Husband buys wife a car with their combined income, without her permission. Happy holidays!

Ah, the holiday car commercial. You know the one. What did dad get mom? Just a little box… with a key in it to a new car! The family rushes to the yard, where a shiny new car waits with a big red bow on it. Apparently the tradition was started by Lexus in 1998, when it began its yearly “December to Remember” campaign that promotes a new car as the perfect gift. And it’s been successful: December Lexus sales are traditionally better than any other month. Other car companies have followed suit.

Some of these ads now feature girlfriends buying boyfriends cars for the holidays, but the most traditional form seems to be a husband buying one for his wife. There’s something wrong with this picture. As Annie Lowrey tweets in parody of these ads, “Husband buys wife a car! Wife expresses horror that he made a major financial decision unilaterally, on impulse!” It is strange to think that a man would up and buy his wife a car without consulting her, particularly as most married couples combine their earnings. But it hearkens back to a time when women didn’t have their own earnings, couldn’t buy their own cars, and actually did have to rely on husbands to buy them a new set of wheels.

Take a look at this vintage holiday car ad:

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Look familiar? Or take this non-holiday ad:

Why do these women have to beg their men for cars? Because many can't afford to buy cars outright, but before the 1970s, women, minorities, and low-income families were excluded from credit products. Women in particular were denied loans based on social biases such as the idea that their salaries weren’t dependable because they would become pregnant and stop working. Not to mention that many women didn’t even have their own incomes; in 1950, only 34 percent of women were in the workforce.

These days, women make up almost half of the workforce. Thanks to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, they can take out as many car loans as any man. And while only four percent of husbands made less than their wives in 1970, by 2007 that percentage had risen to 22. A quarter of households are headed by women. Yet even with women having made such strides in income and the ability to make purchases equally with their husbands, this ad celebrates a man who buys his wife a car without permission as if she is helpless to do so.

Nothing says "happy holidays" like some old timey sexism that assumes women can't buy themselves a car when they want one.

Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

If women continue to be penalized for flexible work needs and depended upon for household and childcare duties, they will continue to face impossible choices.

Women have made huge strides in the workforce, now accounting for half of it. But our policies haven't kept up with them. That fact was made strikingly clear by a story today about Michèle A. Flournoy, the chief policy adviser to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and one of the highest-ranking women in the history of the Pentagon, stepping down from her job to "rebalance" her life and spend more time with her children. The article cites the fact that she "is often at the Pentagon from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily, plus many weekends, a typical work schedule for a top Defense Department official."

As women have made strides in the workforce, they are heavily congregated in the public sector, working for governments at every level. They make up 61 percent of the workers at the local level, 52 percent at the state level, and 43 percent at the federal level. Why have women flocked to the public sector? Because just as for minorities, historically it was a place that welcomed them, more so than the private sector. But even as the percentages make clear, women's involvement slows down the further up you go, from local to federal.

Why this drop off? There was a big to-do in September over whether the Obama administration is a woman-friendly work environment. But what may be more to the point is that few work environments are friendly to women's family obligations, including the federal government. Its policies haven't caught up to the needs of its female employees.

The U.S. is still among a very small handful of countries that don't mandate paid maternity leave, keeping company with no industrialized countries -- just Papua New Guinea, Lesotho, and Swaziland. In 2010, 44 million workers lacked access to paid sick days, which means that even if a child is too sick to go to school, a mother can lose her job to stay home and care for her. And flexible workplace policies, which it sounds like Flournoy desperately needed, are almost unheard of. A study by the Department of Labor found that under 30 percent of full-time workers can vary the times they begin and end their work day -- and only one-third of those, or 10 percent of the entire workforce, actually have official flextime policies at their place of work. So it's little wonder that even a government division like the Department of Defense would be one more workplace that wasn't able to accommodate a mother.

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The other side of the coin is Flournoy's husband. The article on her job transition briefly mentions him: "Ms. Flournoy is married to W. Scott Gould, a career naval officer who is No. 2 at the Department of Veterans Affairs." There's no mention of his hours or whether he considered leaving his position to be with their school-age children. That's pretty typical of most families: women in the U.S. still do the majority of housework and care work, even when they're employed. Employed women do twice the amount of housework as men. Women spend over an hour providing care to their children on an average day; men spend 26 minutes. If women are already expected to be the primary workers for this kind of labor while employed, why wouldn't it make sense for them to get rid of their jobs to focus on it full-time, rather than ask their husbands to do it?

Flournoy is certainly entitled to decide what's best for her family and to leave her job, but she harms both her own career and the paths she blazes for other women by doing so. Had she stayed in her current role, the story reports, she was widely seen as a "likely candidate to be the first female defense secretary years from now, when she would have more experience." By dropping out, she loses that experience and thus is not likely to advance. This is a big part of the leaky pipeline for many professions and why women have yet to make up our 50 percent share at the highest ranks.

And by not continuing on, she opens fewer doors for women to follow in her footsteps. She herself said in 2009, "The thing I feel the most is wanting to do well by the younger women who are counting on me to kind of open doors and blaze a trail for them." Her leaving is not a personal failing. It's a failing of our society to protect and support women workers and their needs.

Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.