Tom Brokaw called it corporate America's little secret on NBC Nightly News last week. Gasp. . .corporate America is more interested in the bottom line than in their employees' family life.

The NBC story was based on the March 17th Fortune magazine cover story, "Is Your Family Wrecking Your Career? (and vice versa)," an investigation of the pressures facing the dual-income family. Fortune's cover shows a crying infant clinging to the leg of a high-heeled woman, a leg that appears to be walking away from the baby. It's a picture designed to break your heart, an image that haunts most women who leave their children at home to return to the workforce.

The subtitle of the story sums up its point: "For all its politically correct talk, your company doesn't much like your kids." The major statistical evidence for this finding comes from a 1993 study of married male managers which found that on average, the men who were married to non-working women earned 32% more than the men married to professional women and appear to have been promoted more quickly.

As the Fortune story points out, both the husband and wife work in 84% of married couples. Fortune calls it the new "Parent Track" of the 1990s; men are beginning to share the burden of trade-offs that were once the sole purview of the Mommy Track. Today's fathers are expected to be involved in their children's lives just as mothers are increasingly expected to contribute to the household income. On the other hand, a father who drives carpool cannot fly to Singapore on a moment's notice, and a boss may not be sympathetic when preschool threatens a million dollar deal.

Betsy Morris, author of the Fortune article, has been making the talking-head circuit with this story, condemning the betrayal of American working families by a supposedly kinder, gentler corporate world. Flex time and on-site day-care aside, corporate America really wants your time, as much as it can get, and it will reward those who put it in. As the author writes, ". . . the corporate world seem strangely impervious to the pressures on working families." Oh, those heartless capitalists -- you can just hear the proletariat turn over in his grave.

Here's the problem: a corporation is not a person. It cannot empathize, care or nurture. All a company can do is stay competitive, and in doing so protect the jobs of all those mommies and daddies trying to make their children's soccer games. The global marketplace puts a premium on availability and access, on immediate reaction. As the article says, "The modes and rhythms of the 24-hour global company have only heightened the conflict between corporate values and family values." The bottom line does not know quality time or the siren song of a school's holiday recital; it knows only hard work.

The dilemma of the "Parent Track" is age-old: how does a person make the best of trade-offs between family time and family income? What we cannot do is ask corporate America to pay for the difference, or we may not have those incomes to worry over much longer.

-by Katherine Post, Public Policy Fellow