The Unspoken Stigma of Workplace Flexibility

Article here. Excerpt:

'Assume for a moment that your employer let you decide when and where you worked — you might arrive early so you could leave in time to care for a child, or work part of the week from home. Or perhaps you want to reduce your hours for a while to care for an aging parent. How would you be perceived if you raised your hand for one of these options?

"Many times these policies are on the books, but informally everyone knows you are penalized for using them,” said Joan C. Williams, founding director of the Center for Work-Life Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, referring to the array of flexible work arrangements some employers offer. “I invented the term ‘flexibility stigma’ to describe that phenomenon. Recent studies have found that it is alive and well, and it functions quite differently for women than it does for men.”

For some women, it gives employers a reason to view them through the lens of motherhood, prompting the strongest form of gender discrimination. Mothers are seen as less competent and less committed to their work, she said, citing other studies. But more surprising is that men who seek work flexibility may be penalized more severely than women, because they’re viewed as more feminine, deviating from their traditional role of fully committed breadwinners.
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“Not only have we put women on the mommy track, we put dad on the daddy track,” said Kenneth Matos, an organizational psychologist and senior director of employment research and practice at the Families and Work Institute, a research group. “We tend to talk about what happens to women, but we don’t talk about what happens to men and we wonder why women are stuck.”
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Still, most workers still remain at the mercy of their managers. “It is not systematic and it is not reliable and for a lot of people, it depends on whether your supervisors are sympathetic,” said Ariane Hegewisch, a study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “But you have no guarantees.”'