To bring the workplace into the 21st century, then, we need a new archetype of the ideal worker that is not anchored in gender and reflects the multiple roles that employees play in all spheres of their lives.

If you think that sounds hard, it’s because it goes against many of our unconscious assumptions about gender norms at home.

Despite tremendous progress, a majority of Americans still cling to traditional gender norms. For example, according to Pew research, 67 percent of Americans believe it’s “very important” that a man be ready to support a family before getting married, while only 33 percent believe the same about women. Pew also found that 51 percent of Americans believe that children are better off if the mother stays home, but only 8 percent say children are better off if the father stays home. Even dual-career couples default to gender roles, unless they are same-sex couples, as we learned at the Families and Work Institute in our 2015 Modern Families study.

It is hard to tell to what extent the assumptions at work are driving choices at home, or the other way around. In the end, the important thing to realize is that these dynamics are self-reinforcing. As a 2014 paper found, in analyzing studies of close to 1,000 male managers, “men in traditional marriages are more likely to have negative attitudes toward women in the workplace” than men in dual-income marriages. They also tend to evaluate work-life policies on the basis of their own “personal beliefs and marriage structures.” When coupled with the research of Adam Galinsky at the Columbia Business School showing that power makes people less able to understand another person’s perspective, it is not hard to see how senior men with wives at home end up perpetuating the ideal male work model.

It doesn’t have to be this way. But for workplace culture to change, perks won’t do. We need new ways to live and work in today’s changing world, and that starts at the top. Leaders have to model a different set of behaviors — and recognize others who are successfully working in a way that allows them to be meaningfully engaged at home. Equally important, leaders have a responsibility to think differently about leadership potential. All too often, women and men who deviate from the ideal worker model, especially for caregiving reasons, are forever written off as leadership material.

We need to reimagine leadership so that the ideal workers are not the ones who stay at work the latest, but the ones who get all their work done and leave at a reasonable hour; they are not the ones who get on a plane on a moment’s notice, even with a nanny in tow, but the ones who figure out how to conduct the meeting without having to travel.