Some sick men want to leer at young women but when women get to a certain age, not so much.

Take Madonna. For some reason people are surprised that at age 54 she’s still wearing sexy outfits.

This from a male reporter in the Style section of the Wall Street Journal today:

“The look can come off as desperate, embarrassing, a little sad. Madonna may be doing what she feels she must to remain relevant and compete with the likes of Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Britney Spears and Rihanna.”

No, Madonna is doing what she’s always done. Dressing sexy and pushing the envelope. Why people think she should suddenly get her muumuu on is perplexing.

I never heard anyone question why Liberace was still wearing his ridiculously flamboyant outfits well into his sixties.

Clearly women are seen as objects by many men in a male-dominated society — whether they’re leering at young women naked or judging older women naked. Maybe you think this is a minor annoyance, but I argue this type of attitude undermines all women in many aspects of their lives.

If we’re objects then whatever we do will be judged because objects are meant to be objectified not respected.

Don’t be surprised when you read stories like this article in Health24.com titled “Work by female scientists gets judged more harshly.”

This from the piece:

Researchers at Ohio State University found that scientific studies written by men were viewed as higher quality than identical studies listing female authors. This gender bias, they noted, is significant and will have important implications over the course of a woman’s career in science.

“There’s still a stereotype in our society that science is a more appropriate career for men than it is for women,” said study lead author Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

Yes gals, science isn’t appropriate for women scientists, and fishnets aren’t appropriate for women entertainers.

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.

But creating an effective and flexible workplace doesn’t happen by divvying up equal pieces of the work pie for each employee. Employees are very different and so are circumstances of an employees personal life and even workload, and that can change monthly, weekly, even daily.

“The key to equity is you are addressing the needs of the people, not necessarily giving them equality,” explained Ken Matos, Families and Work Institute’s director of research. “We want to warn against getting into the debate of who’s getting what because then people with children and people without become enemies. It should be about what people need, period.”

Alas, that can be easier said than done.

Employees and employers can address this in different ways.

For employers, here are some tips from Workflex: The Essential Guide to Flexible and Effective Workplace, coauthored by Matos:

Be concerned about equity. Supervisors worry about being fair to employees when they know everyone can’t have flexibility. The key is making sure that the PROCESS is equitable (the same)—that every employee’s request is fairly considered—even though the
outcome may vary.

Promote flexibility as a management tool. When used as management tools, rather than favors given to specific employees, there are many more options available to employees and supervisors for getting the job done.

Create a format and process so that employees requesting workflex can make a “business case” to you. Employees requesting flexibility should state how this arrangement will help the organization and themselves. They should be prepared to come to a meeting with you with a series of suggested options for how their work will be done best and what business outcomes they believe will ensue because they are working flexibly. It is most helpful if you create a form to help employees think through and present this business case.

For employees, Matos stressed that “rather than frustration against someone getting materinity or partnerity leave, perhaps you should be asking your organization what you need. If telecommuting is not an option, are there other options that would get you through the day?”

He pointed to the many forms of workflex the Institute has identified that are included in a free downloadable toolkit for employees who want to know how to ask for flexible work arrangements.

Here’s an overview of the types of workflex available:

• Flex Time and Flex Place: adjustments to start and stop times and the ability to work in alternative locations (e.g., regular or short-notice schedule changes, compressed workweeks and telecommuting).
• Choices in Managing Time: influence employees have over work schedule and shift assignments (e.g., self-scheduling and shift trading initiated shift trades)
• Reduced Time: the ability to shift between full/part-time or part-year work while remaining in the same position (e.g., full-time during busy seasons and part-time the rest of the year)
• Time Off: includes easily accessed options for taking time for personal or family matters without incurring financial hardships or disciplinary action;
o paid days off for illness (personal or family members), vacation, volunteer work or community service and holidays
o job protected leaves for birth, adoption and care of seriously ill family members
• Flex Careers enable employees to control their career progression by adjusting workloads in collaboration with coworkers, time off for sabbaticals or education, and opportunities to phase into retirement or phase back into the workforce after an extended leave or military service.
• Task Flexibility includes efforts to create reasonable work demands, reasonable options for adjusting job descriptions to match employee strengths, reducing unnecessary work and creating boundaries between life on and off the job (e.g., reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities, cross-training, options for discussing and managing overwork).
• Culture of Flexibility includes openly discussing alternative ways of working more effectively with supportive supervisors without fear of retaliation or having to choose between advancement and devoting attention to family life when work-life issues arise.

Creating workflex equity is possible, Matos maintained. But it’s important to rise above the finger pointing and, he added, “not turn this into a battle of who’s loved more.”

Only when jobs involved making ethical compromises did women report less interest in the jobs than men.

That’s one finding from a series of recently released studies titled: “Who Is Willing to Sacrifice Ethical Values for Money and Social Status? Gender Differences in Reactions to Ethical Compromises.”

More from the studies conducted by Jessica Kennedy of Wharton and Laura Kray of Berkeley:

* Study 1, when reading decisions that compromised ethical values for social status and monetary gains, women reported feeling more moral outrage and perceived less business sense in the decisions than men.

* In Study 2, we established a causal relationship between aversion to ethical compromises and disinterest in business careers by manipulating the presence of ethical compromises in job descriptions. As hypothesized, an interaction between gender and presence of ethical compromises emerged.

The research points to the very good possibility that women may have more integrity than men.

What does this mean?

“We need to see more women at the top,” Kray told Slate. “I think that will change the culture of corporate America.”

Bingo!

With all the discussion lately about leaning in and having it all, the one thing largely missing from the chatter is a need to push the envelope when it comes to getting women in power. And when I say, push the envelope I mean quotas.

Yes, I said it, again.

Our whole economy collapsed recently because a lot of powerful men were unethical jerks. If that’s not enough to force the hand of our government to mandate that more women sit in the nation’s board rooms and corner offices, and in Congressional offices I don’t know what will.

And if men are indeed more unethical, what’s going to push them to give women seeking the top jobs a chance at career advancement?

We can blame women for not speaking up and blame an outdated workplace that doesn’t adapt to working parents, but we may be barking up a corrupt system that just doesn’t want powerful women.

On a positive note, the researchers of the gender and ethics study summed up their findings this way:

“We believe this research has at least one positive practical implication: Retaining more women may have positive ethical consequences for business organizations. As women occupy positions with authority, they may improve the ethical standards of the organizations in which they work, if they can maintain these standards on the way up the hierarchy.”

#1 issue facing women in the workforce today: How we topple the 1950s-company-man sustained model, where women have no say.

Why did it get so much attention? Because women are sick and tired of trying to fit their lives into an out-dated workplace model that no longer fits for today’s realities. Women are juggling children and careers, caring for aging family members, and all the while penalized for it with less pay and little to no representation the nation’s leadership ranks, in everything from Corporate America to the halls of Congress.

That’s why I’m calling for a working-woman revolution. And I don’t mean only waging war against the male-dominated management model, but battling our own fears and baggage when it comes to fighting for what we want and need. Working gals are finally poised to launch an offensive because we are at “the tipping point” of a female revolution. Women now make up the majority of the workforce in America, and many working gals are starting to think the out-dated career template based on the 1950s “Company Man” needs an overhaul.

For too long women have had to accept token work-life changes bestowed by male-dominated workplaces. And moms have become too obsessed with battling the mommy wars, working moms against stay-at-home moms. But now women are realizing they need the keys to the executive bathrooms, not just the lactations rooms; and all that mommy infighting has meant women took their eyes off the prize – a workplace, a world, with women leaders who truly understand family responsibilities.

Family and love trumps egos!

Christine Lagarde, the first woman to head the powerful International Monetary Fund, gets the realities of life.

She understands the global economy and what needs to be done, but her most moving words come when she discusses the egos she confronts in her job, mainly the egos of men who control money and power around the globe.

“When my father passed away and then when later on I gave birth, those are sort of ground-breaking experiences that put everything else into perspective. You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, ‘Come on, you know, there’s life and there’s death and there is love.’ And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.”

Only women can carry this torch.

We need to focus on what we women can bring to the table, and what we need to do, and what many working women pioneers are already doing, to make the nation’s offices, factories, congressional halls, etc., work for us. It’s not shoehorning your way into the existing anti-family, anti-woman workplace structure. It’s about how to go about changing the workplace to better fit the lives of today’s woman.

It’s about the two co-engineers at Ford who share a job so they can spend more time raising their kids, and even so, they’re credited with being the brains behind the success of the auto giant’s Explorer SUV. It’s about the lawyer who left a high-powered law firm for academia because she wanted flexibility for her family, and is now the head of a renowned women’s leadership institute. It’s about the applications engineer at Intel who went part time when her kids were young, and is now a high level manager at the computer chip giant. It’s about a Congresswoman from Illinois who missed votes on the House because she wanted to attend her daughter’s concert and is serving her third term.

A growing number of working women are defining success on their own terms, and while they’re career trajectory seems atypical and they’ve made job decisions based on their family — something which would have doomed most corporate climbers in the past — it works for them.

Almost every story about working mothers lately has focused on how they just haven’t been able to accomplish as much as their male counterparts in the workplace. I’ve just started reading “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, and she’s right, we desperately need more women leaders and we as women have to stop being afraid to stand up and speak up.

But I don’t think the lives women live today are that dire, especially when women go after what they want, just like Sandberg has done. Women who know what they want and go after it don’t feel like they’re getting the shaft.

That’s the biggest lesson women need to learn. Being bossy and demanding what you want isn’t bad gals, as Sandberg points out. My own daughter Circe was given a book by a good female friend of mine when she was around 2 years old titled “Little Miss Bossy.” Hopefully Circe will some day be proud of that!

Indeed, there are many proud and happy working women out there. A survey by Kenexa Research Institute looked at whether women thought their futures looked promising, and 62 percent said: “I can meet my career goals and still devote sufficient attention to my family/personal life.” That compares to 59 percent among men who feel that way.

For women, said Brenda Kowske, a former research manager and at Kenexa, “having a fulfilled or satisfied personal life is an aspect of achieving a promising future at an organization for women in the U.S.”

Women are in a keen position to reshape the linear ladder upward. For the first time, women represent 51 percent of the total U.S. workforce; and the number of working moms as sole family breadwinners hit a record high last year. Many women are realizing they just can’t shoe horn their family lives into an arcane work model.

But one big question remains: “Are we being pioneers, or simply giving in?” asked Pamela Stone, associate professor of sociology at Hunter College and author of “Opting Out: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home.”

If women are just changing their idea of success because they’ve given up fighting a society that deprives working moms of opportunities to advance, then it’s not a good thing, said Stone. But, if working moms are essentially transforming the work dynamic to meet their needs, then it’s a great thing.

The growing power of working moms may alter the landscape once and for all. “When you get a critical mass of women in any professions you do get changes,” said William Doherty, professor 
and director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program in the Department of Family Social Science, College of Education and Human Development, at the University of Minnesota.

“Women are reshaping the workforce, and I think a cultural change is underway,” he continued, pointed to the healthcare industry. “You have 50 percent or more of the young doctors today are women and as a result there is much more part time work available. You don’t have the expectation of 90-hour weeks anymore.”

Rewriting the rules, however, has not been easy because so much of meshing child rearing and career rearing is unknown.

“We have no clue what it’s going to be like when we become a working mother,” stressed Susan Wenner Jackson, one of the founders of the website, Working Moms Against Guilt, because few women do any preplanning. “It completely blows your mind and you have to put the pieces back together.”

We need to build a template for how many working women were able to put the pieces back together and climb their definition of the ladder of success. It would be like a “Fast Food Nation” for working women everywhere. No more being force-fed the metaphorical career chicken McNuggets by “Da Corporate Man,” who says women need to be penalized for being mothers, daughters, and wives. We are going to rethink how we live and breath at work and in our careers. It’s time for women to demand a new, emotionally healthier workplace and a road to the top that takes into account a more organic approach to success and a balanced life.

Here’s the plan I propose we think about:

1. Combating “The Company Man”

The traditional model of professional success in Corporate America has been based on a The Company Man archetype popularized in the 1950s, which mainly referred to a white-male, corporate climber with a wife at home.

In order for women to lead the workplace revolution, they’re going to have to understand how the screwed up U.S. system of work was created in the first place. We need to delve into the history of the workplace as we have come to know it and uncover why it’s continued existence will only doom working mothers and working fathers.

2. Forcing Flex Time

Today’s workplace should be all about flexibility but for some reason, working women still are afraid to ask to leave early for fear of being branded a not-serious employee who drops her work responsibilities for family responsibilities.

(And let’s stop talking about Yahoo’s decision to cut telecommuting, and how the CEO of Yahoo is a new mother. She’s just doing what other dumb male leaders have done before her, cutting everything in sight to prop up the bottom line. It’s a business strategy that never works long term.)

Women have to stop thinking they’re any less than men who are starting to ask for just as much flexibility but don’t have the heavy weight of motherhood guilt to derail their careers. The endless women I’ve interviewed who ask and still succeed at work are those who don’t bring the guilt trip to the office.

And part time isn’t a dirty word anymore. In fact, in this economy, employers are striving to have as many part timer workers as they can to save money.

There has been a long history of brushing aside part timers as the disrespected, underbelly of the workforce but economic forces and a growing number of working mothers and working daughters who have had to cut their hours in order to make it work for their family lives finally deserve respect. Many managers have told me, the part time moms are the hardest working employees they have, and surprise, surprise, they probably put in more hours with no pay than any one else at companies.

3. Job Clone Crusade

The idea of having co-CEOs is not as insane as it may sound. I would argue, any job can be shared, even the top jobs at corporations. A recent example of this is Disney’s decision last year to appoint co-presidents to its interactive group, including John Pleasants and James Pitaro. The thought of having two people do such a critical job would have been unheard of, but suddenly it’s cool if two guys are doing it. Well, two women can do it to and do it well.

Take Julie Rocco, 38, and Julie Levine, 40. They were both established engineers and managers at Ford Motor Company before they became moms. Together, they broached the idea of doing a job-share arrangement even though it wasn’t common at their level.

4. Career Swap Skirmish

Why is it when women change careers people see it as a black mark on their resumes? I have interviewed many women who had to exit careers that just weren’t conducive to their family obligations, but ended up excelling in their new careers.

Marianne DelPo Kulow, a mother of two, said she had her first child at 40 and a second at 42. She decided to leave a career as a high-powered attorney for something more conducive to raising a family, so she went into academia. She is now a law professor and went on to become director of the Women’s Leadership Institute at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass.

“How do you define success?” asked Kulow, 49. “Within the profession I’ve chosen, I made it. I’m respected by my peers, at the top of my salary scale and I’m able to pick my kids up at 3.”

5. Tech Engagement

Clearly, a working mother’s best friend is her iPhone, Droid, and any number of gadgets that allow women to balance work and family. The endless articles about how technology is consuming working parents and thus destroying our kids are getting more and more alarmist.

Attacks on our technology may actually be undermining an important work-life balance revolution. The debate over the over-use of all things digital sounds eerily similar to the daycare debate that flares up every time there’s some new research. Daycare makes our kids dumb and fat; or haven’t you heard.

So, let’s look at the bright side of technology, and not at all the scary, our-kids-are-going-to-become-fat-ax-murderers-because-we-text-message-at-the-dinner-table prophesies.

Kathy Thomas, an executive vice president for Dallas-based Half Price Books, Records, Magazines, receives work e-mails on her Blackberry. She also receives e-mails about her daughter’s volleyball games, school alerts and text messages from her son in college.

“I need it and want it,” Thomas said about her Blackberry, which keeps her connected to her mommy responsibilities and work. “We have stores on the East and West Coast. If a catastrophe happens in the morning or evening I need to know about it.”

6. Spousal détente

Kelly McCarthy, an attorney with Sideman & Bancroft in San Francisco and mother to a 1-year old son named Finn, believes she has a successful and fulfilling career. “I have made it work with a perfect storm of luck, circumstance and planning,” she said. And, the biggest enabler of her success – her husband. McCarthy and her husband approach parenting as a partnership, sharing childcare and household duties.

I tell women over and over again, especially those who haven’t taken the baby plunge yet, that if you want your career to thrive you’ll need a supportive husband, or your better off being a single mother. The allusion that a man is some how helping you balance it all even though he isn’t does more harm than good. If you want kids and a great career, and your husband isn’t supportive, the best advice I’d give is to get divorced first.

7. Ask and Tell: Lessons From Lesbians

There is something to be learned from same-sex partnerships. Why? Because they don’t have the gender baggage that the rest of us hetero couples have. These couples have told me the burden of child rearing and careers is less for them because they don’t come to the table with preconceived notions of what a woman or man should or shouldn’t be doing.

One study in the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services found that:

Seventy percent of lesbian parents were satisfied with their employment situations and characterized the relationships between their households and the workplace as positive.

Indeed, many of the same sex partners I’ve talked to say they don’t tend to feel the bias that working mothers often feel when they first have kids, or ask for time off. Clearly, there is a different dynamic going on and we need to look more closely at exactly what’s going on. Is it the lesbians’ approach to parenting, or is it how they’re perceived at work?

And speaking about lesbian parents, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments about same-sex marriage today. The fact that we’re still dealing with this type of sexual preference discrimination, and bias of all sorts in our country may have something to do with so few women in power.

8. Battle Bitchiness; Don’t Bitch

Stop blaming your children, other women and your lot in life for your career failures. It’s time working women everywhere put an end to the whining about how difficult it is to balance work and family and put their game faces on. Many of the female executives I’ve interviewed attribute their success to focusing on their goals and not allowing guilt to derail their efforts.

And being supportive of women, and looking for women to support them, has also served them well. We have to stop seeing each other as the enemies, even though sociologists say women are often bitchy to each other because they are still the underdogs at work and have to constantly claw their way up the ladder. Alas, clawing leaves a lot of scratched up women behind and we need each other to make this work.

Yes women face many challenges in their careers, including making less than men and not getting those corner offices.

Clearly women have a long way to go when it comes to getting the top seats at U.S. corporations, with women holding only 14.3 percent of the executive officer positions, according to Catalyst. And women still make 75 cents on the dollar to men.

It’s been hotly debated for some time whether this is about bias against women, or their decisions to cut back hours or opt out, or about a system that just hasn’t adapted to the need to working parents. The U.S. is one of the only industrialized nations without mandatory paid family leave; and good childcare options are few and far between.

But bitching and complaining has done little to change the landscape. There are women working to make those changes, but the lack of political will is thwarting their efforts. Women make up 50 percent of the population so if they want to change things they have to make their voices heard. If we whisper that’s a great out for the entrenched power in the workplace to never hear us.

As the late Etta James sang: “This is a man’s world. This is a man’s world. But it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing, without a woman, or a girl.”

Time to wage war sisters!

Those employers are reaping the benefits. Here’s one great example from Pixar, and of course it’s animated:

According to a report released by Pew Research Center today,

Fathers now spend more time engaged in housework and child care than they did half a century ago. And the amount of time they devote to paid work has decreased slightly over that period.

This is further evidence, that the responsibilities of the home are not just a women’s issue people, and we have to stop framing the argument for changes in the workplace as something just mommies need.

I blogged about how 2013 would be The Year of the Working Dad at the beginning of this year, and with that distinction comes a lot of pressure to find equilibrium when it comes to work and family life.

Research from Families and Work Institute (FWI) has found that men are feeling this pressure more and more. The Institute’s report titled “The New Male Mystique” affirms the fact that young men, in particular, “are realizing they have to do more at home than their fathers did, and today’s young men want to do so.”

But FWI’s report also found that “men are under increasing pressure to do it all in order to have it all—be dedicated employees in increasingly demanding jobs, good financial providers and involved family members.”

Thus, the “ideal” man is still seen largely seen as the “breadwinner,” while also being involved in the family more.

Indeed, Dads want to spend more time with their kids.

The Pew study found men more than women thought they were spending too little time with the kids:

Clearly, mom still pick up most of the work at home. But Pew’s data shines a light on how much things have changed.

From the study:

Fathers have by no means caught up to mothers in terms of time spent caring for children and doing household chores, but there has been some gender convergence in the way they divide their time between work and home.

Pew calls it gender convergence, I call it the way it should be, and finally it almost is.

You’ve got to love Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

Frank Sinatra, My Way (Live at the Royal… by waytoblue

The guy didn’t regret a lot, and why should he? You live your life, make mistakes along the way, but in the end, you’ve got to leave regrets behind, right?

Not if you’re a woman!

Regrets, we have a lot.

It seems we can’t do anything right, and at every turn, especially lately, we’re told we’re either screwing up because we’re letting our desire for a good family life stand in the way of our career success, or we’re delusional to think we can have it all.

No matter what line we decide to accept, in the end, we could end up regretting it all.

One former top female executive shared her regrets in an opinion piece in the New York Times this past weekend.

“Sometimes young women tell me they admire what I’ve done. As they see it, I worked hard for 20 years and can now spend the next 20 focused on other things. But that is not balance. I do not wish that for anyone,” wrote Erin Callan, the former CFO of now defunct Lehman Brothers.

Women are so consumed with regretting their work-life choices, or making other women regret their work-life choices, that they spend little time on regretting other important things, like making stupid business decisions while you were an executive at a company that ended up crashing and burning, and contributing to the biggest economic meltdown this country has ever seen. (Callan didn’t mention that in her regret oped, as the astute reporter Matthew Cooper pointed out in his must-read National Journal piece today.)

On the flip side, my mother recently told me she had regrets that she focused so much on children and family and very little on herself and her career.

Women can’t get a break in this country, or anywhere else in the world, my mother said when I asked her about why women on both sides of the spectrum have regrets.

Women, she said, “have a lot of responsibilities and we’re responsible people. Men don’t think about all these things, they just think about their koukou.” (This means penis if you couldn’t figure that out.)

OK, she added, not all men are like that, but women just put the weight of the world on their shoulders. Men tend not to, she stressed.

So I suppose in the end we can’t win this work-life game. If we accept that we may have fewer regrets and just say “I did it my way.”

The CEO of Yahoo is a woman.

That’s the only reason I can find for why the media went crazy this week over Yahoo’s top dog Marissa Mayer deciding to cut telecommuting for her employees; but barely covered Bank of America’s CEO Brian T. Moynihan doing something similar.

Yes, you didn’t hear that in the mass media this week. There actually was another company — Bank of America — that did this and made it public, and that company has way more employees than Yahoo, about 300,000, compared to Yahoo’s 11,000 or so.

I wrote about it for Families and Work Institute late last year, and I was sort of surprised back then that few reporters, beyond local media in North Carolina where the mega bank is based, gave it any ink.

This from the Winston-Salem Journal in December:

Bank of America is preparing to add more restrictions to its popular work-from-home program, meaning more employees across the company will be sent back to the office more often.

The program, known as “My Work,” had grown significantly since it was introduced in 2005 and was widely touted as a cost-saver. It also has proved popular with employees who say it saves on commuting costs and helps them balance work and family.

In addition to scaling back telecommuting, Bank of America also announced they were shuttering their child care centers. Where was all the outrage hurled at Bank of America’s CEO?

I know, people expect a female leader to get the whole work-life thing. But maybe it’s time we accepted that women won’t lead a certain way just because they’re women.

That’s probably what’s held women back from leadership.

“If you’re busy doing free work because it’s a good way to hide from the difficult job of getting paid for your work,” Seth Godin exhorts, “stop.”

Godin is a branding guru, and people tend to listen to what he advises. That a great thing because adult internships for for-profit corporations is a dumb way to climb the ladder of success, as Godin points out.

It also can be illegal, which the article fails to mention.

A growing number of jobless workers who are out of college are working for free in volunteer positions or so-called internships, as employers across the country take advantage of the huge pool of free skilled labor among the seven million unemployed Americans. This despite the face that volunteering, especially volunteering for private companies, can be illegal in some cases and unethical, at best; but desperate out-of-work employees are more than willing to oblige, some even offering to work for free as a way to beef up their resumes.

For many job seekers, interning for low or no pay is seen as a necessary evil in an economy where employers are reluctant to hire full time workers but still have work that needs to be done.

But there are laws in this country that forbid working for free, unless such work arrangements follow very strict guidelines. The reason these laws were written was simply to protect against worker exploitation.

So, are you working for free illegally, or are you pondering an adult internship that could be thwarting the law?

The Department of Labor Wage and Hour division has six criteria on when an unpaid internship is considered an internship and not in violation of labor laws:

1. The training is similar to what would be given in a vocational school or academic educational instruction;
2. The training is for the benefit of the trainees or students;
3. The trainees or students do not displace regular employees, but work under their close observation;
4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees or students, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded;
5. The trainees or students are not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training period; and
6. The employer and the trainees or students understand that the trainees or students are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training.

Now free internships for college students who get college credit is a different situation all together. Clearly, these are even better if you get some pocket change for you troubles, but what I’m focused on here are professional adults working for free, and not for charities but for employers that should know better.

“Great internships still exist — paid positions transparently advertised and filled, stepping stones to full-time jobs, opportunities genuinely focused on education and training,” wrote Ross Perlin, the author of “Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy” in a New York Times opinion piece that ran earlier this month. “But the rash of illegal, exploitative situations has destroyed any notion that internships are inherently ‘win-win.’ The well-intentioned, structured, paid training experience of yesteryear is increasingly giving way to an unpaid labor racket that harms all of us.”

Unflexing.

I decided to give it a name because it seems to be a small but growing trend in Corporate America. First Bank of America announced late last year it would be scaling back its flexible work arrangements; and just last week Yahoo threw its hat in the unflexing ring by sending out a memo to employees saying telecommuting is soon to be a perk of the past.

The memo was included in an All Things D article. Here’s an excerpt:

We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.
Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo! offices.

It’s a disturbing trend that doesn’t seem to make a lot of business sense if employee engagement and productivity is an important goal. We’re not saying that all work-at-home arrangements are advantageous for all involved, or that some face-to-face time isn’t critical when it comes to performing your job.

“It is true that remote workers can become unplugged from the social and creative network of an organization if they are rarely in the physical office space,” said Ken Matos, Senior Director of Employment Research and Practice for Families and Work Institute. “It can be advantageous to require employees to be present for big creative meetings and important tradition- and memory-making social events to reinforce those bonds.”

However, he continued, “unilaterally ending all remote work options is extreme, blunt and ultimately substitutes one set of problems for another. If other companies choose to be more flexible and establish more nuanced remote work plans that combine flexibility and creativity Yahoo may be on the loosing end of a talent war with its competitors.”

One of the key problems with Yahoo’s move, Matos pointed out, is that “when taking away a valued benefit it is important to give employees concrete reasons why the benefit was not working right and why it could not be fixed with more restrained adjustments. The Yahoo memo does neither.”

Yahoo’s management is under pressure to produce results for the struggling Internet giant, trying to boost its marketshare and revenues hammered by the tough economic climate in recent years. Many organizations throughout the country face similar issues. Unfortunately, workflex now has a bull’s eye on it.

This at a time when more and more employees are craving more workplace flexibility, including men and women who are looking to better handle the challenges of work and personal needs. Often the lack of flexibility has been blamed on the dearth of women leaders in the workplace who aren’t in the top seats to push such a workflex agenda. At the same time, the lack of women in leadership has been blamed on inflexible workplaces.

Alas, in the case of Yahoo’s decision, the standard reasons for inflexibility are hard to use because the firm’s CEO is a woman.

Indeed, Marissa Mayer, made it very clear after she took on the post of Yahoo CEO, that she wasn’t interested in workflex for herself.

She disclosed to Yahoo’s board before she accepted the job that she was expecting her first child. And she also said, “My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I’ll work throughout it.” Mayer got a lot of heat for her comments from many women’s groups and work-life fit advocates.

Clearly not all working women require long maternity leaves, and more power to her for having done exactly what she said she would once her son was born. But there are many employees out there who see a value in this, and other types of flexibility.

“Ms. Mayer may be living up to her critics’ worst fears by assuming that the work style that makes her most productive will promote similar results from her employees,” Matos surmised.