The main reason for the gender gaps at work — why women are paid less, why they’re less likely to reach the top levels of companies, and why they’re more likely to stop working after having children — is employers’ expectation that people spend long hours at their desks, research has shown.

It’s especially difficult for women because they have disproportionate responsibility for caregiving.

Flexibility regarding the time and place that work gets done would go a long way toward closing the gaps, economists say. Yet when people ask for it, especially parents, they can be penalized in pay and promotions. Social scientists call it the flexibility stigma, and it’s the reason that even when companies offer such policies, they’re not widely used.

研究顯示，職場所以出現性別落差：女性薪酬較低，較難爬到公司頂層職位，有了孩子後更可能停止工作，主因在於雇主期待員工長時間坐在辦公桌前。

這對女性而言特別困難，因為她們照顧家人的責任比男性大得多。

經濟學家說，在完成工作的時間與地點上展現彈性，對於縮小性別差距會大有幫助。不過，人們如果要求彈性上班，特別是已有子女者，卻可能在薪水和升遷上受到懲罰。社會科學家稱之為彈性汙點，也因此即使公司有這樣的政策，用得也不多。

A new job search company, Werk, is trying to address the problem by negotiating for flexibility with employers before posting jobs, so employees don’t have to.

All the positions listed on the Werk site, including some from Facebook, Uber and Samsung, are highly skilled jobs that offer some sort of control over the time and place of work. People can apply to jobs that let them work away from the office all the time or some of the time, and at hours other than 9-to-5, part time or with minimal travel.

Another option gives workers the freedom to adjust their schedules, no questions asked, because of unpredictable obligations, like a sleepless night with a toddler or a trip to the emergency room with an older parent.

新創職業仲介公司Werk正試圖解決這個問題，方法是在張貼出職缺之前先與雇主洽商彈性，免得員工必須自己去談。

Werk網站列出的所有職缺，包括一些臉書、優步和三星的職缺，都是需要高度技能的工作，能讓應徵者對工作時間和地點享有一些自主性。人們可以應徵各種形態的工作，包括完全不需進辦公室，部分時間不用進去，在9點到5點以外的時間工作，兼職，以及盡量不出差至外地。

另外還有一種選擇，是讓員工可因為不可預測的職責而自行調整工作時程而不須交代理由，這些職責包括為照顧幼兒而整夜沒得睡，送年邁父母去急診。

“Nobody wants to be the female in the department who says, ‘My kid threw up on me this morning; I can’t come in,'” said Annie Dean, who worked as a lawyer before starting Werk with Anna Auerbach, a former consultant. “Eighty percent of companies say they offer flexibility, but it’s a black market topic. You raise it and you’re not taken seriously.”

For now, Werk is a limited experiment. Most of the employers are small companies, and it is aimed at an elite group of women — highly educated and on a leadership track. But it could provide lessons for how to improve work and make it more equal for a broader group.

安妮．迪恩本來是律師，後來與原任顧問的安娜．奧爾巴奇合創Werk公司，她說：「沒有人想當部門裡那個說『我的孩子今天早上吐了我一身，我不能到辦公室了』的女性。百分之八十的公司說他們提供彈性，但這是黑市話題，你若提出來，不會被當回事。」

現階段，Werk是個範圍有限的實驗。大多數雇主是小公司，而且該網站鎖定女性菁英─受過高等教育並有擔任高層主管的潛力。不過這可提供經驗用以改善工作，使工作對更廣大的群體而言更平等。

Women who have less education or are paid hourly wages have significantly less flexibility than professional women to begin with. It makes working and caregiving that much harder.

Motherhood presents a different challenge for the elite women that Werk was made for. The careers that pay the most and require the most education, like business and law, also have the most gender inequality. Why? Economists have found it’s a result of the long hours and limited flexibility.

比起專業女性，教育程度較低或是領時薪的女性彈性小得多。這也使得兼顧工作和照顧家人更是困難得多。

當母親對Werk鎖定的女性菁英是另一種不同的挑戰。薪水最高和學歷要求最高的職涯，像是商業和法律，也是性別最不平等的。為什麼？經濟學家發現這是工作時間長和彈性有限的結果。

Michel Onfray, a best-selling French pop philosopher, was sounding pretty upbeat on the phone, even though the title of his latest book is “Decadence: The Life and Death of the Judeo-Christian Tradition."

His book had just come out, with an impressive press run of 120,000 copies, and was selling briskly in spite of — or perhaps because of — its gloomy prognostication. “If you think today about terrorism, the rise of populism, it was important to put that in perspective,” Onfray said recently. His research, he added, “shows a civilization that had been strong, that had ceased to be so and that’s heading toward its end.”

著作暢銷的法國通俗哲學家米榭．奧佛雷在電話中聽起來相當愉快，儘管他的新書名為「衰落：猶太─基督教傳統的生與死」。

他的書剛剛出版，印刷數目令人刮目相看，高達12萬冊，且造成搶購，儘管─或許正是因為─書中有陰沉的預言。奧佛雷最近說：「如今你思考恐怖主義、民粹主義的崛起，將它（這個主題）加入觀點是很重要的事。」他補充說，他的研究「顯示一個文明曾經強盛，但已不復如此，而且正走上末路。」

Onfray is one of the latest popular authors to join France’s booming decline industry, a spate of books and articles (with a handful of TV shows) that explore the country’s (and the West’s) failings and France’s obsession with those failings. (Last year, the word “declinisme,” or “declinism,” entered France’s Larousse dictionary.) It’s a phenomenon that cuts across the political spectrum and has picked up velocity in recent years by tapping into an anxious national mood. And its loudest voices are intellectuals with platforms in the national news media.

Beyond Onfray’s, other books with decline on their minds have appeared in the past few weeks. “The Returned,” a best seller by journalist David Thomson, is an investigative report about French jihadis who’ve returned home from Syria. “A Submissive France: Voices of Defiance” compiles interviews on France’s troubled banlieues, or suburbs, overseen by historian Georges Bensoussan. “Chronicles of French Denial,” by right-leaning economist and historian Nicolas Baverez, is about how France continued its economic decline under President Francois Hollande.

法國的衰落產業正在蓬勃發展，有一大堆書籍和文章（以及幾個電視節目）探討法國（與西方世界）的失靈，以及法國對這些失靈的迷戀。而奧佛雷是加入這產業最新一波廣受歡迎的作者之一。（去年，衰落主義這個名詞被收進法國的拉胡斯字典中。）它已成一種跨越政治光譜的現象，且近年來，因為摻和了全民的焦慮情緒而加快了速度。而它最響亮的聲音，來自在全國性新聞媒體上享有平台的知識分子。

除了奧佛雷的新書，過去幾周，另外有些書籍念茲在茲的也是法國的式微。「返鄉者」是記者大衛．湯姆森的暢銷書，它是一本調查報導，討論從敘利亞返鄉的法國聖戰士。「一個順從的法國：反抗之聲」，是將針對法國問題叢生的郊區所做的訪談集結成冊，監督人是歷史學家喬治．班蘇桑。「法國否定編年史」是右派經濟學家兼歷史學家尼古拉斯．巴韋赫茲的作品，談論法國如何在總統法蘭索瓦．歐蘭德治理下，繼續它的經濟衰退道路。

There’s also “An Imaginary Racism” by left-leaning philosopher Pascal Bruckner, who was recently cleared of charges of inciting hate speech and argues that fear of being labeled Islamophobic is leading people to self-censor their speech, while in November, Sciences Po professor Gilles Kepel published “The Fracture,” which explores how the radicalization of some young Muslims is tearing apart French society.

“The thing that’s very striking now is how pervasive those ideas are,” said Sudhir Hazareesingh, a professor at Oxford University and author of “How the French Think.” “One of the things characteristic of the present moment is this idea that decline and decadence are not just the preserve of the extreme right.”

還有左派哲學家帕斯卡．布希克內的作品「虛構的種族主義」，他最近才被清除煽動仇恨言論的指控，他認為害怕被貼上伊斯蘭恐懼症的標籤，正導致人們自我審查言論，去年11月時，「巴黎政治學院」教授吉勒．柯佩出版「分裂」一書，探討一些年輕穆斯林的激進化正如何撕裂法國社會。

牛津大學教授、「法國人的思考方式」一書的作者蘇狄．哈札里辛說：「現在十分令人震驚的是，這些想法是如此普遍。現在這一刻的特徵之一，是式微和衰落的這種想法，不僅存在於極右派而已。」