way of approaching everything. Nobody's the boss. In a sense, we're all equal.

I was so intent as a young lawyer on beating the men at their own game that I didn't take any real maternity leave with my three younger children. It is only looking back that I realise I wasn't beating the system but reinforcing it.

In Sweden, both parents take care of the children.

Workplaces still operate like it's 1962 and one person is always at home, and they are not very good at adjusting for the fact that a majority of women work and take care of children.

It is easy but inaccurate to label any legislation which makes it easier for working families to combine family and work responsibilities 'job killers.'

One reason the United States is one of three countries in the world that do not have any form of paid maternity leave is that many American business leaders, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, oppose any family-friendly policies. They scare people into thinking maternity leave will be a job killer.

Why is it our business whether Sarah Palin returned to her job as governor three days after her son was born, or three months? Is there a right answer?

The work-family divide is the biggest issue for American women. But in some ways it's amazing how adjusted society has become to it. In the 1970s, as women began to take more jobs, society was reeling.

We don't have enough support for maternal leave and the kinds of things that some of the European countries do. So we still make it hard on women to go into the work force and feel that they can be good at work but then doing the most important job, which is raising your children in a responsible and positive way.

The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home. There are many ways of supporting that, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all caregiving and making that amount tax deductible.

Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let's stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices.

We need a national family leave policy that will allow both men and women to take paid time off from work to care for a newborn or a sick relative.

I'm grateful that President Trump is willing to talk about paid leave, but his policy, unfortunately, is woefully inadequate.

I think parental leave is enormously important - and it's a personal decision. Part of building a company whose goal is to empower women in all aspects of life is that I've given my team some leeway to determine what parental leave looks like for each of them individually.

We know taking care of an infant isn't just women's work - so why should maternity leave be the norm when paternity leave is the exception? There's no question that taking care of and bonding with a new baby is just as important and meaningful for dads as it is for moms.

It's embarrassing to be in the only westernized economy that doesn't have paid family leave and flex scheduling, and that disproportionately helps women.