the “family-friendly” companies I’ve worked for were only friendly to employees with kids

A reader writes:

Almost every company I’ve worked for in my 15+ years in the corporate world brags about being “family friendly” or something similar, but this usually translates into childless people getting treated differently and/or poorly. I know that being from the midwest, this might be a regional problem, but it’s one I’d love your perspective on.

Some examples:

– I’ve worked for two companies that didn’t allow work-from-home privileges as a rule, unless you were a parent with a sick child or similar situation, but people without kids were not allowed to work from home for any reason.

– During city-wide snow days, everyone without kids had to come into the office to cover for parents who were staying at home with their kids, regardless of how safe we felt driving in the weather.

– While everyone was working from home during the pandemic, management looked the other way when employees with kids spent most of their day showing “away” on Teams, but child-free employees would get pinged asking if we were at our desks.

– Employees without kids who need to adjust their schedule for appointments are given the side eye, but parents can leave early for their kid’s extracurriculars with no problem.

– Employees without kids are often expected to work holidays more than parents and are sometimes asked to move our scheduled time off because someone with kids planned a family vacation for that same time.

I don’t want to take parents’ flexibility away from them, but it would be nice to experience that same flexibility as a child-free person, and I get burnt out taking on extra work or working longer hours because I’m the only person on the team without children. Is there a way to address this without looking petty?

It’s not petty to object to being held to a dramatically different set of expectations than coworkers who have kids.

And an employer that’s able to offer schedule flexibility or remote work for employees with kids should be able to offer that to employees without kids, too. It might not be true for every role but if they’re making it work based solely on whether or not someone has children, they’re equipped to make it work for more of you — they’re just choosing not to, and it’s at the expense of you and your colleagues without kids picking up the slack (and presumably while you’re compensated at the same pay rate as the people who get the additional flexibility).

To be clear, it’s pretty normal that parents might need more flexibility at times; that’s the nature of having small dependents. But it’s absurd to say that they’re the only people who need or can have any flexibility at all. Other people have aging parents, disabled spouses, their own medical conditions, and other life situations to manage that can be significantly less stressful if they have some workplace flexibility.

As for whether there’s a way to address it … in a reasonably functional company, ideally you’d try banding together with your colleagues and pushing for a change, pointing out how inequitable these practices are. You may or may not make any headway — and “reasonably functional” is a pretty big caveat — but it’s far from a petty thing to ask for.