About
State of the World’s Fathers, produced by Equimundo (Formerly Promundo-US), 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.
An advocacy publication of MenCare, the report presents not only the state of the field, but also a vision and pathway to achieve men’s full participation in unpaid care work for the benefit of women, children, men themselves, and all individuals.
The Impact
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 ten 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 and over 42 million impressions on social media.
Inside the 2023 Report
The State of the World’s Fathers 2023 (SOWF 2023) report reveals that thousands of women and men across the world are calling for care to be central to their lives, which can only be addressed by a fundamental overhaul of power structures, policies, and social norms around both paid and unpaid care work.
The report, coordinated and led by Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice as part of global fatherhood campaign, MenCare, asserts that these changes are critical in order to advance gender equality, recognizing care as the foundation that holds society together and enables it to function.
New research conducted for the report across 17 countries shows that women and men across the world have multiple caregiving responsibilities, to children, the elderly, homes, neighbors, friends, and extended families. Men say they are doing, and want to do, more but barriers to equal sharing – structural, norm-based, individual and financial – remain. Despite many taking on more caring responsibilities during the pandemic and more countries and companies putting in national care plans, including paid parental leave, the data reveals too few workplaces support men’s care, too few policies and politicians even consider men’s caregiving, and too few boys grow up seeing it exhibited by their own fathers. There is now an urgent need to break the binary and for men and boys to join the ‘unfinished revolution’ and center care as much as women and girls to achieve care equality.
About MenCare
MenCare is a global fatherhood campaign, active in more than 50 countries on five continents, which is coordinated by Equimundo and Sonke Gender Justice. Our mission is to promote men’s involvement as equitable, nonviolent fathers and caregivers in order to achieve family well-being, gender equality, and better health for all parents and children. We aim for men to be allies in supporting women’s social and economic equality, in part by taking on more responsibility for childcare and domestic work. We believe that true equality will only be reached when men are taking on approximately 50 percent of the world’s child care and domestic work, and when gender stereotypes do not dictate expectations around parenting roles. MenCare’s Steering Committee is comprised of Save the Children Sweden, Oxfam America, Plan International Sweden, and MenEngage Alliance.