When the Labor Department recently gave states grants to expand paid family leave, the money came from the department’s Women’s Bureau. But in the State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama argued that paid leave is not just a women’s issue. “It’s time we stop treating child care as a side issue, or a women’s issue, and treat it like the national economic priority that it is for all of us,” he said. It’s often an economic necessity today for both parents in a household to work, he said.

That is a reality that American families know well. Seventy-one percent of women with children at home work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.