Yahoo’s making workflex news again with its announcement today it’s beefing up paid maternity leave for men and women.

It’s heartening news from the tech company whose CEO Marissa Mayer came under fire recently for announcing a telecommuting ban.

As you can imagine, social media was all a twitter with Yahoo’s leave decision today with some employees seeing the move as further proof that working parents get special treatment when it comes to flexible work arrangements.

Here’s a tweet from @DickTracyOrlndo, who retweeted my tweet about Yahoo’s announcement:

Kidless people hosed again. MT @careerdiva: Yahoo expands maternity leave after banning telecommuting

The feeling of being hosed at work in this regard haunts not only employees but employers, who often wonder if these types of workflex programs can ever truly be seen as equitable. No good supervisors wants to be perceived as caring more about one group of employees than another. And no worker wants to think they’re not getting the same treatment as other works, especially if they work just as hard. (more…)

The Career Diva posts that got the most people reading in 2012 were all about the stupid things employers do.

Here are the top ten posts of the year:

Turns out many of you are upset about performance reviews, and you have good reason to be. The experts say such reviews are arbitrary and utterly useless.

And quite a few of you agreed some human resource departments can be clueless, especially when it comes to employee benefits such as family and medical leave.

Another workplace problem that gets under everyone’s skin is the rise in employers trying to get under your skin and find out how healthy, or unhealthy workers are.

A disturbing trend during 2012 was the growing number of employees holding multiple jobs.

It turns out if you’re a tough white woman or tough black man you can’t get a break.

What got job seekers angry this past year was the endless amount of interviews hiring managers think they need to decide on a candidate.

And women are still facing the perpetual problem of not supporting each other. Who cares how much Kelly Clarkson weighs? Quite a few of us, it turns out.

Employers are still asking job candidates how old they are, and they’re not always breaking the law when they do it.

My standing desk is still my back’s savoir, and a popular topic for many of you.

And finally, the Diva post that got the most readers reading was actually about a story I didn’t write. Lesson for 2013, don’t believe everything you read, especially work-at-home success stories.

Happy New Years everyone!! Looking forward to hearing from you all in the new year with your job/career questions. (careerdiva@verizon.net)

I recently heard Anne Marie Slaughter, the author of the controversial The Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, speak at an event and she admitted to a feminist reality check.

“I’m a proud feminist,” she said. “What was shifting under my feet was my own assumptions about myself. Not about feminism. I always assumed I wouldn’t choose work over my family but I would never choose family over work. I would somehow make them work.”

So can you be a feminist but still quit a job for your family?

Women have to exist in the work world as it is today, unaccommodating to working mothers and working fathers. The workplace just wasn’t designed with us in mind. And it’s also not only about raising children. Many of us will end up caring for elderly family members and let me tell you, the workplace isn’t loving you guys either.

That means men and women are going to come to realizations that they may not expect.

What’s your take? Have work-life issues been a surprise for you? Did you have to rethink your ideas?

I’ve decided to dub 2013 “The Year of the Working Dad” because I’m sick of all the focus on working mothers.

Seriously, men have children too and it’s about time we started accepting this fact as a society. Just yesterday a story appeared in the Wall Street Journal about how women now make up one-third of all the doctors and lawyers in the country, and the reporter saw it fit to ask a female attorney about her plans to raise a family.

A Miami based lawyer, Lindsey Lazopoulos, the article states,

graduated from the University of Miami School of Law last year and now is a commercial litigator. Two partners in the Florida firm where she works are mothers raising children, she said. Ms. Lazopoulos said she isn’t focusing on raising a family yet. “For me, and for other women we’re kind of just trying to get a start on our careers and focus on that,” she said.

What about the guys!? I may be going out on a limb here, but I’m thinking Josh Mitchell, the reporter who wrote the story, would not have asked any male lawyers such questions.

Of course not. We don’t think about men as working dads, as a recent blog post in the New York Times written by a working dad pointed out. (more…)

One of the most disturbing stories following Hurricane Sandy was about a nursing home in Rockaway Park, Queens, that “failed to provide the most basic care to its patients,” according to a story in the New York Times.

“As waves slammed against the building for hours, patients remained inside in the dark, growing steadily more hungry and cold,” the article stated.

That’s the kind of scenario that worries anyone who has a mother or father in a nursing home, and it probably had many wondering how they can better care for their parents.

To often as a society we only focus on how young parents are able to deal with issues of work and children, giving little thought to elder care. But caring for mom and dad will become a major issue for many of us.

I remember interviewing a female top executive at an insurance company for a New York Times story I wrote many years ago, and she told me she never had to worry about having a flexible schedule because she didn’t have children. But now, in her late 50s, she confided in me, she was suddenly taking time off for an aging parent, and it was impacting her career. (more…)

Here we go again. It’s a redux of the working-mother-versus-stay-at-home mother fight, and in this battle there is only one outcome — women lose.

In this corner is one political operative, Ann Romney, and in this corner is another political operative, Hilary Rosen. They’re arguing on Twitter and all over the media about who has struggled most, but you know mommies out there, they’re ultimate goal is political gain, not gains for women overall.

If they really cared about women and their economic concerns they wouldn’t be using working moms as pawns in their games; they’d be spending more energy tweeting about stuff like this.

* The pay gap between men and women. My colleague at Today.com Allison Linn wrote a great article today on the disparity in pay among the sexes across the nation. In Romney’s hometown of Michigan women make 75 cents or less on the dollar to what men make, and in Rosen’s New Jersey hometown women make about 79 cents on the dollar to men.

* The powerful old boys networks that make no apologies for keeping women out of their clubs, and corporate heads who play along because they don’t want to rock their cushy boats.

* Moms and dads should be screaming about the fact that the United States is one of the only industrialized nations in the world without mandatory paid family and sick leave.

* And let’s not forget the fact that women make up less than 20 percent of the board rooms and corner offices jobs in Corporate America.

All these issues should outshine this tired-old debate pitting mothers against each other. It’s a diversion. This is a tactic of war gals and we can’t see it because we’re not the ones who typically take nations to war. But we better start learning wartime maneuvering.

If we keep fighting the mommy wars we’ll remain casualties — underpaid and unequal.

Do you want to know what keeps your human resources department up at night? Turns out many still don’t know the ins and outs of one big key employee benefit, Family and Medical Leave.

Many employees mock HR departments and give them little credit for their work, but they’re the people many of you go to to find out about your benefits, your rights, and general information on how thinks work at your employer.

Where do HR folks go to ask questions? Turns out, some have access to a hotline, and you may be surprised at what they’re asking about most.

No, it’s not about whether they can snoop on your Facebook account, or how they should implement yet another training session. What’s got them asking the most questions is your requests for time off, especially as it relates to Family and Medical Leave Act, or FMLA, among other workplace basics. (more…)

This week, Randolph Babbitt, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, resigned following fall out of his drunk-driving arrest.

It was a monumental fall from grace for a man who has had an impressive career. His FAA bio page has already been deleted.

It’s unknown what Babbitt’s drinking history is, but I thought this was a good time to look again at how drinking issues can impact your career.

If you’re caught doing something illegal as a result, in most cases, an employer can legally fire you. But if you’re an alcoholic, and your boss finds out, you may indeed have some protections against adverse actions by your employer, but they are limited, according to labor law experts.. (more…)

You’ve heard of the sandwich generation — women caring for parents and children at the same time.

Well, I don’t think that term does this growing phenomenon justice. I’ve decided that women end up being more like Philly cheesesteaks. They end up oozing out of every end with responsibilities that are as thick as Velvetta, and when they think they’re done with the hot pepper job of raising their kids and simultaneously building their careers, they get piled on by a bunch of fried up onions, aka, their aging parents. (No disrespect to aging parents. We love you all.)

I got this idea when I heard last week that the president of Temple University in Philadelphia was resigning. Why is she leaving? Because she’s part of the Philly Cheesesteak Generation. (more…)

Two hard-working fathers I respect told me this weekend that they chose family over work as Hurricane Irene barreled toward the Northeast, and both wondered if it would somehow doom their careers.

One dad who works for a regional power company told his boss he wouldn’t be able to come to work Saturday if he was needed because he wanted to be with his family when the storm hit. And the other dad, who works for a major technology firm, made the choice to take half a day off on Friday to help prepare his home; a decision his manager did not appreciate because a key project was due.

Neither man regretted their decisions, that I’m sure played out with many families along the eastern coast this weekend. But when you make such choices there are consequences; something working mothers know all too well. The Working Mommy Trap has been a fixture of the work world for decades, the only difference is now dads are also starting to fall into it; and it could be even more deadly fathers. (more…)