And in fact, claims that children need mothers to stay home are not at all supported by science.

A comprehensive Harvard Business School study found that the children of working mothers actually do better on a number of measures:

Controlling for individual and family demographics, individual and country-level gender attitudes, and economic and cultural differences across countries, we find that female respondents raised by a mother who worked outside the home are more likely to be employed, more likely to hold supervisory responsibility if employed, work more hours, and earn higher hourly wages than women whose mothers were home full time. The effects on these labor market outcomes are non-significant for men, suggesting working mothers provide role models that affect their daughters’ choices without corresponding negative effects on their sons’ labor market outcomes … Our analyses find that sons raised by an employed mother are more involved at home as adults, spending more time caring for family members than men whose mothers stayed home full-time. Daughters raised by an employed mother spend less time on housework than women whose mothers stayed home full-time, but maternal employment has no effect on adult daughters’ involvement in caring for family members.

A few years ago, a review of 50 years of research found “little evidence to suggest that mothers who work part-time or full-time have children with problems in later life.” But the researchers did find two positive associations between working motherhood and well-adjusted children: kids whose mothers worked when they were younger than 3 were later rated as higher-achieving by teachers and had fewer problems with depression and anxiety.” Another study says kids do just fine when “raised” (don’t get me started on that one) by nannies and other alloparents.

Oh, and there’s this:

At all income levels, stay-at-home mothers report more sadness, anger, and episodes of diagnosed depression than their employed counterparts … women who worked full time following the birth of their first child had better mental and physical health at age 40 than women who had not worked for pay … Employed moms spend fewer hours per week with their children than stay-at-home mothers, but they spend more time with their children than homemakers did in 1965! And fathers nearly tripled their amount of time with children.

But the response to these studies has been hysterical and vitriolic, even questioning the motives of the researches who conducted them and the working mothers who quote them. One article, titled “Sorry Working Moms, Daycare Is Bad For Your Kid,” makes these dual accusations:

[T]he field of developmental psychology is monopolized by women with a ‘liberal progressive feminist’ bias. ‘Their concern is not to make mothers feel bad,’ he says. It is deeply disturbing that some working mothers are nearly dizzy with excitement over the notion that mothers and parenting don’t really matter. Presumably, these women wish to assuage their guilt over being separated from their little one all day long. Especially if they know that the decision to do so was a choice and not borne of true economic necessity.

The author goes on to claim that “[a]s mothers, we really do need to take a step back and think about the message we are sending our babies and toddlers if we leave them in the care of someone else all day long … As a society, we really ought to be more concerned about the feelings and welfare of young children than grown women.”

And this is exactly the problem. Women’s feelings, and particularly mothers’ feelings, are not supposed to count. The smallest amount of discomfort for a child — and let’s keep in mind that this is theoretical discomfort, as it has not been borne out by any of the research— trumps even abject misery for the mother. According to this narrative of total motherhood mothers are supposed to sacrifice everything for their children, even — and perhaps especially — any happiness they might gain from any source other than their children.

The fact that I have to make the argument that children do fine with working mothers speaks volumes about how differently we view women and men in the workplace.

No one has done a study to see if it is bad for children when fathers work.

Men work because of course they do, to support their families and find personal fulfillment and bring glory to their family names. Women’s work is presumed to be little more than a hobby, something they do in their free time, but only as long as it does not interfere with their primary occupations as mothers. Nobody talks about men “having it all.”

One unpleasant side effect of the “having it all” talk — as well as the myth of total motherhood — is that it harms women’s careers. Not the actual pressure of balancing work and family, but the perceived pressure. Everyone assumes that because women are mothers first, their work will suffer. Even when it’s not true.

It is presumed that when a woman becomes a mother, everything that used to define her as a person — her art, her hard work, her grit — is replaced with soft, lazy mommy-hood. Which is where the “mommy track” comes from. Women are always surrounded by people encouraging them to leave their jobs, to take a less stressful job, to focus on preparing for the family they may someday have.

But of course, mothers who are passionate about their careers and want to stick with it are accused of selfishness and not loving their children enough.

For example, famous photojournalist Lynsey Addario wrote a piece in the New York Times about working as a war correspondent while pregnant. She was predictably deluged with a storm of vitriol and accusations. My comment on the article, which was published in the NY Times magazine that week, was this:

This is a wonderful article. Although I’m not surprised by the outpouring of comments calling the author “selfish” and “irresponsible” and a “bad mother,” I am extremely saddened by them. A woman’s body does not cease to belong to her and become community property as soon as she becomes pregnant. Careers and actions that are obviously noble and self-sacrificing for a man or a single woman become labeled as self-centered and irresponsible for a pregnant woman or a mother. The importance of the author’s work is not diminished by the fact that she did it while pregnant and now does it while raising a child. The reaction to this article is only an extreme version of the argument that a woman’s primary role is that of mother, and every other pursuit should come second if at all. Does the logic of this extend to doctors who are sometimes exposed to diseases? To scientists who can come into contact with chemicals? To teachers whose students may have measles? How about to lawyers who defend violent criminals? How much risk is enough to clamor for a woman to abandon a career that is important for the world in order to spare her fetus from potential harm?

Having children increases men’s pay, but decreases women’s. And although the current crop of new dads talk a good game about being involved fathers and sharing the burden of parenting equally, very few of them actually follow through.

A recent Pew Research Center study found that women continue to bear the burden of child care. Over 70 percent of Gen X and boomer men say their careers are more important than their wives’, and 86 percent say their wives take primary responsibility for child care. And there has been significant back-sliding in the past generation. The Pew study found that “58% of working millennial mothers said being a working mother made it harder for them to get ahead in their careers, compared with 38% of older women.”

Even the attempts to talk about “work-life balance” are impossibly skewed. When Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote an article in The Atlantic about her work and family choices, it was in the “sexes” section. But when her husband wrote an article in the same magazine about how he balanced work and those very same children — it was published in the business section.