Bosses take remote less work seriously when it’s geared toward parents, study shows

Being penalized for using flexible working policies—remote work, hybrid work, parental leave, and more—can be subtle, or screamingly obvious. Nicole Yelland, a communications strategist from Detroit, has experienced both. In one remote role, she was managed by a hostile boss whose explosive “Hulk-out” rages made work miserable. The breaking point came when her 5-year-old daughter was laid out sick in Yelland’s office during a call, and her manager erupted, asking what her “kid is doing in the office” in an expletive-packed rant: “You’re not paying attention! You’re not committed!” He then dismissed remote work as “BS”—as he himself was working from his large house in the country. When Yelland asked what he did when his own child was sick, he replied: “That’s what his mother is for.” She says she hid her daughter from the camera on future videoconference calls, and sent him her resignation notice shortly thereafter. The same pattern emerged in another job. There, the pressure to stay reachable bled into her time off. Before taking a day of PTO to support a friend, she informed her boss that she wouldn’t be bringing her laptop. But when she returned on Monday, things felt amiss. “Everyone was off in the corners whispering,” she recalls. She later learned the team had struck a new deal with a big brand, but colleagues had been told not to fill her in because she “wasn’t available after hours.” Her boss also demanded that Yelland take all calls within her earshot, and one morning when Yelland’s car battery drained, she was told to use PTO for the hour missed rather than count it as her lunch hour.Yelland also resigned from this role, and it’s no coincidence that she now runs her own business. “I got sick and tired of having to deal with company policies developed for the right reasons, but interpreted in the wrong way,” she explains. Her story serves as a depressing snapshot of the motherhood penalty. However, new research shows that when flexible work is treated as som