Assume for a moment that your employer let you decide when and where you worked — you might arrive early so you could leave in time to care for a child, or work part of the week from home. Or perhaps you want to reduce your hours for a while to care for an aging parent. How would you be perceived if you raised your hand for one of these options?

“Many times these policies are on the books, but informally everyone knows you are penalized for using them,” said Joan C. Williams, founding director of the Center for Work-Life Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, referring to the array of flexible work arrangements some employers offer. “I invented the term ‘flexibility stigma’ to describe that phenomenon. Recent studies have found that it is alive and well, and it functions quite differently for women than it does for men.”

For some women, it gives employers a reason to view them through the lens of motherhood, prompting the strongest form of gender discrimination. Mothers are seen as less competent and less committed to their work, she said, citing other studies. But more surprising is that men who seek work flexibility may be penalized more severely than women, because they’re viewed as more feminine, deviating from their traditional role of fully committed breadwinners.

That may at least in part explain why using flexible work options — which include telecommuting, compressed work weeks and sharing jobs among employees, to name a few — has been slow to catch on, even though more organizations are offering them (at least on paper). Employers have increased options to help workers manage the time and place they work, from 2005 to 2012, according to the Families and Work Institute’s 2012 National Study of Employers. But employers have cut back on alternatives that would enable employees to spend significant amounts of time away from full-time work, like career breaks or moving from part time to full time and back again.