[iamsmooney]

Enabling should be enough. NY State has a paid family leave policy[0] that allows both parents to take advantage. The birth mother may be required from a health perspective to take more immediately but allowing the other parent the same opportunity for bonding and helping with child/family care is important. There's no forcing it at all, the parents can choose what is best for them which is the flexibility and independence that the rest of the USA should be enabling.

[0] https://paidfamilyleave.ny.gov/

[lotsofpulp]

Enabling isn't sufficient to counteract the fact that the men who choose not to take leave will be more valuable to an employer.

If society wants men and women to be on equal footing, and society wants women to be able to have children, and the consequence of having children is not being able to work, which then results in being less economically valuable to an employer, then to "fix" this, society must also make men just as less economically valuable. It all depends how "equal" you want to make the game.

[tomp]

Although I disagree with your assumption (that it's valuable that men and women are equal in every, or at least this particular, dimension), I want to point out that you're forgetting another option - to make women (mothers) more economically valuable (so they compare favourably with fathers / childless individuals). You can simply reward companies whose employees have children! This would also correctly incentivize hard-working smart people to procreate (if rewards are proportional to taxes/salaries).

[iamsmooney]

I'm not sure why the discussion is heading towards making companies value genders equally. Is "women get pregnant" a real concern from an employers perspective? Anecdotally I have not seen that be the case, and if it were a corporate truth I expect some discrimination lawsuits to emerge.