Okay, so I give Sacramento Magazine a hard time (rightfully so, when it comes to their “Best of” issue). Today, though, I caught a glimpse of a headline piquing my interest enough to make me find it online. It’s hardly breaking news. It isn’t even solely a Sacramento problem. The issue: childless (or “child-free” if the “-less” gives you inferiority issues) women in the workplace feeling pressured to cover their child-rearing coworkers. You’ve heard the situations: worker 1 has to go get kid A from school to soccer practice; worker 2 has to get the proposal done for the boss by first thing tomorrow. Worker 2 has no kids. Guess who gets to stay late?

With all the new home construction, migration, and new families in town, this issue must be especially pressing in Sacramento. But aren’t a lot of these complaints tired? Are some shallow? And are they missing a bigger problem entirely?

Here’s the main (kind of extremely phrased) complaint:

To the growing ranks of nonmothers in this country, mothers seem entitled in a way no one else could hope to be. Company benefits, they point out, are mostly designed to favor people with children: more money for health insurance, subsidized child care, paid maternity leave, even adoption assistance and mutual-fund programs for newborns or newly adopted children. What’s more, mothers, citing family responsibilities, seem to be constantly scooting out the door, leaving co-workers stuck with more work. The backlash is especially vitriolic in Elinor Burkett’s The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless (Free Press, 2000), in which one outraged nonmother is quoted as saying, “People seem to think a professional office can double as a petting zoo, so they bring [children] in all the time. They are very disruptive, a huge distraction for those that are actually trying to work. . . . Breeders get so much time off to tend to the emergency sicknesses or the accidents or the school this or that. Who covers for them, who works more hours? The nonbreeders, that’s who. And no one notices. We are punished for not squirting out spawn.”

I really hate the “breeders” label. And the “non-breeders” (also charming) complaints frequently play out like hysterical rantings of embittered old maids. No, not too strongly, but that sentiment is there, under the surface, still living after all these waves of feminism. One childless - fine, child-free - woman complains because her friends get to stay home with their sick kids; she doesn’t get the same consideration for her sick dog. Each time I read that complaint, I decide its either more or less reasonable than on the previous reading.

The problems come from outdated models of the Ideal Worker, theorizes one scholar:

The notion of full-time work–a 40-plus-hour workweek (58 hours now is the norm, O magazine reports), a two-week vacation and few, if any, paid sick or “personal” days–is designed around the outdated Industrial-era life pattern of the traditional breadwinning male, Williams notes.

“We tend to define our ‘ideal’ on the job as someone who starts working early in adulthood and works for 40 years straight, taking no time off for childrearing,” she says in a phone interview. “That doesn’t fit mothers’ social role. Look to the right and left of you. People in high-powered jobs tend to be men married to homemakers, because they’re the people who have that immunity to household work that is expected of the ideal worker.”

In what Williams calls a “workforce-workplace mismatch,” several assumptions persist about what makes an ideal worker. These assumptions need rethinking, she believes, in order to facilitate change–which would not only be good news to mothers, but also both men and women of Generations X and Y who in large numbers have voiced a desire for more of a work-life balance than their predecessors had.

According to Williams, one ideal worker assumption is that commitment to the job equals long hours. All too often, she says, we characterize “go-getters” not as people who do good work, but people who are always at work.

That’s certainly true - or seems that way. I don’t think enough of a point is made that this is a description of the ideal AMERICAN worker. Other countries aren’t as incredibly stupid when it comes to burning themselves to the ground and refusing to stop for recreation time.

But you know what’s missing from this article nearly completely?

Did you know that along with women, there is an entirely different sex classification known as “men.” Seriously, where are the effing fathers in all of this. I know there are a lot of single mothers out there for whom balance is a lot less of a concern than just surviving. But I’m guessing at least some of the women mentioned here are married. Are the fathers doing any of this wife/mom work? Cleaning the house? Caring for the sick kids? Driving them to soccer? Do THEY worry what the boss thinks when they ask for time off for school events or does taking such time cross their minds? Didn’t seem to cross the minds of those interviewed for this article.

How the hell is this just our problem, ladies?

When I was growing up, my father worked in Downtown L.A. - a lousy commute which he avoided by using the local park & ride. He’d go at the crack of dawn so he could work his full day and be home by around 5. I’ll never know if the somewhat early-shifted schedule cost him upward mobility in his professional life (he worked for city government as well, traditionally a more flexible gig with random hours to begin with). But I sure do appreciate his being home more while I was still awake. A lot of fathers, I’m sure, do make the same kinds of sacrifices for their families that the women in this article do. A lot less research money gets spent on them, however. And no one seems to being emphasizing what these women wars are really saying: we still get stuck with the kids - at the expense of our professional lives and working relationships, apparently.

[Author's note: to be fair, I just noticed a disclaimer at the end of the online version of the article indicating there's more text in the print edition. Perhaps the Daddy Question is addressed. I'll try to find out - but if you have more insight, please share!]