That brings to mind a situation we had at work. There was a woman in the team who was in a common-law marriage; the reason she didn’t want to get officially married was that, as soon as she got married, HR would stop offering her jobs involving travel; she was even considering the option of having a church wedding with no civilian paperwork. OTOH, one of the two men in the team was married, with two small daughters, and he hadn’t been offered a job with 80% time abroad: he’d been told “you’re going” (the project we were in, in fact). Our boss made a weak attempt at rationalizing the assumptions, but had to shut up when we told her “we already know the explanations, but note you aren’t saying it doesn’t happen”.
That kind of assumptions leads to a bad situation for everybody.
My work isn’t quite so rigid, but I still get a lot of qualifications when offered travel (“I know you have a little one so its okay if you don’t want to, but…”) that fathers don’t get.
I also get a lot of unprompted speeches about things like flexible work schedules, part time opportunities, etc. that I definitely didn’t get before I had kids. A couple times I’ve had to outright say “I really enjoy the structure of coming to work in the morning, would be a terrible stay-at-home mom (so please stop suggesting things that aren’t full time work.)”
None of it really affects my decision making, since I am pretty sure of what I want. But it does kind of feel like I am being steered to less ambitious directions, and if I were one to feel guilty or insecure about working, it wouldn’t help.