In many professional jobs, there is an expectation that one be an “ideal worker” – fully devoted to and available for the job, with no personal responsibilities getting in the way. While women struggle with this standard more overtly, in disputes over maternity leaves and childcare, many men struggle with this expectation as well. They may resist it by pulling back their workload, while still “passing” as the workaholic superhero their company values. Other men are more direct about their difficulties with their employer, which can result in harsh penalties and marginalization. A critical implication of this research is that high quality work does not necessarily require working long hours. The men who “pass” at their jobs by pretending to work more than they actually do show that it’s possible to reorganize work so that it takes up fewer hours of the day.

In many professional jobs, expectations that one be an “ideal worker”—fully devoted to and available for the job, with no personal responsibilities or interests that interfere with this commitment to work—are widespread. We often think of problems with these expectations as women’s problems. But men too may struggle with them: my research at a top strategy consulting firm, first published in Organization Science, revealed that many men experienced these expectations as difficult to fulfill or even distasteful. To be sure, some men seemed to happily comply with the firm’s expectations, working long hours and traveling constantly, but a majority were dissatisfied. They complained to me of children crying when they missed their soccer games, of poor health and substance addictions caused by how they worked, and of a general sense of feeling “overworked and underfamilied.”

Many of these men acted on their feelings, finding different ways to resist the firm’s expectations that they be ideal workers. How they resisted shaped their futures at the firm in important ways: some men made small, under-the-radar changes to their work that allowed them to pull back, while still “passing” as the work-devoted superheroes the firm valued. Others were more transparent about their difficulties, and asked the firm for help in pulling back. Their efforts resulted in harsh penalties and marginalization.

Superman Doesn’t Get Time Off

I studied a global strategy consulting firm with a strong U.S. presence. Like many such firms, the firm I studied offered advisory services in multiple areas of expertise, and relied on small teams to complete client projects over a period of weeks to months. As is common in the industry, consultants were expected to be available for overnight travel to client sites, and to work evenings and weekends on short notice. I gathered interviews with more than 100 people at this firm, as well as performance data and internal HR documents.

At this firm, people believed that success indeed required ideal-worker-like devotion. Many reported 60- to 80-hour weeks, with little control over when those hours were worked and whether they might have to travel. Work was expected to come ahead of other life responsibilities. For example, a Partner told me:

I will sometimes have to get calls on Sunday nights. Sometimes, I have to do calls on Saturday mornings. So the weekend is not sacrosanct. If the client needs me, I will generally take [the call]. And you know when the client needs me to be somewhere, I just have to be there. In the consulting—in the professional services industry, generally—you don’t really have the latitude of saying “I can’t really be there.” And if you can’t be there, it’s probably because you’ve got another client meeting at the same time. You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my—my son had a Cub Scout meeting.

Junior consultants also felt they were expected to devote themselves to work in this way. For example, a Junior Manager told me:

Our email program has a time client built into it. So you can actually see in your email box who’s online and who’s not. And there’s an implicit culture [here] that if you don’t see somebody on at the same time at a certain hour of the night, you’re wondering what the heck they are doing.

Those who succeeded in this environment were lauded by colleagues as “stars” and “superheroes.” For instance, in describing his colleagues, one Partner told me, “It’s just the thing about consultancy — I mean you run into bankers and consultants at the business school — I’m always reminded of that REM song — Superman — right, that’s what we all are.”

While women, particularly mothers, were expected to have trouble with these expectations, and the firm offered women many types of formal accommodations such as part-time work or internal roles, generally, the firm expected that men were willing and able to comply with its demands that they be ideal workers.

Two Strategies for Cutting Back

My research revealed that men were just as likely as women to have trouble with these “always on” expectations. However, men often coped with these demands in ways that differed strikingly. Women who had trouble with the work hours tended to simply to take formal accommodations, reducing their work hours, but also revealing their inability to be true ideal workers, and they were consequently marginalized within the firm. In contrast, many men found unobtrusive, under-the-radar ways to alter the structure of their work (such as cultivating mostly local clients, or building alliances with other colleagues), such that they could work predictable schedules in the 50 to 60 hour range. In doing so, they were able to work far less than those who fully devoted themselves to work, and had greater control over when and where those hours were worked, yet were able to “pass” as ideal workers, evading penalties for their noncompliance.

One man who passed was Lloyd (a pseudonym), a Senior Manager. Lloyd was deeply skeptical about the necessity of being an ideal worker, and was unwilling to fully comply with this expectation. He described to me how, by using local clients, telecommuting, and controlling information about his whereabouts, he found ways to work and travel less, without being found out. He told me: “I skied five days last week. I took calls in the morning and in the evening but I was able to be there for my son when he needed me to be, and I was able to ski five days in a row.” He clarified that these were work days, not vacation days: “No, no one knows where I am…. Those boundaries are only practical with my local client base.… Especially because we’re mobile, there are no boundaries.” Despite his deviance from the ideal worker expectation, however, senior colleagues viewed him as a star; indeed, one Partner described him to me as a “rising star,” who worked “much harder than” he himself did. This assessment—in combination with Lloyd’s top performance rating and his promotion to Partner that year—suggests he had successfully passed in the eyes of senior members of the firm as an ideal worker.

While Lloyd’s ability to pass was rooted in the type of client projects he took on, other people’s abilities to pass were rooted in close personal relationships with colleagues. In these relationships, people felt able to share their unwillingness to devote themselves to work and collaborated to find ways to avoid overwork. Indeed, one whole team that I interviewed seemed to mostly reveal their unwillingness to work constantly to each other, yet passed to the broader community of the firm. They traveled little, worked reasonable days (e.g., 9-5) and often worked from home, without apparent penalty. One Partner within this team told me:

We kind of have a shared agreement as to what work–life balance is on our team. We basically work really closely with each other to make sure that we can all do that. A lot of us have young kids, and we’ve designed it so we can do that. We’ve really designed the whole business [unit] around having intellectual freedom, making a lot of money, [and] having work–life balance. It’s pretty rare. And we don’t get pushback from above because we are squaring that circle—from the managing partners— ’cause we are one of the most successful parts of the company. Most of the partners have no idea our hours are that light.

But not all men who resisted the firm’s mode of working did so in ways that permitted passing: some men asked for the firm’s help in reducing their work hours, including requesting access to the same accommodations typically proffered to women. These men were treated very differently from the men who managed to pass: they were marginalized and penalized, in the same ways that women who reveal work-family conflict have long been. For example, Doug, a Junior Manager, told me how, following an assignment that involved several months overseas, he had formally requested a U.S.-based project in order to be close to his family, which included two young children:

I told the firm, you know I don’t think I can go back to [country] again. And if that means I’m going to have to look for something else, I’m going to look for something else. And, that was kind of what resulted in the non-promotion, because they said, “Well, you’ll probably get it if you stay out there.”

Doug’s story later arose during an interview I conducted with Barry, a Senior Manager who had worked on the same assignment. Barry told me, “Doug’s wife didn’t want him to [work overseas] but he did it anyway and that was a much different experience for him.… He stayed for about five months and then came back, and refused to go back again.” Barry identified his own choice to work overseas as an opportunity that had signaled his personal commitment to the firm and had played an important role in setting him up for a promotion. Thus, the man who happily went overseas was promoted; the man who publicly cut his stay short because of his family was denied a promotion.

Indeed, for men, revealing that one was unwilling to devote oneself wholly to work could be very costly. Michael, a Junior Manager with young children, told me:

When my daughter was born, one of the things I wanted to do was take off three months and do the full FMLA and be a stay-at-home Dad.… I felt like this was the only time in my career I would be able to do this.… But the original reaction I actually got inside of the firm was “oh no, you can’t take three months off.”

Faced with intense resistance within the firm, Michael settled for just six weeks of unpaid leave. When he returned to the office following this leave, he also returned to the expected mode of working: he worked very long hours, travelling weekly, for the rest of the year. Yet, he found that “people still talked like I was out three months.” At his annual review he was told that the firm could not properly evaluate him because the six weeks he had taken off meant he “had this big donut hole in [his] year.” He consequently did not receive a hoped-for promotion, and his performance rating fell from what it had been the year before. In a subsequent conversation, Michael reflected to me, “no one questioned my commitment until I had a family.”

Intriguingly, the pushback men received for asking for time away from work seemed limited to time for family: one man who had since left the firm told me that, when his daughter was born he had been harassed for taking two weeks of paternity leave, despite spending some of that leave working. But when, later that year, he and his family took a three-week vacation to an exotic locale, the vacation was permitted, and his team encouraged him to “unplug” and take a real vacation. This disparity in treatment seems, at one level, ridiculous, but at another level, entirely consistent with the firm’s expectation that men be ideal workers: taking on mundane responsibilities in one’s family life can threaten one’s devotion to work, while affording an expensive vacation may be instead contingent upon devotion to and success at work.

Implications for How We Organize Our Work

Thus, like women, many men in professional jobs also experience difficulties with demands that they be ideal workers, and like women, men who express these challenges and seek the firm’s help to redress them face resistance and penalties. What seems to differ is that many men are able to stray while passing as fully devoted.

For people in demanding professional jobs, passing may seem like a tempting strategy. After all, passing allows one to avoid long, often unnecessary work hours, without eliciting any penalty. Career-wise, it is certainly less costly than transparency. Yet passing may not be possible for everyone. Passing effectively requires both strong relationships within the firm and the networks necessary to find local clients, and not everyone has equally strong relationships or networks. In addition, women’s work time may be under greater scrutiny than men’s: people at this firm seemed to assume that women who left the office around five went home to their children, while men who left around the same time could be, in the words of one administrative assistant “on the way to a client’s.” Thus, it may be more difficult for women to find ways to slip under the radar than men.

More importantly, however, passing is not a good strategy for the organization as a whole: not only does it involve an element of deception between colleagues, bosses, and subordinates, it also perpetuates the myth that those who are successful are also all wholly devoted to work. Yet, a critical implication of this research is that working long hours is not necessary for high quality work. The experiences of those men who passed show clearly that, even in a client service setting, it is possible to reorganize work such that it is more predictable and consumes fewer hours.

Leaders of organizations, however, who are already invested in how things work, and who themselves likely made many personal sacrifices to advance, may have trouble accepting the possibility that there might be another way to work. Indeed, when I reported my findings to the organization I studied, I was met with two responses: (1) a response that “these men”—those who revealed their lack of desire to be always available for and primarily committed to their work—were not the sort of men they really wanted anyway; and (2) a request to figure out how they might teach women to pass. The broader implication—that the organization itself might alter its expectations—was lost.

Editor’s note: Names and some identifying details in this piece have been changed.