This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning.

This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is that work is a perfectly good reason to

decline to do something, even if you work flexibly. No one else is going to protect your work

hours for you. If you are serious about doing big things, then you need enough space to work.

So if someone works full-time in an office, most people understand that they will not be readily

available for certain things.

When the neighbor's dog walker cancels, they do not ask if you can cover, if they know that you are sitting in an office

30 minutes away. Men who work full-time in particular seem not to attract these sorts of requests.

I know from stories people send me that even if the male half of a two-parent family is listed

as the first contact for the school,

the school will often still call the woman,

because it's assumed that the man is working and can't be interrupted.

Mom, on the other hand, is free game.

This is, of course, frustrating in families where mom is working far less

flexibly than dad, but cultural assumptions can run pretty deep. Now I would note that even

so-called not flexible work turns out to be more flexible than people often think. It was once

assumed that medicine wasn't flexible at all. When women became a higher

...