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Good morning, Broadsheet readers! We visit the women running Quebec’s wine scene, MacKenzie Bezos has money to share, and two bosses walk the walk on paternity leave. Make the most of your Tuesday.
[bs_bullet_primary] Endorsing paternity leave. What happens when the CEO and the COO of a 30-person firm take paternity leave at the same time? Live-chat software provider Olark found out when its co-founders took three months off with their newborns earlier this year.
The outcome? "Its workers found that life at work didn't go off the rails with the bosses gone," the Wall Street Journal reports. Yes, there was more work to go around, including a few 'Yikes' moments, as Director of Product Julie Williams put it. But on the flip side, she says the experience bolstered teamwork and employees' problem-solving abilities.
The execs themselves admit it was hard to unplug; to stop lurking on Slack. But, of course, there was ultimately an upside on their end too. COO Matt Pizzimenti says he gained confidence in his own parenting abilities, found new empathy for the "mental load" of full-time parenting, and set firmer boundaries between home and work.
The benefits of taking paternity leave are pretty undeniable, with an 11-nation study in 2016 finding leave of one month or more makes fathers more assertive as parents, and results in them doing more housework that's usually shouldered by mothers. Yet without a direct endorsement of an extended leave, few men take it, the study says. That's backed up by data in the U.K., where the government offers shared parental leave (though it is not fully-paid), and as few as 2% of eligible parents take advantage of it each year. The financial penalty is thought to be a factor as are cultural barriers and the fear of workplace discrimination.
The Olark execs' simultaneous leaves were meant to fight back against those forces, Mandy Smith, director of people operations, told the WSJ. "When employees see the CEO and COO use our parental-leave policy and have faith that it's going to work, they think, 'Hey, I can do the same thing if I need to.'" [bs_link link="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bosses-who-walk-the-walk-on-paternity-leave-11558949400?mod=hp_featst_pos1" source="Wall Street Journal"] [ceo_attribution author="Claire Zillman" email="claire.zillman@fortune.com" twitter="clairezillman"]
[bs_bullet_primary]MacKenzie's money. MacKenzi Bezos, the ex-wife of Jeff currently worth $36.6 billion, has signed Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge, which commits the uber wealthy to giving away at least half of their fortunes. In a letter, she says she has "a disproportionate amount of money to share," and that her approach to philanthropy will "continue to be thoughtful." "It will take time and effort and care," she said. "But I won't wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty." Her former husband, the world's richest man, is notably absent from the list. [bs_link link="https://www.ft.com/content/dc186c4e-80c6-11e9-b592-5fe435b57a3b" source="Financial Times"]
[bs_bullet_primary] A hardliner on Huawei. Here's a profile of Nazak Nikakhtar, acting head of the Commerce Department's bureau of industry and security, who's "a little-known hardliner playing a big role in implementing the [Trump] administration's combustible international economic agenda." Her current project? Overseeing the U.S. crackdown on Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei. [bs_link link="https://www.ft.com/content/0421d498-8002-11e9-b592-5fe435b57a3b" source="Financial Times"]
[bs_bullet_primary] Cheers to that. For Fortune, Katie Sehl dives into Quebec's wine scene--one where women are running the show, especially compared to France. V?ronique Rivest is one of the sommeliers at the forefront of the industry. [bs_link link="http://fortune.com/longform/montreal-sommelieres-quebec-wine/" source="Fortune"]
[bs_bullet_primary] Special delivery. Women in their 40s and 50s now make up more than half the contractors working for major food delivery apps like Instacart, DoorDash, Postmates, and Shipt. They're drawn to the flexibility of the work and to its relatively safety, since these gig economy jobs don't mean inviting a stranger into your car. [bs_link link="https://www.npr.org/2019/05/25/722811953/why-suburban-moms-are-delivering-your-groceries" source="NPR"]
[bs_bullet_primary] Masako's moment. President Donald Trump's state visit to Japan this weekend put a spotlight on Empress Masako, finally allowed to use her Harvard education and multilingualism now that she has a role in the Imperial Family other than producing an heir. The Japanese public was impressed by the empress's fluent English as she spoke with the Trumps. [bs_link link="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/world/asia/japan-empress-masako.html" source="New York Times"]
[bs_bullet_primary] College-bound. Sonita Alleyne is the first black person to lead a college at either Oxford or Cambridge, the U.K.'s most prestigious universities, after being elected master of Jesus College at Cambridge. The entrepreneur who's chairwoman of the British Board of Film Classification's management council is also the first female head of the college, which, at 523 years old, is Cambridge's oldest. [bs_link link="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/may/26/sonita-alleyne-to-become-first-black-leader-of-an-oxbridge-college-jesus-cambridge" source="Guardian"]
[bs_bullet_primary] Marine v. Macron. One outcome of Europe's elections this past week: Marine Le Pen's far-right anti-EU National Rally beat out the party of Emmanuel Macron, marking a sort of resurgence for the firebrand politician following her failed 2017 bid for the French presidency. [bs_link link="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-election/pro-europe-vote-fragments-but-limits-nationalist-gains-in-eu-election-idUSKCN1SV0QQ" source="Reuters"]
[bs_bullet_primary] Military IDs. For Memorial Day, the New York Times looked at Arlington, Virginia's Women in Military Service for America Memorial--underfunded by federal money and, the story theorizes, female veterans who prefer to focus on their civilian identities after returning home compared to their male peers. [bs_link link="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/female-veterans-memorial.html?" source="New York Times"]
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TV's reckoning with #MeToo [bs_link link="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/tvs-reckoning-with-metoo" source="The New Yorker"]
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