I remember a law show episode years ago, maybe Ally Macbeal, maybe Law and Order.
A mother was suing that she was working 40 hours and not getting promoted as much, that wasn’t fair. The young childless professional woman representing the client brought up her personal (character) view - “I work 70-80 hours a week, I work weekends, I don’t take vacations while you take days off for childcare and school holidays. Why should you get the promotion ahead of me? How is that fair? And if I get the promotion when you don’t, that isn’t sexism, that is merit, a reflection of who works harder.”
The mother complained she couldn’t work those hours.
The younger attorney said, “There are women who work those hours, some hire nannies, some have husbands doing all the work. But you want to do everything, and you can’t, and while that’s not fair in your view, you getting the promotions and raises when I work longer and harder isn’t fair.”
Feminists think you can have it all - and you honestly cannot. You can have a full tilt career or full time parenting or rich social life with activities - but only so many hours in a day. There’s a reason women’s salary growth curves tend to slow or stall after having kids - because they instinctively spend more time on kids. That’s not sexist except to the degree having kids tends to put the burden on women. Some men take on the burden, some women don’t have children. But you can’t be there for the kids and be there for work ...
This “meternity” to try to say non-mothers should get equal time off actually hurts women more. How? By saying women need time off for “whatever”, without even the “my kid is sick” excuse. And if women in mass start demanding this, the childless women who work the long hours will be sidelined by employers afraid they’ll start needing random breaks, too, and hire guys instead. It is safer, then, to actually discriminate against women.
At my job the childless women don’t work a minute more than the mothers, and have figured out their own ways to get off when they want to - by simply saying they have to do something for an aging parent, for example. There are only so many hours in a day, and you can’t “have it all”. My wife described a female co-worker who had a live video feed to her child’s daycare on her work computer; besides being the saddest thing ever, it was disgusting that an employer has to deal with someone watching that at “work” - I would never pay someone to do that.
A friend described a scenario where a childless woman went to their boss and basically said that going forward they would pretend she had a family, and she couldn’t stay late any longer because she had to make dinner for her imaginary family. She had a valid point; that wasn’t a fair arrangement, and I support her in that.
The resentful childless women I describe don’t work any extra time because they are relics of a bygone era where people worked 9-5 like clockwork; they are older, and don’t have the interest or stamina for more work. They came of age at a time when women were just starting to enter the full-time workforce en masse, and the idea of being worked to death the way so many others are today is unthinkable to them; they simply refuse to put in extra time/effort, so have no basis for complaint about the mothers in the office. Fearing lawsuits, the company promotes them despite their lack of effort, so us guys in the office cut back our hours to match theirs - and this let me be actively involved in my children’s lives instead of just seeing them late at night or on weekends.
While I deal with many young women working long hours (in relationships with vendors), I don’t see it in my own company; my female co-workers reject the idea of long hours and use threats of lawsuits to prevent it from hurting them financially. As a guy, I make sure their actions benefit me in terms of work/life balance; if what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I’ve been working like a goose for years now - with no financial consequences. The legal atmosphere (in which tokenism is rampant to preempt lawsuits) have made extra time/effort on a white guy’s part an exercise in futility.