One more way the men's working lives are made easier than women's:
The study found that managers are most likely to grant a request to men in high-status jobs in order to pursue career advancement opportunities like professional development classes, while women in the same job making the request for the exact same reason weren’t as likely to get approval. The researchers explained the preference for giving men flexible time for career development by pointing to “the greater respect and admiration managers felt toward high-status male employees to high-status female employees.”
While authors Victoria L. Brescoll, Jennifer Glass, and Alexandra Sedlovskaya had expected to find that men would be less likely to be granted flexibility for childcare reasons, they didn’t find anything supporting that idea. In fact, men in low-status jobs who asked for flextime to care for children were more likely to have their request granted than high-status men, while for women, neither their job status nor their reasons impacted managers’ decisions about whether to grant the request.
With women taking on more of the responsibility for child care and household labor, lack of flexibility is more likely to drive them out of the workforce altogether, when they can afford it, or to lead to less than ideal child care situations. But the finding that men are more likely to be allowed flexibility to advance their careers is a particularly excellent example of how women just can't win.
And then, after women detach from careers in which they're treated as second-class citizens, or scale back their hours because if they don't take care of things at home no one will, we get newspaper and magazine trend pieces about how women are choosing to leave the workforce because of their essential nurturing femininity. Just to underscore the whole "women can't win" point yet again.