Selflessness aside, however, what happens to a father’s career after a lengthy paternity leave? In Europe, women who take long parental leaves may suffer career consequences, as my colleague Claire Cain Miller reported last year.

In the United States, we don’t know all that much yet about men specifically. Google has had generous parental leaves for several years and crunches plenty of its own human resources data. The company would not tell me whether it had specifically matched up men who took long parental leaves against otherwise similar men who did not, to see whether the leave-takers suffered financially in the years afterward.

But Roya Soleimani, a Google spokeswoman, did offer some encouraging words. “I can assure you that all levels of analysis are rigorously done by our team to ensure that there isn’t bias,” she said. “We see no sign of bias in our people processes, which includes compensation, promotion, performance.”

Your employer may be nothing like Google, so there’s no denying that paternity leave requires bearing some risk. But it is also something that you can do for your fellow man, literally. If people don’t use the leave, employers will take it away or cut it back or not extend it.

Moreover, bias against leave-takers probably won’t go away entirely until there are men in positions of authority who have taken it themselves. Right now, most new fathers are left to hope that their bosses won’t grumble (rightfully) about the fact that they didn’t get to go on a long, paid leave or (rightfully again) about the fact that they probably aren’t getting 12 weeks of paid time off to take care of an aging parent.

Employers can try to head off any such resentment by ordering managers to meet with fathers planning a leave the same way they do with pregnant women. “We encourage them to adjust their goals for that period of time,” said Mary Tavarozzi, North America practice leader for absence and disability management at Towers Watson. “Then, employees don’t feel like they’re going to get dinged on performance reviews because they had the same goals as a guy who had been there all 12 months with no leave.” Initiate that discussion yourself if no one at your employer does.

Still, the normalization of paternity leave can only happen when larger numbers of men publicly declare their intention to take one and then shout from the rooftops about how spectacular it was. So let me do my part right here: My byline will be scarcer in the coming months as I take my own paternity leave. I’ve done it before, and I feel intensely lucky that I’m able to do it again.

As for Mr. Zuckerberg, he is a busy man, and who knows how Wall Street would react if he sat out a quarterly earnings call or two? Here’s hoping, though, that we’ll get to find out.