When Dads demonstrate the belief that they offer value to the world — by letting life live through them, by acknowledging their weaknesses but not allowing the difficulty to impede the expansion of their being, by not staying stuck in a victim mindset — they offer their daughters a model of what it means to value one’s self.

“My instinct is always to say the thing they say, ‘Don’t say.’ Which is ... it concerns me, as a father of two daughters. It concerns me. But you shouldn’t have to have daughters to get that it’s disgusting. You should be able to say as the owner of a bird, I’m disgusted. Everybody should be disgusted. It’s horrible.”

They talk about how poor dad is going to go broke with so many girls in the house, because all girls love to shop. And, of course, girls are naturally going to emasculate, manipulate, and henpeck the father of the family — just being around so many girls is going to sap the manliness right out of him. Essentially, this version of "poor dad" purports that every obnoxious stereotype about women and girls is true.

According to a recent OECD report, it’s the only country in the developed world where fathers spend more time with school-aged children than mothers, to the tune of eight minutes a day. The Global Gender Gap report rated Finland the second most equal country in the world in 2016, and the Economist recently rated it the third best country to be a working mom.

Don’t reinforce major gender differences between children. That means letting your son wear pink and your daughter wear blue. It means inviting your daughters to play the same games as you play with your sons. Don’t buy into the fear that doing so will somehow make your son into less of a man or your daughter into less of a woman.

We really wanted to hear men talk on the question of feminism and women’s rights and the role of a woman in the society. We thought a good place to start was with fathers who have daughters, because it might be easier for them to empathize with their young daughter so they could kind of learn through them.