Let’s give Amazon the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the announcement of its revamped and significantly more generous family leave policy didn’t have anything to do with the really bad PR that the company has been combatting since the publication of a New York Times exposé, including comments by some former Amazon insiders, about just how difficult it is to work for the retail behemoth.

Writing that the company “is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable”, Times reporters collected somewhat hair-raising tales of what it means to be an elite worker at the giant online retailer. In the process, they raised the question of whether a gender gap might partly explain the problem, and recounted at least one instance where a woman was told by her boss that having children “would most likely prevent her from success at a higher level”.

Following a war of words, Amazon – which took issue with the article’s conclusions and the reporting process itself – now appears to be striking back. Months after some of its technology peers rolled out lavish new family-oriented perks for their employees, Amazon has said it will offer paternity leave to new fathers for the first time ever, and expand the amount of time off available to new mothers to as much as 20 weeks. Unsurprisingly, the company did not point to the controversy engendered by the Times piece when announcing its new policies, but instead said that they were developed response to employees’ preferences and to match what their competitors were doing.

The benefits arms race in Silicon Valley has been well documented – and Amazon does indeed remain well behind the leaders.

If anyone is in pole position right now, it’s probably Netflix, which has offered new mothers and fathers unlimited paid time off during their child’s first year of life, to be divided however those parents wish if both of them work for Netflix. “Parents can return part-time, full-time, or return and then go back out as needed,” the company announced. “We’ll just keep paying them normally.”

Adobe Systems, not to be left out, followed Netflix’s August announcement with its own expansion of maternity leave from 17 weeks to 26 weeks, while doubling paternity leave to four weeks – and rolling out new, more generous, medical and family leave policies as well. That’s more in line with the increasingly generous benefits being offered by companies like Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft.

While the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act made it possible for mothers in the US to take up to 12 weeks of maternity leave for the first time, that is only possible if they have worked at least 12 months for companies with more than 50 employees – and there is no federal requirement for the leave to be paid. Some corporations have stepped in to fill the gap, and a handful of states have offered more generous leave policies and taken the additional step of defining childbirth as a “disability”, meaning that new mothers qualify for some kind of paid leave.

It has become easy to document and track the benefits that companies in Silicon Valley rush to offer as they try to recruit and retain top talent. Who has doggy day care – or will let you take your dog to the office? Which tech campuses offer the best free food? What about a day off to volunteer or just ponder life (LinkedIn)? Or use of an in-house mediation room? Heck, Facebook will even give you a free wash and fold service for your laundry.

There are two factors to remember about these perks, however.

Firstly, they’re all aimed at keeping these talented workers working, as productively and happily as possible – and as long as possible. Laundry is a distraction, and so is going out to try and shop for food and prepare meals. Ergo, remove the distraction, and employees will keep their noses to the grindstone.

Secondly, when it comes to the wave of “time off” benefits, what is lacking is any publicly available data on how willing employees are to ask to take advantage of them in practice, and how accessible they turn out to be.

For instance, what happens at a company like Yahoo, whose CEO, Marissa Mayer, is sending decidedly mixed messages on work-life balance? On her arrival at the firm, Mayer moved rapidly to end a previous policy that had allowed employees to work from home to a limited extent. That followed the announcement of a more generous parental leave policy that gives new mothers up to 16 weeks off – although Mayer herself had taken only two weeks off following the birth of her first child. Now pregnant with twin girls, Mayer has said that once again she plans to take only “limited” time off following childbirth.

What message is a Yahoo employee going to take away from all this? On the one hand, there is more generous leave available. On the other hand, the CEO’s own example, and her eradication of work-from-home policies, suggest that asking to take advantage of the full time officially available might be frowned on.

Mayer is likely making her own personal decision as a CEO; she’s still trying to complete her turnaround of Yahoo and wants to reassure investors and employees that she won’t be Awol for long during that critical process. But if you ask any student of corporate culture how it works, and they’ll tell you: people watch what their CEOs do, and model that behavior.

If Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase works every day while being treated for cancer, he’s making a prudent decision as a CEO, but he’s also sending a message that his employees, too, might want to avoid taking medical leaves. If Mayer returns to work two weeks after the birth after twin baby girls, with a toddler at home, how hard will it be for lesser mortals at Yahoo to rationalize taking off the full quota of paid leave to which they are technically entitled?

It isn’t just family leave that’s a problem. When note-taking app Evernote gave employees unlimited vacation time, some employees took less time off than they had before, because they wanted to impress their bosses. Evernote’s CEO had to resort to writing $1,000 checks to anyone who could prove he or she had taken at least a week-long vacation, and who shared stories about their adventures and experiences.

These aren’t the only instances of mixed messages. Silicon Valley bills itself as a meritocracy, but every so often glimpses of an alternative reality intrude. One sexual discrimination case filed early this year against Facebook by Chia Hong alleged that she was “asked why she did not just stay home and take care of her children” and was “admonished when she exercised her right under company policy to take time off to visit her child at school”. (Facebook has said it had “substantive disagreements” regarding the facts alleged in Ms Hong’s suit.) At the same time, Facebook was rolling out a new and rather extreme benefit aimed at women who might postpone motherhood and keep working: the ability to freeze their eggs.

This is not just about gender or something that needs to divide employees and employers, as Anne Marie Slaughter points out in her just-published book, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, which was shortlisted for this year’s Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. “The majority of Americans are mired in a 1950s mindset when it comes to assumptions about when and how we work, what an ideal worker looks like, and when to expect that ideal worker to peak in his career,” she writes. “Men who came up through the old system and succeeded in it simply find it very hard to believe that their businesses could flourish any other way.”

That “old system”, however, doesn’t necessarily exclude the male-dominated Silicon Valley. The workforce may be younger, but that just means that work-life issues haven’t yet reached a critical tipping point for many employees. For some that will happen when a second child is born, when parents divorce, or when an elderly parent needs care.

For her part, Slaughter urges employees to avoid playing the competitive game of how many hours they worked last week and instead shift the topic of the discussion to something other than work. Employers, for their part, can avoid assuming that a decision by an employee to devote more time to family means that they aren’t interested in leadership positions down the road. “Plan together for ramping back up when she or he is ready.”

Only when everyone is on board – men and women, employers and employees – is it likely that we can realistically aspire to real work/life balance. Until then, odds are we’ll end up with some lovely-sounding workplace perks, rarely used except by the most senior or bravest members of the company. The bulk of the employees may find them alluring when weighing job offers, but end up sticking to the free food.