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Catherine Rampell: Paid family leave isn’t just a women’s issue. It’s an economic one.

That's how we should be thinking about many of the "softer" policy areas that will be debated in the 2020 election -- and that have already found their way into legislative proposals, including the paid family leave bill reintroduced this week by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, D-Conn..

I'm hardly the first to point out the connection between "women's issues" and the economy. Slate's Jordan Weissmann, for instance, recently wrote an excellent piece emphasizing the economic benefits of affordable child care. But still, policies that affect mothers' ability to work are too often framed as being mainly about fairness, feminism, personal fulfillment and family bonding.