So — if you need a break from playoff hockey — here are some nuggets:

• Via Nick Senzee: This item is nearly 6 months later, but I totally missed Joy Behar and George Lopez calling Todd Palin a “bum” for being an at-home dad. Political commentary aside, that’s a pretty low blow. And a partisan one. Because I don’t see anyone calling Daniel Mulhern a bum, even though his wife might end up becoming way, way more powerful than Sarah Palin.
• Last week, the Wall Street Journal looked at how tough it is for at-home dads to re-enter the workforce. Further evidence that the Daddy Wars may be heating up.
• I have a hard enough time keeping up with the images of dads on TV, let alone how they are being portrayed in literature. Fortunately, there is BookDads.com.
• This anecdote made me more optimistic about the future of work-life balance than anything I saw from the White House forum on flexibility. When big German banks see the wisdom of flexibility, the future is obviously bright.

*** I’m slowly ramping back up on Twitter, but I have to admit that I’m not keeping up with the people I probably should be watching. Please let me know — here or via @rebeldad — insightful dads I should start following, and I’ll start adding folks.

That’s the romantic version, anyway.

A new paper out in American Sociological Review finds another reason why highly educated, high-powered woman leave the workforce: they’re married to workaholics. It’s especially pronounced in professional woman and in mothers. Here’s the essence of the research, from the press release on the article:

… having a husband who works 60 hours or more per week increases a woman’s odds of quitting by 42 percent. … The odds of quitting increase by 51 percent for professional women whose husbands work 60 hours or more per week, and for professional mothers the odds they will quit their jobs jumps 112 percent.

What’s dispiriting is that this isn’t about money or the difficultly of balancing life in a household where one partner is gone 12+ hours a day. It’s about gender norms. When the researchers look at women who worked 60+ hours a week, husbands were no more likely, statistically, to quit. So the traditional model, with the guy’s career first, remains the reigning paradigm.

I’ve done my part to change the trend, but — apparently — I haven’t done enough.

Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute was glowing about how the event suggested that three decade of work were paying off. And my friend and erstwhile college Katherine Lewis titled her post at about.com “My Workplace Flexibility Day to Remember.”

I think they offer important context. Please read what they had to say. But, at the end of the day, I’ll stick by Daddy Types take on the situation.

As for why I can still be cranky when work-life balance received the presidential treatment, I think my deep unease around the lack of governmental action comes back to something else I stumbled on today: Human Rights Watch — you know, the group that spends a lot of time advocating against systematic murder and torture – is apparently working on a report about parental leave in the United States. And while I don’t think anyone is comparing unpaid leave to torture, it is telling that on this particular issue, the United States looks pretty close to the bottom of the heap by international standards.

Here’s where I come down on the issue: there are two ways to make flexibility a reality. The first is that you change the laws to make damn sure that workers have some baseline protections when flexibility is a necessity. This is where paid leave is important. This is where paid sick days are important. And — unless I missed something — there were no solid proposals offered today for doing that.

That’s an opportunity lost.

The second is that men have to be involved. And when I say, “involved,” it needs to be acknowledged that men need flexibility for themselves, not flexibility for their wives, not flexibility in a business-decision sense. When President Obama said, ” Workplace flexibility isn’t just a women’s issue.  It’s an issue that affects the well-being of our families and the success of our businesses,” he only gets halfway there. Unless and until men get personally invested in the fight for workplace flexibility, “flexibility” will continue to be a niche issue that’s easy to pass off as a narrow “mommy” concern. We need Daddy Wars in order to take this issue to the next level.

But all of the official stuff around today’s meeting implied that what we’re dealing with is still a mommy concern. The very first paragraph of the official report from the Council of Economic Advisers on this issue notes that women are now half of the labor force “… yet, children still need to be taken to the doctor.” Immediately, the issue is framed as one that arises from the decisions of women.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t talk of solutions. There was a ton of talk of solutions. (The Fork did a great job of outlining the ideas put forth.) But I didn’t hear much that was novel. Again, the solutions aren’t rocket science. It’s the implementation that’s tricky. And not just implementation at the top, but the work required to make flexibility a value that every boss on down the organizational chart subscribes to. Those problem bosses exist all over the place. And they weren’t watching today’s webcast.

I’m hoping that today was the first small step in continuing to build this dialogue. But time is going to tell, and it’s not clear to me how this momentum gets sustained.

There was one bright spot. The highest-ranking at-home dad in the nation, First Gentleman of Michigan Dan Granholm Mulhern, spoke at once of the breakout sessions and made clear that the language and focus of the discussion has to be broadened to men (and what’s best for the kids). This is not about gender, he said. And he’s right. Absolutely right.

Of course, I can even be cynical about that. Google News tells me that there were well in excess of 100 stories written about the event. Not a single one cited Mulhern. The struggle continues …

Ellen Galinsky, who runs the Family and Work Institute, sees the meeting as a culmination of a decades-long fight for flexibility. Dooce will be there. So will outsourcers and gurus from the results-only work environment world. (Actually, the Twitter-o-sphere is kind of split on whether having Heather Armstrong at the White House is really cool or really dumb. My invite was apparently misplaced.)

Regardless of who says what, I’m pretty sure that we’ll wake up Thursday morning to a world in which work-life choices are still tightly constrained. Most dads will hit the snooze button a couple of times, then truck off to their 8-hour-plus workweeks. A growing handful will prepare for a day at home with the kids. And there aren’t now — and won’t be on Thursday — many other options available. There is still no paid federal leave. Sick days aren’t guaranteed by law. And getting fired for putting family first is neither reason for surprise or, it seems, for sympathy.

In short, I don’t expect high-quality, state-run childcare to suddenly emerge. I don’t expect European-style paid parental leave policies to get floated. I don’t even expect Obama to make good on his campaign promises to expand FMLA. All I want is a serious effort to get paid sick leave instituted. That’s all. It would be one small — one tiny — step for flexibility. And it’s not going to happen. Not in this Washington, not in this economy.

You can host all of the flexibility summits you want, but words only get you so far.

(UPDATE: The whole thing will be streamed to the Internet from the White House site. I still haven’t seen a list of speakers. I’m not sure I’m up for watching it, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts.)

So it was fortuitious that I saw this tweet by Kristin Maschka on WorkOptions.com’s Max Maternity Leave guidelines. This is a really smart and straightforward how-to for moms-to-be who are interested in having a baby and taking leave without blowing up a career. And while following this advice certainly doesn’t ensure that the maternal wall will be torn down, it’s certainly a start.

Now, the issue of guys taking paternity leave is fraught with issues that are different but just as tricky to navigate (if not more so). In a world of infinite time, I’d love to screw together this kind of resource for the guys, so that men who wanted to take full advantage of paternity leave could do so. My experience with leave was ultimately positive (and life-changing), but getting my employer to understand what the hell I was doing was far more complicated and dispiriting than I had expected.

If you have any tips on this, let me know in the comments …

But it doesn’t have to been a shooting war. The Australian site, dadsclub.au, ran a nice piece on why negotiation is so important in making sure that employers understand how important family time is. Of course, proactively talking about work-life balance isn’t instantly going to change a century-plus of misplaced expectations, but it’s a good start. (Thanks to Marc at Equally Shared Parenting for the link.)

Interestingly, the whole daddy wars topic has quieted down. It was really hip three or four years ago, when people started wondering if the growing number of at-home dads would somehow get dads to snipe at one another, but I haven’t heard that much lately. Right now, the biggest dad-inspired parenting battle is over whether it’s a good idea to take your kid out to the bars …

Not, via the Wall Street Journal, comes the news that people are assuming that high profile men such as NASCAR’s Jimmy Johnson and tennis’ Roger Federer will get knocked down a peg or two by their impending paternity. The blog post by Sue Shellebarger has a telling headline: “Johnson, Federer and the New Dad Stereotype.” Kudos to the WSJ blog folks for the headline. The idea that parents suddenly lose their mind (or their career drive) when they have children is a pervasive and generally wrong stance.

While I suppose you could cheer that dads are slowly being held to a similar standard as moms, I’m not sure that’s the kind of gender equity we need. Maybe we should move in the other direction, and just start treating moms in the workplace the way we treat dads.

(As usual, the WSJ comments are pretty interesting on this one.)

If you’ve followed this issue at all, even causally, you know what the report says: this country’s support for working parents is dismal by the standards of any other developed nation. The incomplete victory of the Family and Medical Leave act nearly 20 years ago hardly covers the fact that we’re working harder than ever — in a more gender-equitable way than ever — and yet our laws remain mired in the idea that it’s still 1960.

It’s easy to be cynical about this kind of report, and the action called for don’t look radically different from the action that family advocates have been calling for continuously since FMLA passed. The big question is whether Williams and Boushey have framed this in a way that can make political action somehow more likely. And on this score, the report deserves kudos. For starters, they utterly dispense with rich families. As fun as the “Opt-Out Revolution” is to debate, arguing over that is like arguing over whether Merlot has been unfairly maligned. If you’re lucky enough to be rich enough to drop opt of the workforce (or opine on wine), you don’t understand the real problems.

So Williams and Boushey look at three groups: the poor, the professionals and the “missing middle.” It’s a nice way of describing the 53 percent of families that seem to be fitting the description of the American dream: mom and dad both working full-time, above the poverty line but very much at risk. These are the families that politicians celebrate as just-plain-folks, yet they are the ones that can be devastated by family un-friendly policies.

Will defining the “missing middle” change the game? Maybe not, but it’s important to keep a spotlight on this issue. Sooner or later, we’ll get the laws we need. (I hope it’s “sooner”.)

(Since she’s not my sworn enemy anymore, now that I’ve left the Post, you can check out Lisa Belkin’s take at Motherload.)

I also received an e-mail from Rhonda Present flagging her Illinois organization, ParentsWork:

We’re a grassroots organization of Illinois parents and grandparents dedicated to ensuring that all moms and dads have the time, resources and support we need to care for our children and families. And, of course, paid family leave is top on our agenda!

Rhonda is trying to snag 100,000 parents by the end of the decade, so if you’re in Illinois, please offer your support.

In addition, I have some updating to do to the blogroll. Trying to get that updated by Christmas.

Finally … there are two new manifestos up. Please keep ‘em coming.