Dive Brief:

• It seems that businesses are falling over themselves these days to cater to women who want to be or are mothers, according to an opinion piece at the New York Times.
• For example, the author cites a private equity firm that now offers to pay for both your baby and a nanny to fly with with you on business travel until baby’s first birthday. IBM plans to ship home breast milk pumped on a work trip. Facebook and Apple will reimburse the costs for employees who want to freeze their eggs. 
• But this new raft of “perks,” says author Anne Weisberg, president at the Families and Work Institute, shows how a work culture that prizes total availability at the office at all times is still in play. Also, it shows how blind employees are to the impact that norms at work have on roles at home. Change to both will come only when we acknowledge the deep connection between the two spheres, she writes.

Dive Insight:

To bring the workplace into the 21st century, employers need a new archetype of the ideal worker that is not anchored in gender and reflects the multiple roles that employees play in all spheres of their lives, Weisberg writes.

She adds that it is hard to tell to what extent the assumptions at work are driving choices at home, or the other way around. In the end, the important thing to realize is that these dynamics are self-reinforcing.

The solution? Leadership must be "reimagined" so that ideal workers are not the ones who stay at work the latest, but the ones who get all their work done and leave at a reasonable hour; they are not the ones who get on a plane on a moment’s notice, even with a nanny in tow, but the ones who figure out how to conduct the meeting without having to travel, she writes.

Food for thought for today's HR leaders, especially in the wake of the raging Amazon culture debate.