视频：安妮·海瑟薇在联合国的演讲（附演讲稿）
Paid Parental Leave Is About Creating Freedom to Define Roles– Keynote Address by UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Anne Hathaway at the UN
Official Commemoration of International Women’s Day
New York
March 2017
演讲文稿(完整版)：
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Thank you so much for those words. Wow.
President of the General Assembly, United Nations,
UN Deputy Secretary-General,
Executive Director, UN Women,
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen.
When I was a very young person, I began my career as an actress. Whenever
my mother wasn’t free to drive me into Manhattan for auditions, I would take the
train from suburban New Jersey and meet my father – who would have left his desk
at the law office where he worked – and we would meet under the Upper Platform
Arrival(s) and Departure(s) sign in Penn Station. We would then get on the
subway together and when we surfaced, he would ask me, “Which way is north?” I
wasn’t very good at finding north in the beginning, but I auditioned fair amount
and so my Dad kept asking me, “Which way is north?” Over time, I got better at
finding it.
I was struck by that memory yesterday while boarding the plane to come here
– not just by how far my life has come since then, but by how meaningful that
seemingly small lesson has been. When I was still a child, my father developed
my sense of direction and now, as an adult, I trust my ability to navigate
space. My father helped give me the confidence to guide myself through the
world.
In late March, last year, 2016, I became a parent for the first time. I
remember the indescribable – and as I understand it pretty universal –
experience of holding my week-old son and feeling my priorities change on a
cellular level. I remember I experienced a shift in consciousness that gave me
the ability to maintain my love of career and also cherish something else,
someone else, so much, much more. Like so many parents, I wondered how I was
going to balance my work with my new role as a parent, and in that moment, I
remember that the statistic for the US’s policy on maternity leave flashed in my
mind.
American women are currently entitled to 12 weeks unpaid leave. American
men are entitled to nothing. That information landed differently for me when one
week after my son’s birth, I could barely walk. That information landed
differently when I was getting to know a human who was completely dependent on
my husband and I for everything, when I was dependent on my husband for most
things, and when we were relearning everything we thought we knew about our
family and our relationship. It landed differently.
Somehow, we and every American parent were expected to be “back to normal”
in under three months. Without income? I remember thinking to myself, “If the
practical reality of pregnancy is another mouth to feed in your home, and
America is a country where most people are living paycheck to paycheck, how does
12 weeks unpaid leave economically work?
The truth is: for too many people, it doesn’t. One in four American women
go back to work two weeks after giving birth because they can’t afford to take
any more time off than that. That is 25 per cent of American women. Equally
disturbing, women who can afford to take the full 12 weeks often don’t, because
it will mean incurring a “motherhood penalty” – meaning they will be perceived
as less dedicated to their job and will be passed over for promotions and other
career advancement. In my own household, my mother had to choose between a
career and raising three children – a choice that left her unpaid and
underappreciated as a homemaker – because there just wasn’t support for both
paths. The memory of being in the city with my Dad is a particularly meaningful
one since he was the sole breadwinner in our house, and my brothers’ and my time
with him was always limited by how much he had to work. And we were an
incredibly privileged family – our hardships were the stuff of other family’s
dreams.
The deeper into the issue of paid parental leave I go, the clearer I see
the connection between persisting barriers to women’s full equality and
empowerment, and the need to redefine and in some cases, destigmatize men’s role
as caregivers. In other words…thank you. In other words, in order to liberate
women, we need to liberate men.
The assumption and common practice that women and girls look after the home
and the family is a stubborn and very real stereotype that not only
discriminates against women, but limits men’s participation and connection
within the family and society. These limitations have broad-ranging and
significant effects for them and for the children. We know this. So why do we
continue to undervalue fathers and overburden mothers?
Paid parental leave is not about taking days off work; it’s about creating
the freedom to define roles, to choose how to invest time, and to establish new,
positive cycles of behavior. Companies that have offered paid parental leave for
employees have reported improved employee retention, reduced absenteeism and
on-training costs, and boosted productivity and morale. Far from not being able
to afford to have paid parental leave, it seems we can’t afford not to.
In fact, a study in Sweden showed that per every month fathers took
paternity leave, the mothers’ income increased by 6.7 per cent. That’s 6.7 per
cent more economic freedom for the whole family. Data from the International Men
and Gender Equality Survey shows that most fathers report that they would work
less if it meant that they could spend more time with their children. And
picking up on the threat the prime minister mentioned, I’d like to ask: How many
of us here today saw our Dads enough growing up? How many of you Dads here see
your kids enough now?
We need to help each other if we are going to grow.
Along with UN Women, I am issuing a call to action for countries, companies
and institutions globally to step up and become champions for paid parental
leave. In 2013, provisions for paid parental leave were in only 66 countries out
of 190 UN member states. I look forward to beginning with the UN itself which
has not yet achieved parity and whose paid parental leave policies are currently
up for review. Oh, you’re going to see a lot of me. Let us lead by example in
creating a world in which women and men are not economically punished for
wanting to be parents.
I don’t mean to imply that you need to have children to care about and
benefit from this issue – whether or not you have – or want – kids, you will
benefit by living in a more evolved world with policies not based on gender. We
all benefit from living in a more compassionate time where our needs do not make
us weak, they make us fully human.
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. 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?
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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