This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How To Navigate Parental Leave with Daphne Delvaux, Esq | 335

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

We’re diving headfirst into the chaos that is parental leave in the United States — and debunking the absurd notion that being a mom somehow makes you any less dedicated or productive at work. Here today to help us navigate the murky waters of parental leave is Daphne Delvaux, Esq, also known as The Mamattorney — a legal badass who’s made it her mission to fight pregnancy and postpartum discrimination and help women understand their rights at work. She’s the founder of Delvaux Law, the only firm in the country dedicated exclusively to women’s rights in the workplace. In this episode, Daphne breaks down what the law actually says, what your employer hopes you don’t know, and how to protect yourself — legally, financially, and emotionally — when you’re expecting (or recovering, or parenting, or just trying to stay employed while having a uterus). We cover: What to do if your HR department can’t (or won’t) help How to prep for maternity leave without sacrificing your career Legal protections you already have but probably haven’t been told about The gender double standard of parental expectations at work Why we need to stop treating parenthood like a liability Because here's the truth: being a parent isn’t the problem. The systems that punish you for it are. And if we’re going to ask women to work like men, then it’s time men start parenting like women. Connect with Daphne:  Website: https://www.themamattorney.com/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/themamattorney/?hl=en Related Podcast Episodes: Wages For Housework with Emily Callici | 325 The Good Mother Myth with Nancy Reddy | 274 Two Can Win (Helping Two-Career Families Move From Chaos To Connection) with Tiffany Sauder | 243 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Impact site located, entering spacecraft. Contact, but identified life form. In time. We were safer in space. FX's Alien Earth, an original series now streaming on Disney Plus. Sign up today. 18 plus subscription required TNCs apply. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines.

Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fairs include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. I am Nicole Khalil, and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast, where we're torching the old playbook, calling out tired myths, serving up some unfiltered truth, and writing our own damn rules. Today, we're tackling the absolute shit show that is parental leave in the United States

and debunking the absurd notion that being a mom. somehow makes you any less dedicated or productive at work. Newsflash number one, moms literally create humans inside their bodies. And then after that miracle and barely enough sleep and absolutely no downtime, many of us head back to work only to have Dick, short for Richard, ask if we enjoyed our time off. I mean, come on. It's not like we were lounging by the pool with margaritas. We were doing what I consider to be one of the hardest things on earth, coming back sleep-deprived and riddled with guilt, yet ready to handle our own workload and all the other shit, like daycare, sick babies, pumping, what's for dinner, other kids, all on like four hours

of sleep while also picking up the slack from, I'm going to guess, at least one other co-worker or family member. Less dedicated and productive, I call bullshit. More like superhuman efficiency and hyper-focus on what matters. Newsflash number two. If you're a mom who's managed to be at the same professional level as your child-free colleagues and those fortunate enough to have a partner handling the home front, you've earned it. I don't want to hear about imposter syndrome. I want to see you strutting around like the ultra-qualified force of nature that you are. And newsflash number three. The brutal contradiction is this. Society hails childbirth is the pinnacle of biological achievement. There are politicians who'd have you believe that it is

every woman's primary purpose, and yet women are punished for it with discrimination and neglect. I'd love to see those same voices actually advocating for moms' needs, all moms, with things like paid parental leave, reduced childbirth mortality rates, and I don't know, an expectation, a demand of support from the other person who helped create that life. The lack of these things is not only offensive, it's burning out an entire generation of women. So here today to help us navigate the murky waters of parental leave in the United States, we're joined by somebody who's seen it all from the legal front lines. Meet Daphne Del Vaux, the mom attorney.

Daphne is the founder of Del Vaux Law, the nation's only firm devoted exclusively to women's rights at work. Shocked by how clueless many HR departments and managers are about the legal entitlements of new parents, Daphne set out to fight pregnancy and postpartum discrimination head on and untangle the confusing maze of parental leave regulations. She's here to give us the straight story on our legal rights and what we should be demanding from our employers. So Daphne, thank you for being here. And I want to start by asking about some of the common myths or misunderstandings that

you're seeing about parental leave in the U.S. Gosh, thank you so much for. that amazing introduction, first of all. I'm so with you, unlike this deep sense of injustice of the way that mothers are being treated. And that really being the root of so much that we're seeing. The mother is the source of all creation. And my task is in reminding everyone where they came from. So when it comes to parental leave, I'm laughing because it's made very confusing for parents to understand their rights. That is because parental leave as a legal concept does not actually exist. We use language such as medical leave or family leave to describe the time after birth. So when a parent goes to their employer and asks for parental leave,

the employer is usually going to say we don't have that, meaning we don't offer that as a policy or a perk. And because the language is so confusing, often parents don't really know what to do because they assume that HR will tell them which they don't. When it comes to time after birth, which is considered a medical event, we have to look at medical leaves and family leaves, which are going to be subject to federal and state law. And then there's going to be kind of an interaction of those laws as well as interaction with benefit systems and insurance systems

and health systems. And it's an absolute cluster of fact. 100%. So it's, I believe, intentionally made, this complicated because it kind of discourages us from trying to figure it out. And it almost results in a lot of mothers specifically quitting just out of desperation. And what I'm here to do is help mothers and parents pause, take a breath, and do the hard work to actually navigate this maze. And I give them the roadmap. I give them the language of how to get to the other

side. Because what I see is that because it's so confusing, we tend to just kind of give up the search of what is really our rights. And I find that the real revolution is to actually stick it to the man by knowing what's up and saying, these are my rights. I'm not going to bow to you. In fact, you can bow to me because I'm the creator in all life. And I know what my rights are. And I know the power that I have. And then the employers be like, oh, whoops, like she is really powerful. I really respect that. I'm a little scared, but that's good. They should be scared. So I teach mothers specifically how to stand in their own sovereignty. And the way that I do that is through the law. And again, parental leave is such a maze. It's going to depend on where you live.

It's going to depend on how big your employer is, how long you've worked there. There's all of these little factors and nuances. So for example, a mother in the state of California can sometimes to take a year of paid leave, which is actually one of the longest maternity leaves in the whole world. And then we have mothers in, for example, state like Mississippi, who can't take any paid time off. And she's lucky if she can even get unpaid time off. So it's really fragmented. And because it's so fragmented and so messy, no one really knows what to do, including HR. And ideally, we just have one harmonized law that applies. to everyone equally, and we don't have that right now. So it is just going to be so subject to

your zip code and the type of employer that you work for. So that speaks completely to my experience. I really think the only reason I got any benefits whatsoever is I had two friends who were pregnant at the same time as me slightly ahead, and I basically just went to them and was like, what do I do? And then I remember moving, so when I had JJ, I was in California, moved to Massachusetts and I was talking to a young woman in Massachusetts and I was trying to like give advice or share what had worked for me only to realize that what happens here is wildly different and I could be no help whatsoever. And I definitely had moments where I was like, is this even worth it and thought about giving up? And I had that like, well, it's there. I've been

paying into a system. I should get the benefit of it more out of like being pissed off. I move. It's so good because this is a good mentality because if you don't do that, you're basically giving your money to the government. That's what it is if you don't get those benefits back. And it's true. California, Massachusetts have very different systems. Quite recently, Massachusetts has created a really good one actually, almost on par. But it is, it's taken some time. But yeah, there's such disparity between the states. It's actually quite bonkers to see just how different it is. Yeah. I'm both privileged to be in the position to make this choice and this is the hill I'm willing to die on, but I would never live in a state where, I mean, the way I view it is,

it's like you must really hate women. If you're not, again, clearly I'm pissed off about it. Okay. So I'm going to ask a few questions kind of in stages. So the first stage I often hear women or people talk about is when do I let people know that I am in fact pregnant? When do I let my employer know? I even know people who are interviewing and like wondering when to disclose. This is crazy to me, by the way, that we have to question disclosure about our pregnancies. But any advice about when to announce our pregnancies to our employers? Yeah. So there's two questions here. I'm going to talk about interviewing in a second because that requires a bit of a different approach. If you're You're already employed.

The time to tell your employer that you're pregnant is right after you peed on the stick. So the moment you get that positive tests. And because when you wait to disclose, you're going to be missing out on a ton of rights, accommodation rights that you can take advantage of during your first trimester, including when you have morning sickness or first trimester exhaustion. You can ask to work from home. You can ask to work a flexible schedule. You can ask to take some time off.

You can ask to go to your prenatal care appointments without having to take PTR without having to dip into your leave bank. And when we wait to announce, we're going to be missing out all of that kind of support. In addition, when your employer doesn't know you're pregnant, your job is not protected in the way that it is when they do know you're pregnant. And this is going to sound counterintuitive unless you do the work that I do. When you tell your employer you're pregnant and please do it in writing and keep a copy, But when you tell an employer you're pregnant, you're in a protected class, which means that

any action that is adverse to you is going to be assumed to be discrimination, which is actionable. And you can then sue them and get a lot of money from them. However, if you don't tell them that you're pregnant, you can still lose your job. And then there's no recourse. There's been so many women who called me and said, I just got fired, but I'm pregnant. And I'm like, well, did you tell them? And they're like, no, I was scared I was going to lose my job. And I'm like, well, you lost your job.

And now there's nothing you can do. So I think waiting to announce is only protects the employer. It really harms the women. A lot of women will say, well, what if I lose the pregnancy? And then I say, well, don't you want to take some time off for that? Because if you don't announce your pregnancy and you do lose the pregnancy, you're really telling yourself that you're just going to work through that, you know, when you actually do have a right to take time off or healing.

And I also find that being kind of quiet about this. pregnancy ends up increasing the chances of discrimination in the sense that we're giving our employers less time to plan for our absence. We have to be honest that this is going to take some time away from work. And if we give our employers not a lot of time to find coverage or to move projects, they're going to be resentful about that. And so in all aspects, giving your employer so much notice to plan for your upcoming absence is going to be absolutely the best way to go. And then just quickly on interviewing, any tips there? Interviewing. So with interviewing, it's different because when you're already employed and you assert your pregnancy and then you lose your

job, like that is really easy in terms of a case. But when you're interviewing and you tell them you're pregnant and then you don't get the job, it's quite hard because, you know, it's technically illegal, but it's really hard to prove because they might just say, well, you weren't a good fit, you know because you weren't there yet. So when you're interviewing, the time to announce your pregnancy is after you get the offer letter because it's illegal to rescind an offer letter in response to pregnancy. In fact, that's one of the cases I've had. So you accept the letter, you accept the job and you also inform them of your pregnancy at that time, but you need to get something locked in. You need to have them actually offer you a job. Again, we don't want to wait too long to announce

because you just got there and you're still establishing trust. And if you wait too long, that's going to, you're going to damage that trust. If you are pregnant and you want to know about any benefits, they might have, I generally recommend asking for the handbook. And you don't have to say, I want to see the handbook so I can see the leave policies. You can say something like, I want to understand the company ethos and the company mission and ask them to send you a copy in the handbook and email so that you can take a look at that. Keeping in mind that with interviews, probably you go to a recruiter first, who don't actually have anything to do with you're com with the company you know they're not going to be the people you're working for

so with interviewing you do need to be a little bit more careful because usually those are third-party vendors that really don't give a shit about you and the moment they know you're pregnant to the moment they know you are asking about parental leave policy it's very unlikely you'll get that job get to toronto's main venues like budwiser stage and the new roger stadium with go transit Thanks to Go Transit's special online e-ticket fairs, a $10 one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel on any weekend day or holiday, anywhere along the Go Network. And the weekday group passes offer the same weekday travel flexibility across the network, starting at $30 for two people and up to $60 for a group of five. Buy your online go pass ahead of the show at go-transit.com slash tickets. I have lots of questions, but I want to move into the planning for a league.

because I found that to be incredibly daunting. So I'm going to ask it as a two-parter, planning for leave internally, like how do you plan for being gone with your workload and your coworkers and all that? And then planning for leave from benefits and finance standpoint, obviously knowing that it's going to differ from state to state. So in terms of your work, you want to start. creating a Google Doc drive, a Google Doc with all of your projects and make sure someone has access to that from day one of your pregnancy. Sometimes things happen and you can end up

having an emergency and then no one kind of, no one's allowed to contact you, but it can really disrupt work. So we don't want to plan for our leave the week we go on leave. We're going to plan for a week from the moment we're pregnant. And you're going to start educating other people on how to do your job and what's important. Because one thing to keep in mind is that while your job is protected, your work itself is not. So what I often see with parents is that they're on leave and all their projects kind of fall apart or are mishandled.

And there's kind of little to anything to do about that. And often this actually causes them to go back to work or to work while on leave to just kind of jump on email real quick or spend a day at the office. And the way to protect against that is to start planning really early. And again, give notice really early and start having regular meetings about the state of your work and make sure that whatever any launches or any projects you're doing accounts for the time that you're going to be gone. The second part about your benefits and about finances essential is that you sit down with your baby daddy or the other mother and that you come up with a joint plan. You have no idea many dudes just wait until their wife's in labor to tell their boss, like, hey, can I have some time off?

And then often they're like, no, you don't have PTO. And he's like, wait, what? Meanwhile, he may have had paternity leave either through state or federal law. Dads can usually take up to 12 weeks. And rarely they do, but mostly they have that right. And they often have some state benefits or some insurance benefits or parental leave policy through the company. So you want to sit down together and make sure that's a joint exercise that you're looking at what both of your rights are. and then coming up with a joint roadmap, you know, ideally, in fact, the dad would take

the kind of laboring horror on all of this work and create some sort of drive file where you save all of it because she's already creating life. So I feel like the last thing he can do is like deal with all this complicated, confusing mental stuff. And you want to just be prepared really early on what it's going to look like when you have that baby so that if you do need to save, you can do that if you do need to do like a you know some sort of funds where people instead of giving you a snoo they give you actual money um you can start doing that um so you just want to be prepared because i've had too many messages over the years from parents who are in it like in labor or right after birth or not ready to return to work and just like figuring it out at that time is a really

hard thing to do and it's also not an empowered thing to do because you don't have the time, you don't have the resources, you don't have the energy to deal with this complicated mental stuff. So it's almost like you want to create a roadmap of everything that might happen, including what happens if I have postpartum anxiety and I'm not ready to go back to work and I need some more time. What if, you know, if I want to be pumping mother, what is email I'm going to send? Just like we prepare the nursery or we spend hours researching and reading Amazon reviews on like specific baby bottles. Like we want to really do the work now. Like we want to do it as soon as possible. So given that it is different from state to state,

and it is very confusing, any recommendations of where to start to find out what state and federal benefits are available to you beyond what company benefits are? Yeah. So I have a whole portal around this where you just click on your state. and it tells you how much rights you have and what the email is to send your employer because what I have found, and I've created this because it didn't really exist in this way, because what I found is there's either like the EEOC website

which only provides federal law and not your state, and then the state websites which only provide information about financial benefits, but there's no space where those are actually combined and provide a comprehensive review of what your rights are. There's a few places, but they provide more kind of, like overview and not the in depth like how do I actually put all of this together so I have

created this and it's really essential here that we don't rely on the handbook the handbook is not going to necessarily have all of this information because they're usually focused on policy and they may not even want you to know that you have certain options it would kind of be against their own interest to teach you how to take more time off you know so very rarely would the handbook be the best source. People usually go to HR to get information on their rights, and I always say that's just not the place to go for that. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, right? And I will say, you know, I do have some empathy on the other side. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners. And I know when you have a team of three people and one person's going to be out

for three months and, you know, has to leave for doctors, appointments and things like that, it absolutely can be disruptive. Oh, totally. And it's part of the deal. And mothers biologically or women biologically have no other available option. It is what it is, right? Yeah. But you raise a good point.

First, the small employers usually don't have to follow any of these laws. So that's going to be based on kind of a conversation as to what can be possible. because the law does recognize that for small employers like that, it can be really disruptive. And I think it's important for the mothers to be honest about that, that taking the time away does have an impact on the business. And I think if we're like naive about that, it can end up causing more harm because we do want to create a work environment

that is mutually respectful and professional. So this is again why like waiting to announce something, hiding the truth, it really, it's frustrating for the employer because they want to help you. And sometimes they don't know how to help you because you're not telling them what's going on. Yeah, totally. Okay. I'm going to shift to like once we come back from parental leave. But before I do, when we think about preparation and knowing our rights, what about people who are adopting or same-sex paternity rights or people going through IVF?

You know, there are a lot of different ways that people are experiencing having a new child. What's available and what do we need to know about their rights? So adopting and foster same sex, those are all actually in the same bucket as the dad. So they're going to be taking family leave, which is usually 12 weeks. So folks don't know that you can take time for a new baby or a new child in your house. it doesn't have to be you who was the one birthing the child. So it's going to be 12-week bonding leave that you can take. For IVF, you're going to be using the Pregn Workers Fairness Act for time off or for accommodations,

or it can also use your leave rights. So the law is really comprehensive in that way. It doesn't only support the birth, the mom to give birth. It does actually is quite inclusive in terms of who's allowed and who can take time off. A lot of folks, though, know that you can use FMLA for a full bonding leave for 12 weeks of bonding. And they assume that you need to have a medical event because it's usually used for medical leave.

So you can use the full of the entire 12 weeks for a bonding leave. And I have a bias that I believe that it's incredibly important that men especially, but both parents take leave when and forever, however long they can because I think women often feel guilty about taking leave. We feel like we can't win either way. If we take our full leave, we're not dedicated enough. If we don't take our full leave, we're, you know, cold-hearted bitches who don't really care about our children. And it's this feeling like you can't win. And I think the more we see men taking advantage of these leaves and and sending the message of how important it is to participate in both. And to sort of help.

de-stigmatize this or not have the stigma be only on women because I would imagine men taking leave are going to feel the exact same I can't win here moments and hopefully have some increased empathy. But that's my perspective. What are your thoughts on maybe men specifically taking advantage of their parental leave? Yeah, I agree with you. What I see in my work is that men will take some time off, but rarely they're fully, for the exact same reasons you mentioned that, they're worried about the stigma. And I don't want to deny that there's a stigma. It's absolutely there. There's research about that. Men can be impacted. And what I want to invite men into is a conversation around what providing really means. I think they're still focused on the financial aspect,

but being there and being also an emotional support and helping is also providing. And what is frustrating, as you mentioned, is that for the mothers, they don't have a choice. They're also worried about impact. In fact, there's a ton of data that there is impact, but they don't really have a choice. So it often forces parents in this kind of traditional gender role with the dad just like gone at work and the mother alone home with the baby, which can be quite a shock to the system. So the more that you can just be prepared in advance, and you can be clear, like this is when you take time off, especially when the mother goes back to work. Ideally, the other parent is home with the baby at that time so that the mother can feel like, all right, I'm here.

It's hard. I miss my baby, but at least my baby's bonding with the other parent. Like, this is good for them. So I can actually focus on my work. Instead of that first transition being with the baby going to daycare or a stranger, like that's a, it's a really disruptive experience to go back to work in and of itself. So having that time dedicated to the bonding time, the other parent can be really key there. Yeah. Okay. What about when we return to work? What are the rights or misconceptions or things that we should be on the lookout for as we go vastly thrived and, you know, craving adult conversation? Oh, goodness.

And like a warm cup of coffee. So the first one is that we have a right to our job back or a comparable job, which has to be almost the same job. So a lot of people, including employers, think that when an employee leaves on leave, they can be replaced permanently, which isn't true. Often they're like, well, it's not my problem. You decide to have a baby. Well, it is. You actually do have to get that woman or that man, her job back. Even if the replacement is doing a good job, if the replacement is doing a good job, then you need to create another job. But that is number one is make sure you get your job back. Make sure you're

not put in the back office suddenly doing admin work when you were previously a manager. The second part is that there are still rights, even though you're not pregnant anymore, a lot of people assume including managers that, oh, she's not pregnant. So now kind of, you know, it's whatever. I can do whatever I want. I can be act out of my frustration that she was gone. And that's not true. There's still protections based on motherhood discrimination after you return from work. So if you are retaliated against because you left for a while, that is actually illegal. And the last thing, is that you can pump under the Pump Act. And also, you can still take accommodations,

those part of accommodations for medical needs or for mental health needs. Sometimes you can take more time off. So there's still a whole cornucopia of rights after you return to work. What I do see, though, is mothers at that time feel really nervous asking for more stuff because they're like, I was pregnant, I already took time. And here I am asking for more things. And I just really want to remind mothers that these are your rights, you know, and that we have to use them or they will go away. 100%.

And any advice about when to begin conversation or communication about coming back in a different or more flexible way if you have that opportunity? So I remember when I was pregnant, my employer at the time kept asking what was it going to look like when I came back from maternity leave. And I understood and had a lot of empathy for why they were asking. And I was like, I can't honestly answer that question. I haven't had the baby yet. This is my first child. I don't know what to expect. I don't know how I'm going to feel.

I do know for sure without a shadow of a doubt that I'm going to want to come back to work. Yeah. Being a work from inside the home parent has never been a choice I would want to make. It would be far more likely that Jay would stay home than me. And I was able to collaborate. to have kind of an extended transition back into work. I came back to work three days a week and then four days a week and stayed at four days a week from that point forward.

And again, privilege and good relationship and communication with the people I worked with. But my question is when to begin having conversations about what's possible from a flexibility or even restructuring what work looked like or looks like when you come back? And is that even a possibility? That's such a good inquiry. And I think first, it's hard indeed to anticipate that. But I think you can anticipate it because if during pregnancy you felt like the job was too hard and the job was too demanding and overwhelming, it's going to be even more that

when you return from leave. So just trust how your body feels while you are working. If you feel like it was easy and it was enjoyable and you enjoyed spending time with your co-workers and it was nice to have that routine and you didn't feel a ton of pressure, then most likely you're going to kind of ease back in just fine. But if you felt like it was tough to combine pregnancy and working, it's going to be even tougher combining postpartum and working. So the time to start thinking about that and open that conversation is actually during

pregnancy because again, the employer has to make accommodations and changes to make sure that that's possible. There's a few ways to do this through your rights. So sometimes you can save some time on your leave bank and you can kind of come back on an intermittent schedule, but that's always going to be temporary. You can also ask to come back on a reduced schedule through your accommodation rights. But if you wanted to be a long-term thing, just understanding that you're essentially asking for a different job and your employer doesn't have to grant that. They're allowed to say, no, sorry, this is what works for us. But if you can do the, take the initiative and actually provide the research and show them that it's possible,

show them how it would actually help and benefit them, then there's absolutely a way. Like, if we can show them that it would save money, you know, they love it. They're like, yeah, this is how you'll save money. Here's how we're going to do it. Let's try it for a month as a trial period. it's really hard to say no to that for the employer unless they just want to control you. But with a benevolent employer, it's so easy, too, if you frame it like that. Yeah. I think that was one of my saving graces in that moment as I understood the goals and what was important to the organization and the employer.

And so it was very much, how do I position this as a win-win? Yeah. You're saving money because you're not, you know, and I'm going to let go. of the lowest level work that I do, and you can pay someone else to do it. You shouldn't have been paying me that amount of money to do it anyway. It was a really big conversation, and I didn't just think about it from the angle of my needs and what I wanted. I thought about it from the angle of what was best for the organization and what the company wanted. So I think really good points. Yeah, you've really done this right. The more you're sharing about how you handled it, it's really,

I'm really impressed because this is exactly the way that I'm advising it. And even when you ask for your rights, you can actually frame it in the way that benefits the company, which doesn't make sense until you're like, until, you know, the way that I have my mom's write these emails is like, hey, I looked into this. I just want to make sure we're compliant, you know, position yourself as looking at for risk, almost like a de facto HR person. like that is the way to actually get the employer to align with you. Yeah.

Okay. I know we're over time, but I did want to ask because I'm sure there are people listening who are like, okay, but I'm self-employed or I'm an entrepreneur. Yeah. Do I have any rights? And so where do I go to find them? So when you're in that position, the first thing to do if you're thinking about children is to, I mean, if you don't already do this, make sure that you employ yourself.

meaning that your company pays you on payroll as an employee. Lots of folks stay in this independent contractor kind of in between place when I want you all to move to being an actual company because when you're being in when you are in this self-employed place, kind of the gig worker 1099, and when you stay there, you're going to not only pay the highest tax, you don't have any rights. So you either want to be an employee or you want to be a business owner, actually a company or both. And if you are a company, you can actually be both because you can employ yourself. And then you pay into all of these systems and you also pay a lower tax rate.

And that is a way to kind of hack these benefit systems. But when you are in between and you're self-employed and you're just doing some work on a contract basis, you don't actually have any rights. So it's a very scary place to be. So I always tell folks, like either move into being a company, like, incorporate yourself because that's when you actually are treated the best or become an employee, even if it means becoming an employee of your own company. Yeah, great advice.

Okay. I know people are going to want to learn more and find and follow you. So the website is the mom attorney.com. And you can also follow Daphne on Instagram at the mom attorney. And, definitely, let me just confirm the portal that you mentioned earlier with the state's rights. Is that on the mom attorney.com? Yes. Yes. Okay. You, yeah, you'll find it there. And if you're looking at Mama, so M-A-M-A attorney. Yeah. Right. Okay. We'll put the links and show notes. Daphne, thank you for an important and obviously topic that I care a lot about for an important

conversation. Thank you. You're so welcome. Thank you. All right. As we close out this conversation today, let's be clear that being a mom is an intensely personal choice. And while it might not be the path for everyone, one thing is indisputable, at least for me. We can and should do a better job advocating for them. Discriminating against parents, pushing them to work without proper support, and making them feel guilty for wanting both a career and a family is simply unacceptable. After all, society has never made men feel guilty for wanting both. And as Daphne says, if we explain women to work like men, we should expect fathers to parent like mothers. And that's not just a clever retort. It's a demand for balance in a world that's long overdue for change. So let this be

a call to action, a rallying cry for a future where parental leave isn't more confusing than filing your taxes. Parenthood is a respected choice and a skill and where equity is built for everyone, both at work and at home. Being a mom isn't a requirement for doing woman's work, but protecting them absolutely is. This is woman's work.