It’s a strange season in America, at least if you care about feminist social policies that have for decades felt wholly out of reach. It’s not just Kirsten Gillibrand and Rosa DeLauro and Hillary Clinton advocating for paid family leave; Barack Obama discussed it in the State of the Union. Bernie Sanders is running for president and talking about equal pay for women. Bill de Blasio has mandated free pre-K in New York City. And Josh Levs, a 43-year-old CNN reporter has written a book, All In: How Our Work-First Culture Fails Dads, Families, and Businesses – and How We Can Fix It Together, arguing that it is incumbent on men to become part of a conversation about gender equality in homes and in workplaces. Levs is a former NPR reporter who has, at CNN, developed a beat reporting on issues surrounding parenthood. In 2013, he filed an EEOC claim against Time Warner when, after the early birth of his third child, he was denied the ten paid weeks offered to mothers and to adoptive or surrogate fathers. He spoke to The New Republic by phone.

Rebecca Traister: At what point in your life did you become interested in gender equity and bringing men into conversations about it?

Josh Levs: I grew up on Free to Be You and Me. I knew the girls I grew up with were just as smart, capable, and driven as me. It never occurred to me that they wouldn’t be able to make it as far in their careers as I would as a boy. But then we grew up: We got jobs, had kids, and discovered that the workplace never grew up. The workplace never listened to Free to Be You and Me. It was built on structures based entirely on the 1950s presumption that women will stay home and men will go to work. I mean: Only 4.6 percent of CEOs in the S&P 500 are women. That is insane.

When my wife was pregnant and I realized I would need to be home, I discovered that Time Warner had this strange policy under which anyone could get ten paid weeks, unless you were a man who impregnated the mother of a child. I went, in private, straight to [the Time Warner] benefits [department] and said, “I’m sure this is an oversight and you didn’t mean to exclude dads.” They wouldn’t give me an answer for months. Then my daughter was born in an emergency delivery, and eleven days later I’m home holding my four-pound preemie, messaging benefits, saying “Hey, I need an answer.” That’s when they wrote back to say that they would be unable to give me paid leave benefits. I decided to file a suit with the EEOC for gender discrimination.

RT: What was the public response to news of your suit?