It took three gay men and an unborn baby to make San Francisco the first US city to require employers to offer fully paid parental leave.
The most prominent of the trio is supervisor Scott Wiener – gay, single and childless – who introduced the measure, which passed unanimously on Tuesday to make the California city the only place in the country where parents can get fully paid leave.
The new law, which has attracted attention from coast to coast and takes effect in January, is just one of many firsts for San Francisco, a trendsetting, liberal enclave that has set the precedent for policies that have later rippled across the country.
Think bans on plastic bags. And health warnings on ads for sugary drinks. And comprehensive healthcare coverage for the uninsured. And earned paid sick days for all workers.
Andres Power and Rod Hipskind are less well-known than Wiener but even more instrumental in the creation of the new parental leave law.
The story of how the trio of men conceived of and gave birth to San Francisco’s groundbreaking new law says as much about the city’s celebration of unconventional relationships as it does the principle of paid parental leave – one that is taken for granted in every country in the developed world except the US.
Power is Wiener’s legislative aid. Hipskind is Power’s partner. The two men will become fathers in late April when a surrogate delivers their bouncing baby daughter, who has yet to be named.
And then there’s the little girl herself. The egg that led to her conception was donated by Power’s sister, Karina Power. The sperm was Hipskind’s, for obvious reasons. The surrogate is Hipskind’s first cousin’s best friend. “A family affair”, Power calls it.
“As I found out that we were going to be having a baby,” added the legislative aid, “I started taking a look at what benefits I had as a city employee and then what benefits my partner had. On the latter side, as an independent contractor, he has nothing. As a city employee I have three months of paid leave.”
That imbalance, he said, got the 36-year-old thinking about how family leave is addressed across the country. He hit the internet, did a lot of reading, realized that “this country does not have a paid family leave policy at all and that very few jurisdictions do and that there should be and there ought to be and it got me thinking how we might have a proposal here in San Francisco”.
He broached the idea with Wiener, worked with the city attorney’s office to draft an ordinance, and the supervisor who represents the Castro, San Francisco’s famous LGBT district, introduced it in January.
California is one of five states that have some form of a paid family leave program on the books. The first US law of its kind when it passed in 2002, the state law mandates that employees are entitled to six weeks of partial pay – 55% of their salary – to care for newborns, adopted children and foster kids. The paid time off is funded by employee payroll contributions.
The San Francisco measure requires employers with 50 or more workers to provide the remaining 45% of employees’ wages for a six-week leave. The law will be phased in to eventually extend to businesses with 20 or more employees.
“Not only does it eliminate for workers this terrible choice of, ‘do I bond with my child or pay the bills’, but it also makes it easier for the non-birth parent, often fathers, to take leave,” Wiener said. “We know that when people are able to take good parental leave, the birth parent, the mother, is healthier, the child is healthier, the mother is more likely to breastfeed longer. The child in the long run is healthier and has better educational achievement.”
Wiener – who is 6ft 7in, sports a closely cropped beard and a serious mien – does not consider himself an unlikely champion for an ordinance that he may never take advantage of.
“I think it’s important for allies to step up sometimes,” he says, noting that there are no mothers on the San Francisco board of supervisors, a matter he calls a “gaping hole” in this deeply inclusive city’s power structure.
“In the LGBT community we want our own leadership, but it’s great when you have straight allies like [former mayor] Gavin Newsom and Barack Obama,” he said. “I think it’s important for men to stand up for women, whether it’s around reproductive health, parental or other forms of family leave, or any other issue where women are disproportionately impacted.”
Needless to say, he’s a Democrat.
Wiener has his own personal first in this city filled with them. In September 2014 he became the first public official to reveal that he is on the drug Truvada, which reduces the risk of sexually acquired HIV infection in uninfected adults at high risk.
A group of HIV advocates he works with on a regular basis found out that he was taking the drug, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2012. They told him it would help increase awareness of a life-saving measure and decrease stigma if he went public.
He thought about it for a month. Then he penned an essay that was published on the Huffington Post’s Queer Voices. And hundreds of e-mails flooded his in-box.
“I came of age as a gay man in 1987 when I was 17 years old and during a time when there was no treatment for HIV,” he said. “For the first, like, almost 20 years for me as a gay man, I associated with sex, death and illness and bad side-effects from drugs.
“The anxiety that that produces – and this is just true for so many gay men – it’s just enormous and very unhealthy,” he said. “I started taking it, and not only does it mean you’ve reduced your risk of HIV by approaching 100% ... but you have this powerful prevention tool that also just eliminates all that unhealthy connection between sex and illness and death.”
He was nervous, he said, about going public, but he’s happy he did.
“I feel like we were able to make a difference,” he said.
Not for the first time. And not for the last.