“Not only did I greatly appreciate that time, but my wife did as well,” says the 36-year-old investment representative. “She was very thankful that KPMG allowed me to take time off and get paid…paternity leave benefits encouraged me to have my second child.” Last year, his second daughter, Hannah, was born.

McIlbain now utilizes the flextime options at his new company, Edward Jones, and spends his mornings at home with his kids. Flextime, usually used on an employee-by-employee basis, allows workers to arrange alternate time schedules to accommodate for other aspects of their life. After his positive experiences at KPMG, he says it was partly the family-friendly policy that attracted him to this new job. “This generation is demanding more flexibility,” says McIlbain. “They’re saying “I spent time in daycare and I’m not going to do that with my kids.”"

New dads, new trends
Paid paternity leave and flextime are just two of many facets of the work-life movement, the “newest profession in the HR domain,” said Kathie Lingle, director of the non-profit organization Alliance for Work-Life Progress. The term “work-life” describes the way employers deal with their employees’ “balancing act” between their work and personal lives, she says. “Everyone who works has a dual agenda. Companies have to have some work-life responses or they wouldn’t be in business.”

The term entered the business lexicon in relation to new moms searching for ways to balance their work and family lives, according to the Journal of Family Issues. The movement gained momentum along with the increasing number of working mothers in the 1960s and 1970s, in reaction to discriminating employers who assumed a child would inhibit a mother’s ability to work. “Until the Family and Medical Leave Act, women were summarily fired when they got pregnant,” Lingle says.

The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 is a federal mandate that guarantees workers 12 weeks of unpaid family or medical leave. Though it’s generally associated with maternity leave, the act is gender-neutral, says Lingle. A recent trend is that new fathers are taking advantage of the FMLA for paternity leave purposes, and some companies are supplementing this with work-life benefits like paid leave and flextime. Where a mom taking time out to be with her baby is now generally accepted, the case can be different for dads, says Lingle.

“What’s shifting is that men are feeling more pain. These programs were largely developed for women, and men don’t really know how to ask (for flextime). It’s counter-cultural — ‘real men’ don’t drop their kids off at daycare,” says Lingle.

According to National Study of the Changing Workforce, a study of work trend data gathered over the course of 1977-2002, men actually report higher levels of interference between their job and home life than women. According to the same study, the breakdown of family childcare activities has shifted in recent years from female-centered to a more even balance between men and women. But workplace flexibility has not followed the same path.

In theory, says Gina Robison-Billups, founder of the Moms in Business Nework, men and women should utilize flextime equally — but she says she doesn’t think that’s the case. “Goodness knows we don’t want to see women breast-feeding at work, take the time off!” she jokes. “But with men, there’s a kind of stereotype as in, ‘Hey, you’re not nursing, you should be in the office!’”

“When men start becoming caregivers they run into more of a stigma than women,” says Cynthia Calvert, Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California. “Men are sometimes told, directly or indirectly, that they had better not take paternity leave if they want to get ahead.” These messages are a form of family responsibilities discrimination, she says. For men, this usually means companies violating the FMLA by denying them paternity leave, or discouraging flextime benefits while women are encouraged to take it. Lawsuits in connection with family responsibilities discrimination, according to a study released in June by Calvert’s team at University of California’s Hastings College of Law, have skyrocketed 400 percent in recent years. And with the largest family responsibilities discrimination settlement to date costing an employer $11.6 million, companies are beginning to perk up their ears to caregivers.

The culture, and the business, of flexibility
But companies are responding to the work-life movement not only for compliance issues. Flextime’s increasing popularity, Lingle says, is as much about business as it is about supporting workers. Work-life benefits are increasingly becoming a draw for prospective employees, according to Lingle. The publicity generated by “Top 100 Companies” lists by Fortune and Working Mother Magazine, she says, creates a kind of workplace buzz that has applicants coming out in droves. “You have people coming in to interviews waving the October issue of Working Mother Magazine, expecting these policies that will support them,” Lingle says. “Employers of choice don’t have to look for employees, employees look for them,” she says.