Claire Cain Miller’s article about “The 24/7 Work Culture’s Toll on Families and Gender Equality” in The New York Times is fascinating, both for what it tells us about work and gender differences, and for the ways companies respond to the findings. As Miller explains,

The biggest obstacle to women in joining the highest ranks of the business world is a lack of family-friendly policies. That, at least, has been the conventional wisdom in recent years, and it has been embraced by progressive companies that offer flexible schedules or allow people to work from home.

But some researchers are now arguing that the real problem is not the lack of family-friendly policies for mothers, but the surge in hours worked by both women and men. And companies are not likely to want to adopt the obvious solution.

The pressure of a round-the-clock work culture — in which people are expected to answer emails at 11 p.m. and take cellphone calls on Sunday morning — is particularly acute in highly skilled, highly paid professional services jobs like law, finance, consulting and accounting.

Offering family-friendly policies is too narrow a solution to the problem, recent research argues, and can have unintended consequences. When women cut back at work to cope with long hours, they end up stunting their careers. And men aren’t necessarily happy to be expected to work extreme hours, either.

The article builds on Erin Reid’s recently-published study (which I talked about a couple weeks ago) comparing how men and women deal with expectations at professional service firms. That study found that men and women who wanted to throttle back their hours pursued different strategies for doing so. Broadly, women tended to follow formal policies for flex time or accept jobs that allowed for more time off, and took the hit to their careers; men found ways to fake it. They looked like Captain America, but worked like Wally.

But the other awesome reveal was the company’s reaction to the study:

The researchers said that when they told the consulting firm they had diagnosed a bigger problem than a lack of family-friendly policies for women — that long hours were taking a toll on both men and women — the firm rejected that conclusion. The firm’s representatives said the goal was to focus only on policies for women, and that men were largely immune to these issues….

It is not necessarily surprising that companies prefer to focus on relatively narrow fixes like family-friendly policies, not more broadly on the culture of overwork. They would have little incentive to encourage their employees to work less.

One of the things I hope to do with Rest is to provide a language for talking about why taking vacations, mentally and emotionally disengaging from work, and not working extreme hours are good things for both people and organizations. This is not something you can change overnight, but I still hope that the book can help bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.