Hellobee Boards

Never. When I was back from my maternity leave I was expected to pull my weight, and did. I had to leave work at 5, but also started arriving at 730 because my kid woke at 5. I worked nights and weekends to make sure that I got my job done. I'm a lawyer.

Never. Pre-kids I was known by our clients as the only person still in the office at 5pm on a Friday and would therefore sometimes be asked to handle accounts that weren't mine, but it wasn't only parents skating out early and it was totally my choice to stay because I wanted to advance my career.

Nope. I mean, admittedly, I've previously only worked part-time cashier jobs and I've been at this company for 10 years now. Parents and non-parents are treated equally. I still have to get in my hours, but now my start time is 7:30 so that I can leave on-time to pick up my kids from daycare. My boss is really understanding about family emergencies, but I imagine he's understanding about most things. I never really had emergencies as a non-parent, so I can't really compare, but I was never asked to work more/longer/harder than parents when I was a non-parent, and I don't feel like I'm given more slack now that I am a parent.

I have, I mean, I can't go into huge amounts of detail, but there have been times I haven't been able to run a meeting because I had an appointment for my son so I've had to ask someone else to cover. And it's happened to me in the other direction, where I have been asked to cover.

I don't look at it as a big deal though, it's what we do to help each other in the cycle of our work lives.

Like @Anagram, I'm in education. So I certainly cover all of my basic responsibilities but I have a lot of flexibility in how I address them, and I am definitely addressing them in a less intensive way now than I did before kids. Also, a lot of the work of a college/university is done on a "volunteer" basis (but is used for promotion cases), and I just volunteer less for that. Which means that there is more for others to do. But I did much more than "my fair share" of the extra work before kids and I anticipate doing more of it when my children are older.

As @Looch said, I think it's ok for people to go through different cycles in their work lives and for the work environment to support that, as long as their is an expectation of things evening out in the long run. It's common for people in academia to shift priorities throughout their careers, regardless of their personal circumstances. (I just got tenure, which is a common time to dial back the extra service work that a faculty person does.)

No. Well I guess one time I worked on Christmas when my coworker who had kids didn't but I think that's pretty understandable.

When I was working, I had a kid, was pregnant with my second, delivered 75% of the deliverables that year even though I worked 25 hrs a week and basically did my childless coworker's job for her because she "didn't know how" and always had lots of "networking" lunches to go to. She was promoted. I left.

@Anagram: I have had people who work more than me even before I had kids. There was one person who sat by the office window and kept track of the times people came and left. They saw coming early and staying late and thinking about work off hours as a badge of honor. I'm guessing if they were looking for reasons as to why, they might point to kids as being a factor.

Non-parents certainly aren't required to work more or pick up slack in my office, but they generally DO work more. I'm a lawyer and we have a bonus system that encourages exceeding your baseline hour goal for the month. Pre-kids, when I was a go-getter and had a lot of free time, I routinely worked nights and weekends to get that bonus and look good to my bosses. Now, I'm happy if I meet the minimum requirement.

The only time non-parents have had to fill in for me is when I haven't been comfortable traveling long distances for hearings or meetings within the last couple weeks of my due date for pregnancies, but I would consider that almost more of a health reason than a parenting reason.

The only thing I can thing of was when a coworker realized a week before that her daycare was going to be closed Christmas Eve and she needed to take the day off. Since it was so close to the holiday we already had a schedule worked out with who had off. Our supervisor asked her to make sure it was "ok" with the only 2 people who would be left working. Obviously they said yes, but it put everyone in an awkward position.

With that said this is an office job where Christmas Eve is normally slow and we close easy. Also anyone could have had a last minute emergency where they had to take the holiday off, but here it was directly related to not knowing the daycare schedule earlier.

I think it's perception too. I used to work in a high stress office environment and we were constantly given "urgent deliverables" with ridiculous expectations/deadlines. There were definitely a lot more workers without kids than workers with kids. It seemed like people with kids would not let the stress get to them as much as people without kids and they would say - I need to go home to do xyz with my family vs the single people felt they couldn't do that. When coworkers went on maternity leave, their work would be distributed to others - I wouldn't say single people got the work more than people with families but they may have felt that way.

Nope. We both teach in college, so our jobs are inherently flexible, and there have been times when professors volunteered to take over someone's class for family emergencies (like the death or illness of a parent) but no one has ever had to pick up slack for anyone else because of parenthood.

I think it's a very different question to ask if people without kids HAVE to work more vs if they actually do work more. Honestly, I feel like a lot of jobs don't REQUIRE overtime, even when it's common.

I know I, like many PPs, worked more pre-kids. I didn't mind the overtime too much and was making promotions. Now I have a kid and I don't like to work as much overtime. Did I HAVE to work the overtime pre-kids? No but most people do. And if you're never going to have kids, I can see that getting tiring. I also think it's more culturally acceptable to say you don't want to do overtime because you want a work/life balance when you have kids. Just look at all the people who responded to the article saying that consoling a friend isn't as important as spending time with your kid. So, yeah, I get it. But I think it's more a matter of everyone being okay with saying that home life is important whether you have kids or not.

@Adira: Agree that a lot of it is about perception. I have one coworker who has an infant and asked if he could change his schedule to 7-4. Our department head approved it, but I'm not sure whether everyone in our department knows. I'm sure some people might think, "hey, why does he get to leave early?" If anyone actually asked me (I'm one of two dept. managers), I'd just tell them he has a different schedule but no one has.

@Anagram: yes this was exactly what I was thinking, this question on a parenting site.

With the secondary of my two jobs, my boss made it clear that I should be able to do more since I don't have kids. I am a workaholic at my primary job, and he brought up the other employees, basically saying these guys also juggle two jobs and family,, and you don't even have kids so you should be able to do more at this job. I can't even articulate it but definitely felt like there was an element of sexism in there too. Like if I were a man with aggressive career goals (like I do at my primary job) I would get a pass at "slacking" at my second job but cause I am a woman who puts her career first and doesn't have children, he brought up the children comment. I felt so resentful at his presumptuous expectations - just cause I don't have kids yet doesn't mean my life is all easy breezy! That seemed to be his perception. Not to mention let's be honest the wives of these men are the ones doing the brunt of child rearing.

I'm not even sure this is related to your question. I just still feel ragey about it half a year after the comments were made.

Age had more to do with it than kids. There were people with diff home lives and I've been at places where that was accommodated. But everyone knew how much work they were doing and while it was tolerated there was zero chance they were moving up the ladder and I know they were talked to once for passing off duties.
At my husband's job the person who works way later than everyone else is bc he uses work time as social time and just chit chats the day away. Staying late doesn't mean effective. They all have set work that needs to be done and there's no getting around it. Some of the parents are better at just focusing on their stuff and getting out. My husband does more than his duties as much as he feels comfortable but his reviews reflect that too and hopefully will help in the long run.

I'm surprised at all the 'no' answers. I don't see non-parents picking up the slack as an ongoing 'business as usual' thing, but if there is a firedrill that requires unexpected late nights, the non-parents are definitely going to be more likely to handle that than those of us who need to get to day care pick up.

Only in situations where the parents were not working full-time. All the full-time workers would put in like 60+ hours a week at times and the part-timers were never asked to go over their set hours.
Otherwise, sometimes parents would leave early but they always seemed to work in the evenings. My former boss had 2 young kids before I had any and she was a very hard worker, despite often getting in later and leaving earlier than many others in our group. She would work from home in the mornings and evenings. I don't know how she did it!

I don't think I've run into this. In my line of work we don't really share a lot of work with other team mates. I have various projects/features that I work on by myself. And the work is distributed evenly on my team. So there's picking up the slack for someone else, or someone needing to pick up the slack for me since we all work on different things.

I feel like I've seen men sometimes use having kids as an excuse to get out of stuff - and explicitly tell other men this is a great excuse - whereas women tend not to do so because then they would be even more likely to get "mommy-tracked." That said, the few issues I've had with people on my teams not pulling their weight have never been with parents. If people want to work less and think they can get away with it because someone will pick up the slack, they will do so and this seems pretty unrelated to their family situation.