In June 2019, at the Women Deliver Global Conference in Vancouver, Canada, Equimundo and Sonke Gender Justice will launch MenCare’s third-ever State of the World’s Fathers report with its Steering Committee and partners, featuring new, cross-country analysis and data on men’s caregiving.
The report, sponsored by Unilever, Dove Men+Care, calls for men’s uptake of their full share of the world’s childcare and domestic work, across all societies and across all relationships.
State of the World’s Fathers, a MenCare publication produced by Equimundo, is a globally recognized, biennial report and advocacy platform aiming to change power structures, policies, and social norms around care work and to advance gender equality. It presents not only the state of the field, but also a vision and pathway to achieve men’s equal participation in unpaid care for the benefit of women, children, men themselves, and society more broadly.
Since 2015, State of the World’s Fathers has motivated high-level political and civil society advocates to speak out and build long-term partnerships and coalitions; and it has informed debates on paternity and parental leave policies in the Netherlands, Brazil, South Africa, and in Washington, DC. The report has been launched at the United Nations in New York and Geneva, as well as in more than 10 other cities around the world, inspiring translations into six languages and nine regional reports.
State of the World’s Fathers has received global attention. It has been featured in news outlets from The New York Times to Glamour, FiveThirtyEight, and The Guardian, with a potential readership of over 2.2 billion; has received over 42 million impressions on social media; and the State of the World’s Fathers landing page has been visited over 80,000 times.
The 2019 report will reveal new data from multiple sources, and from 12 countries globally, with additional cross-country analysis of data from a survey conducted in over 40 countries. New research includes:
- Never-before-seen data and analysis on men’s attitudes around caregiving – and why they may or may not be taking the time to do it – in the US, UK, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands, led by Equimundo in partnership with Unilever, Dove Men+Care;
- Cross-country analysis of data collected on men’s attitudes and behaviors around caregiving from Equimundo and the International Center for Research on Women’s International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES), the most comprehensive household survey to assess what men think and how they act when it comes to gender equality (with regard to violence, caregiving, health, and more), carried out in over 40 countries to date;
- New qualitative data: in-depth conversations with fathers, mothers, and children, from a selection of countries in Plan International Canada’s SHOW project, which aims to improve the health of women, adolescent girls, mothers, newborns, and children in under-served areas of Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Bangladesh and Haiti;
- Global visualizations of data from the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) and other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) analysis; and
- An in-depth case study on paternity leave policy change in the Netherlands, from Rutgers.
Join the conversation online using #WorldsFathers, and sign up for the MenCare newsletter to stay up-to-date.
Are you a MenCare partner who will be attending the Women Deliver 2019? Let us know at info@men-care.org.
This report is also supported by Plan International Canada and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).