The Guide for Supporting Involved Fatherhood in the Workplace, co-developed with TÜSİAD (Türkiye’s leading confederation of business associations, representing over 4,500 companies), gives companies practical tools to redesign paternity leave, dismantle invisible norms, and build cultures where men’s involvement in parenting and care work is genuinely supported. A parallel workshop with the UN Global Compact moved from awareness to action, participants rewrote real policies before leaving the room.
A significant body of evidence affirms that positive father engagement in the lives of their children is associated with a series of early child development outcomes, improved quality of the family environment, greater workforce participation for mothers, and improved wellbeing for men themselves. AÇEV’s own Father Support Program (BADEP, active since 1996, with over 60,000 fathers reached) has contributed directly to this evidence base in the Turkish context. Yet structural barriers in the workplace remain among the most persistent obstacles to change: short or stigmatized paternity leave, managerial cultures that penalize fathers who use flexible working arrangements, and internal communications that frame caregiving as a “mothers’ issue.” The Guide addresses these barriers directly.
Developed through close collaboration with TÜSİAD, whose members represent some of Türkiye’s largest employers, the Guide moves beyond aspiration to operational guidance. It covers leave policy design, internal communication templates, manager training frameworks, and metrics for tracking progress. The TÜSİAD partnership is strategically significant: it positions men’s involvement in parenting and care work as a matter of corporate leadership, not individual preference, and creates conditions for culture change across the Turkish private sector.
The “Allyship in Gender Equality” workshop, hosted jointly with the UN Global Compact, piloted the Guide’s methodology with private sector representatives. Participants were asked not simply to reflect on their own assumptions, but to rewrite real paternity leave policies, redesign internal messaging, and commit to a specific action they would take the following day. This participatory approach, theory followed immediately by practice, is central to AÇEV’s adult learning philosophy and distinguishes this initiative from conventional corporate gender equality training.