The Great Illusion of Work-Life Balance in Tech

I’ve spent the last few days thinking about a conversation I overheard at a networking aperitivo. Two women, both in their forties, both in tech, were talking about their careers. One had just been promoted; the other was thinking about returning to work after maternity. The first was single, no children. The second had two small children. And while I listened, I noticed how different the tone of their voices was when they spoke about the future.

It isn’t a new story, probably. And yet it still strikes me as absurd, almost surreal, in a sector that does nothing but talk about inclusion and diversity, about work-life balance, about family-friendly policies. Every tech company has its diversity page, every CEO delivers inspiring speeches about employee wellbeing, every corporate report celebrates initiatives to support working parents. But then, when you actually look at who reaches the top, who gets the most significant promotions, who’s considered leadership material, a pattern emerges that contradicts all that polished storytelling.

The paradox no one wants to admit

The numbers speak for themselves, even if we’d rather not hear them. 50% of women leave the tech sector by age 35. It’s no accident that this age coincides with the years many people decide to have children. Almost 40% of women who leave tech cite caregiving responsibilities as a determining factor. And those who stay? Two-thirds of working mothers in the sector report their career stalled after parenthood.

I often wonder what HR leaders think when they prepare those splendid presentations on parental leave and flexibility policies. Maybe they really believe in them, maybe they think offering more weeks of parental leave really makes a difference. And in a sense it does, don’t get me wrong. But it’s like putting a band-aid on an open fracture.

The problem isn’t only in the benefits, however important. The problem is that unwritten, invisible yet omnipresent culture, that keeps rewarding those who can afford to be always available. The culture Google itself embodied until recently, when co-founder Sergey Brin recommended employees working on Gemini do sixty hours a week and show up at the office “at least every weekday”. The culture Meta embraced when CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about a corporate world “culturally castrated” that had moved away from “masculine energy”.

The impossible equation of total availability

In 2025 we still work with an “ideal worker” idea that goes back decades—someone always present, always reachable, ready to sacrifice everything for work. Someone who, frankly, either has no family or has someone else handling it completely. Research confirms it: in high-intensity environments like tech, people who “accept” this always-available culture often fail to cultivate external interests and are slow to recover from professional setbacks.

I’ve seen with my own eyes what this expectation means. Colleagues replying to emails at 11 p.m., not because there’s a real emergency, but because they know someone will notice, someone will compare them with the colleague who shut down the computer at 6 to pick up the kids from daycare. And it isn’t paranoia. A Slack study found that those who feel obligated to work past hours report 20% lower productivity and stress levels more than doubled compared to those who keep normal hours.

And yet this culture persists, in fact it intensifies. After the pandemic, many tech companies reversed course on remote work, not for productivity reasons (studies show people work just as well from home) but for control reasons. Amazon imposed a five-day return to office. Meta cut four thousand employees deemed low-performing. Microsoft revised its evaluation system to eliminate underperformers more quickly.

It’s interesting how the younger tech bros, the ones founding startups and talking about wanting four children, work more than 80 hours a week and candidly admit they don’t have time even to go to a bar. “I probably talk to language models ten times more than I talk to people,” joked one 21-year-old founder. It isn’t funny, it’s tragic. And it reveals how deeply rooted the expectation is that success requires sacrificing everything else.

A small digression about something I’m proud of. My CEO told me a while ago:

“Anyone who doesn’t cultivate a rich parental and social life can only be small at work too.”

The invisible parenthood penalty

There’s a phrase that recurs in studies on women’s careers in STEM: “spectre of motherhood”. You don’t even have to become a mother to suffer the consequences of this hostile culture. It’s enough that your colleagues and bosses think you might. PhD candidates and post-doctoral researchers have described being explicitly warned by their mentors that they would have to choose between an academic career and family. Some have hidden serious miscarriages or publicly declared they didn’t want children, in a desperate attempt to be taken seriously.

And when children actually arrive? Mothers in STEM produce on average 17 fewer publications than fathers in the ten years after the birth of the first child: a gap that would take about five years of work to close. It isn’t a question of capacity or commitment. It’s a question of time available for research, time that for mothers gets systematically eroded while fathers manage to protect it.

70% of mothers working in tech believe their career is suffering because of caregiving and family responsibilities. It isn’t subjective perception. It’s a reality documented by countless studies. Mothers are 79% less likely to be hired, half as likely to be promoted, and earn significantly less than women with comparable CVs but no children.

The other side of the coin

But maybe the most insidious part of this culture is how it creates tensions among colleagues. During the pandemic, when many tech companies offered additional leave to parents to manage school and daycare closures, a real revolt erupted among childless employees. On Facebook, employees repeatedly noted during company meetings that COVID policies “primarily favoured parents”. On Twitter an intense debate erupted when a childless employee criticised a colleague on leave to care for a child, arguing they weren’t doing their part.

And you understand their point. Truly. 63% of childless workers report having been denied time off, 69% having had to do overtime, and 70% having received heavier workloads. Almost half believe employees with children are more likely to be promoted.

The problem is this isn’t a war between parents and non-parents. It’s a war orchestrated by systems that demand too much of everyone, and then pit them against each other to hide the real problem. Companies offering extraordinary benefits to parents but then expecting childless colleagues to cover their work aren’t helping anyone. They’re simply moving the problem.

The myth of tech meritocracy

Maybe the most frustrating part of all this is the hypocrisy. The tech sector loves to present itself as meritocratic, a place where only talent counts and the best ideas win. But how can a system be meritocratic when having a family (or even just intending to have one) automatically becomes a professional handicap?

Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, before the pandemic wrote proudly that his job was “incredible, but it’s also just a job. Family and personal health come first on my priority list”. This year he changed tone drastically: “I’m home for dinner but I work at least ten hours a day and a lot during the weekend”. The message is clear: that balance he was talking about was a luxury we can no longer afford.

And when leaders change tone, the cascade is immediate. Microsoft employees describe the cultural shift toward “firmer performance expectations”. Startup workers report we’re in the era of “shut up and grind”. Palantir’s CEO told Gen Z explicitly that at twenty you can’t have both a social life and professional success.

It’s not by chance that smaller tech companies, under five hundred employees, offer full work-location flexibility 88% of the time, while tech giants over twenty-five thousand employees have nearly all adopted “structured hybrid” models with specific in-office requirements. Innovative startups understood flexibility works. Big companies seem more interested in control.

Fathers and the presence penalty

There’s another side rarely discussed with proper attention: what happens to men who decide to be present parents? Those who don’t settle for the traditional “breadwinner” role spending twelve hours a day in the office while someone else raises the children, but actually want to be active in family life?

The answer is complex and, in some ways, even more insidious than the penalty hitting mothers. Because if for a woman having children is almost automatically perceived as a professional handicap, for a man choosing to take extended parental leave or ask for flexible hours the stigmatisation can be even stronger. Recent studies show fathers who fully use available parental leave are often perceived as less ambitious, less committed to work, less “leadership material”.

It’s a perverse double standard: while women are blamed for being mothers, men are blamed for actually wanting to be fathers. As if fatherhood should remain confined to evening hours and weekends, never interfering with the total availability tech demands. A father who leaves the office at 6 to pick up the kids from daycare is viewed with the same suspicion as a mother who does the same, but with an added burden of judgement: “He isn’t ambitious enough”, “He doesn’t hunger for success”, “He lost his edge”.

And when a man chooses to reduce work hours or refuse a promotion that would require even more time at the office to dedicate himself to family, the career cost can be devastating. Research shows that while mothers suffer a career penalty regardless of how much time they actually dedicate to children, fathers suffer it only when they become visibly involved in daily care. In other words: a father can have children without professional consequences, as long as someone else handles them full-time.

The result is a culture that perpetuates deeply outdated gender dynamics. Tech companies can celebrate gender parity all they want and offer generous parental leave on paper, but if then a man who uses it gets penalised in performance reviews, in promotions, in growth opportunities, the implicit message is clear: childcare remains women’s work.

This hurts everyone. It hurts women, who keep carrying the disproportionate caregiving load because “his job is more important anyway”. It hurts men, deprived of the chance to be present fathers without sacrificing the career. And it hurts children, growing up in a world where parental presence is still considered a luxury incompatible with professional success.

What’s left, in the end

While I write this, I keep thinking about those two women at the aperitivo. I wonder what the one considering a return to work after maternity will do. Will she go back to an environment that statistically penalises her for making a perfectly normal life choice? Will she accept being considered less ambitious, less available, less “leader material” only because she has responsibilities outside the office?

Or maybe she’ll find a different company, one of those rare places that have actually internalised the value of diversity and inclusion, not just as a slogan on the website but as daily practice. They exist, these companies. There are leaders who model the balance they want to see in their team, who reward results instead of hours worked, who understand that a person with a rich life outside work is often more creative, more resilient, more capable of seeing different perspectives.

But they’re still too few. And meanwhile, too much talent gets lost, too much potential innovation wasted, too much suffering accepted as inevitable. Tech keeps talking about disruption, changing the world, building the future. Maybe it should start by changing itself, by building a future where you don’t have to choose between having a family and having a career. Where your availability at 11 p.m. doesn’t become the measure of your dedication. Where you can be present for your children without being invisible to your bosses.

I don’t know if we’ll get there soon. But I keep hoping that one day, when two people meet at an aperitivo to talk about their careers, having or not having children will be as irrelevant as preferring tea to coffee. A personal characteristic, not a determining factor for professional success.

Maybe it’s naive to think so. But if there’s a sector that should be capable of imagining and building different futures, it should be this one.