How the Fight for Paid Leave Has Quietly Become One of the Most Successful Movements of Our Time

Brigid Schulte was quoted in Slate about why the paid family leave movement is gaining traction:

Shifts in media also helped make the paid family leave movement more prominent in recent years. Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at New America and the author of the best-selling book Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, says there are more avenues for academic research to get out into the mainstream.
“There were these maps created about paid leave showing who has it and who doesn’t, and they started showing up in blog posts everywhere. They made our situation as one of the only countries in the world with no paid leave very easy to understand,” Schulte said.
The other change was the feminist blogosphere, which not only gave women a space to share their stories and write about these issues, but proved to the traditional press that readers cared about these issues, too. “Before news went digital, a lot of the gatekeepers in the traditional press were still men, and the women who had power tended to not have kids because they had to act like men,” Schulte explained. “To them, reading about these issues was like watching paint dry.”