It's not remotely facetious. Regularly doubling your hours in the office generally does not even remotely double a person's productivity.
However, appearing to be a "team player" and always being in the office makes a person appear to be a hard worker. So people who put in long hours are generally rewarded with more bonuses, promotions, and retention, even if there isn't a strong correlation with their actual work output.
I think the point he was trying to make still holds without such absurd multipliers as "doubling", it's just an intuitively easy to grasp multiplier. What he's saying is that increasing your number of hours may get more absolute work done, but proportionally a person accomplishes less as more hours are worked. Thus, the correlation between time in office (hours) and productivity (work accomplished per unit time) is a negative correlation.
You are implying that childcare and other non-work flex time activity isn't work. This is, in the frame of this discussion, in itself implicitly sexist.
Women aren't asking for flex time in order to relax: they want flex time in order to do work that isn't business related, like taking care of their family.
So the same number of hours are being worked - the question is whether using these extra hours to do company business is more beneficial to the company than doing something else.
Quite frankly, it's kind of a ridiculous discussion. I can't see how it isn't driven by implicit benevolent sexist assumptions.
Woah woah woah, slow down. You are infering that childcare and other non-work flex time activity isn't work. I was not saying anything at all about time spent outside the job. I was trying to clarify the argument that you were responding to by demonstrating how it is not a straw man.
To follow the argument from it's origins, you led with
>I'd be amazed if there wasn't a correlation between time in the office and productivity.
And you were later responding to SamBam saying
>Regularly doubling your hours in the office generally does not even remotely double a person's productivity.
Which I was clarifying was not exactly a straw man because the fact that he chose "double" the hours was merely a hyperbole to demonstrate that productivity (in the office) does not scale positively with time spent (in the office).
So we are talking about correlation between time in the office and productivity (in the office). The negative correlation that was spoken of is a very measured effect, multiple studies and articles can be found [0] using the same tool that you so kindly used to define benevolent sexism to me with.
However, appearing to be a "team player" and always being in the office makes a person appear to be a hard worker. So people who put in long hours are generally rewarded with more bonuses, promotions, and retention, even if there isn't a strong correlation with their actual work output.