Meet Maxima Zuckerberg, Baby Feminist Champion

Mark Zuckerberg is a dad! He and his wife Priscilla welcomed their daughter Maxima early last week, and by our estimation she’s already one of the most influential women of the year.

First, shortly before Maxima’s birth, Zuckerberg announced he will take two months of paternity leave from Facebook. As several commentators have noted, this is a really big deal. In the US many men aren’t even offered paternity leave, and those who do have that benefit are often hesitant to take advantage of it. Zuckerberg’s example could go a long way towards reducing the stigma new dads face for wanting to help out at home.

A week after Zuckerberg made his personal plans public, Facebook expanded its employee parental leave policy. Facebook will now offer up to four months of paid leave for all new parents regardless of gender.

As if that weren’t enough impact for one baby, along with the announcement of Maxima’s birth, Mark and Priscilla let the world know that they plan to donate 99 percent of Mark’s Facebook shares to charity. Those shares are currently worth $45 billion.

If this pattern keeps up, maybe the key to gender equality and world peace isn’t so complicated after all—maybe it’s just a matter of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan having ten more kids!

About the Author

Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.