Dads for Daughters. Michelle Travis

can support women’s re-entry after having a baby. That led to other changes, like providing medical grade pumps in the company’s nursing rooms and reimbursing women for supplies and shipping costs to send breast milk home when they’re travelling for work. Twitter also gives its employees free premium memberships to Care.com, which helps employees find quality childcare.

      Adam had done his research, so he knew that these investments would not only be good for women, but also good for Twitter. “The science here is pretty simple,” says Adam. “When you look at the various business studies that look at company performance and inclusion numbers, it’s just a fact, it’s not even a theory, that companies that are more mindful around inclusion perform better.” In thinking ahead to the corporate world he hopes will exist for our next generation of girls, Adam jokingly tweeted to the Twitter recruiting office that his daughter “will be graduating from college [fourteen years] from now with a computer science/math double major.” He asked them to “please keep an eye out” for her application.

      How Dads Can Get Started

      For dads of daughters who are in positions of corporate power, mentoring women colleagues can be an important and rewarding contribution to advancing women’s equality. Just like other goals that you’ve set and achieved in your professional life, you don’t have to go this one alone. There are excellent resources available for honing your mentoring skills.

      A great first stop is Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women by W. Brad Johnson and David Smith. Brad and David are professors in the Department of Leadership, Ethics, and Law at the United States Naval Academy. They’re also dads of daughters, so they understand both the motivation and the anxieties that may come with mentoring women. Their book shares a wealth of advice about how men can become successful, effective, and empathetic mentors for women.

      One thing that Brad and David have discovered is that when men (including themselves) mentor women, they often reduce their anxieties by falling into so-called “man-scripts.” They describe these man-scripts as “roles men have long been conditioned to play in stereotypical male-to-female relationships.” While these roles can make the mentoring relationship more comfortable for men, they can also enable gender bias to undermine success.

      One of the most common man-scripts is the “protective father.” This is when a man replicates a father-daughter relationship when mentoring female colleagues. While this can ease men’s discomfort about mentoring women, it often makes men unwilling to give negative feedback or push women to challenge themselves. Women often regret that male mentors aren’t as tough or honest with them as they are with men, so they don’t know how to improve, take risks, and grow. “A man who falls back on a father script with a woman at work believes in his heart of hearts that he’s being helpful and he’s being protective and shielding her,” explains Brad. “But the problem is he’s not allowing her to experience the same challenges and opportunities that a male mentee would get. He’s not allowing her to go out and make mistakes and fail and to build up that immunity as she learns to overcome challenges.” Acting like a father at work can also be patronizing, which undermines women’s autonomy.

      So while Brad and David definitely believe that dads should be motivated by their daughters to mentor women at work, they shouldn’t act like dads when taking on a mentoring role. They should be inspired by their father-daughter relationship, but they shouldn’t replicate it on the job. Brad knows from personal experience that this can be tricky, so he recommends that men talk about it openly with the women they mentor. When Brad is mentoring a woman, he tells her, “Look, occasionally, you’re going to see me acting like a dad and I don’t intend to do that, when I do it, will you promise to bring it to my attention and tell me to stop it?’”

      Athena Rising offers men many other tips for improving mentoring skills. Perhaps the most important is to spend less time talking and more time listening, which is what mentees want most. What makes male mentors most effective for women, says David, is “listening with a purpose as opposed to thinking about what it is I’m going to tell you next.” Additional advice is available from Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.org, which recently launched the #MentorHer campaign, which helps build men’s mentoring skills. Research has found, for example, that women are more likely than men to get very vague feedback that they can’t implement, so the #MentorHer campaign teaches men to give women precise, skills-specific feedback.

      All of these mentoring tips work better if your firm has a formal mentoring program, which is something you can help establish if it doesn’t already exist. Formal mentoring programs reduce the social barriers for women to find mentors in the first place. They can also reduce men’s concerns about the relationship being misperceived. Establishing a common set of specific goals for the relationship also paves the way for greater success. Catalyst has found that this groundwork pays particular dividends for women, who receive about 50 percent more promotions when they have formal mentoring programs than when they find mentors on their own. But whether your firm has a formal mentoring program or not, the most important thing is to get started. “Powerful male mentors don’t wait,” explain Brad and David. “They purposefully identify promising women in their organization and reach out, initiating interaction and support without being asked.”

      Increasing flexibility at your workplace can be more challenging because it often requires both formal policies and cultural shifts in attitude. An excellent place for dads to start is by reading Josh Levs’s book, All In: How Our Work-First Culture Fails Dads, Families, and Businesses—And How We Can Fix It Together. Josh is a journalist who wrote All In after his employer, Time Warner, denied him fair parental leave when he had his third child. While the company gave moms ten weeks of paid leave after giving birth, it gave dads like Josh only two. Josh was forced to file a discrimination complaint when Time Warner wouldn’t reconsider, and he ultimately got the policy changed. Parents around the country supported Josh throughout the ordeal, knowing that shared parental leave not only supports involved fathers, but is also essential to advancing women’s equality.

      Since then, Josh has become an advocate for parental leave laws and workplace flexibility that offer both women and men a healthier work/family balance. Josh’s book builds a compelling case for why paid parental leave—for both moms and dads—supports healthier kids, stronger families, and more successful companies. Share Josh’s book with your male colleagues to start a conversation about the importance of work/family balance. Men’s voices are often under the radar when it comes to paid family leave and workplace flexibility. “Dads can change that,” says Josh, “by joining the public conversations on gender issues, sharing experiences, and amplifying the arguments women have been making. Women can help by making sure men are welcomed into these conversations with open arms and minds.”

      The stories of dedicated dads in Josh’s book will also support fathers in taking perhaps the most important personal step to advance women’s equality: proudly and visibly using your paternity leave if you have it available. Speak up in support of paid paternity leave. Applaud other men for seeking and using it. And never leave your parental leave benefits on the table. “Women have done a great job of speaking out about this,” says Josh. “It’s time for men to join in—in a big way.”

      If you do, Alexis Ohanian is one dad who will support you all the way. Alexis is the co-founder of Reddit and Initialized Capital, and he’s also tennis superstar Serena Williams’s husband. Alexis became an outspoken advocate for paid paternity leave after he used Reddit’s sixteen weeks of paid leave to care for his daughter Olympia. Alexis acknowledges the reality of “career fear”—the concerns men have about stigma, retaliation, and career deceleration if they use their paternity leave. But he encourages dads to take their leave anyway because the payoffs for their families far exceed the costs. While he’s advocating for a federal paid family leave law, he wants you to know that he’s got your back. “[L]et me be your air cover,” says Alexis. “I took my full sixteen weeks and I’m still ambitious and care about my career. Talk to your bosses and tell them I sent you.”

      On the policy side, company leaders can begin by filling out the Workplace Flexibility Scorecard created by New Agency Partners. The Scorecard is part of a Flexible Workplaces HR Toolkit, which is available for free online. The Scorecard helps leaders understand their current