Working Mothers: Who's Opting Out?
Weeks ago, I promised to launch a follow-up discussion, here at the Coffee House, growing from a New School panel about the “opt-out” debate: are mothers dropping out, or being pushed out, of the workforce? What are the labor statistics for moms as a whole? What are the trends among the more privileged women? Ours was an all-star panel—including Heather Boushey, Ellen Bravo, Linda Hirshman, Joan Williams, and a brilliant volunteer in the audience, Pamela Stone, each of whom has researched and written a great deal about working families. We had been talking 'at' each other in print and in pixels for quite awhile (and after the jump, I will give a brief outline of our previous main points.) But this was our first time discussing these issues *with* each other, in person. And with the help of the audience’s questions, we did indeed come to some new thoughts—both agreements and disagreements—about the questions at hand.
Here’s the full video of our panel. If I can figure out how to use video editing software, I will try to post key snippets later this week.
The story so far
In the beginning, there was Lisa Belkin’s article, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” ($$) New York Times Magazine, October 26, 2003. In that article, Belkin jump-started a century-long debate about women who work. Her semipersonal essay was featured with this banner: “Why Don’t More Women Get to the Top? They Choose Not To.” Inside, by telling stories about herself and eight other Princeton grads who no longer work full time, Belkin concluded that women were just too smart to believe that ladder-climbing counted as real success. This, understandably, got under some people’s skins. It was the most e-mailed Times article of the year. The magazine ran rutraged and laudatory letters for four weeks. It was critiqued on almost every prominent media Web site and online opinion magazine. If you google "The Opt-Out Revolution," and you'll get more than 42,000 hits. Clearly, the article was a marketing success.
Heather Boushey, then an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research and now a senior economist with Congress's Joint Economic Committee, immediately began publishing papers and popular articles exposing the misinterpreted statistics underlying this “trend” – while also publishing on the real dilemmas facing most working mothers: lack of child care options, lack of family friendly policies, increase in gender bias in employment, and bias when they try to return to work after maternity leave.
Then Linda Hirshman’s article “Homeward Bound,” The American Prospect, Dec. 2005, insisted that despite the outrage, it’s true: there is an “opt out” trend among women who are, as she puts it on her website, “privileged and educated.” She researched this by calling women whose marriages had been profiled in the New York Times Style pages, and concluded that: the real glass ceiling is at home; feminism changed the workplace but not men or how women relate to men; and, in our culturally conservative climate in which gender roles are being re-inscribed, that’s a major problem.
Her more controversial claims were that these women are betraying feminism, and that feminism has not been prescriptive enough about what’s liberation. Women must work outside the home, she wrote, because family doesn’t offer enough opportunity “for full human flourishing.” She expanded on all this in her book Get To Work, 2006. I quote from the intro: “The abandonment of the public world by women at the top means the ruling class is overwhelmingly male. If the rules are male, they will make mistakes that benefit males.”
Meanwhile, Joan Williams researched and then published an in-depth, academic-quality research study analyzing news coverage of working mothers’ issues, “’Opt Out’ or Pushed Out? How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict: The Untold Story of Why Women Leave The Workforce.” In doing so she analyzed and critiqued 119 print news stories that discuss women leaving the workforce, noting that they focused overwhelmingly on the most elite sector; emphasized the “pull” of family life rather than the “push” of unfriendly workplaces; made it sound unrealistically easy to reenter the workforce; and ignored the longterm consequences of this short-term “choice.” She further pointed out some of these articles’ common statistical errors—for instance, despite the bias toward elite women, better-educated women are more likely to be in the labor force than less educated women—and noted that news sources tend to treat this trend as “traditional” when it most definitively is not.
I then did some additional reporting based on Joan’s study, publishing articles in the Columbia Journalism Review and The Washington Post, looking at problems with the “moms go home” stories, and looking at the media marketing machine that keeps pushing them out—because anxiety sells to women. However, “the opt out revolution” is a false “trend.” Since 2000, the percentage of working mothers with infants has held steady at 53.5 percent, according to a February 2007 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When they can afford it, married women with infants take maternity leaves of a year or so, but then head steadily back to work: 75 percent of mothers with school-age children are on the job. Most work because they have to. And most of their stay-at-home peers don't hold it against them. But the moms-go-home and mommy-war stories keep coming back, like stalkers, because the mommy war—like any war—is good for the news business. It sells newspapers, magazines, TV shows and radio broadcasts. I also noted that there’s a different quality of reporting for men’s job difficulties and women’s job difficulties. Fathers getting pushed off the job? That’s reported on under the topics of labor, globalization, world trade, public issues all. But mothers getting pushed off the job? That’s reported on as private emotional choices. In other words, women are seen as having personal lives even in the same arenas in which men are seen as having public lives. But here’s the key point (as I wrote about in this post here last spring): 70 percent of American children are growing up in families with all adults in the workforce. When the demands facing working families are posited as personal issues for individual mothers rather than as a major public policy issue for a 21st century economy, each family must tackle these issues alone.
Meanwhile, Ellen Bravo published her book Taking on the Big Boys, which looks at this and other forms of discrimination against women on the job. Unlike those of us who are primarily pointy-headed thinkers, Ellen is a real-life grassroots activist who has tackled these issues on the ground for all her working life. She now coordinates a network of state coalitions working to expand family-friendly policies, especially paid sick days and family leave insurance. Her book looks at the problem of mis-framing on all women’s issues, including working family issues, contending that if you don't name a problem correctly, you can never solve it.
I have my own favorite moments from the panel. I'm hoping that the panelists will reprise their ideas here, and tell us what struck them most forcefully during the panel. And I hope Coffeehouse readers who actually take the time to view it tell us theirs.
This week, the panelists will be jumping in with their follow-up comments to our discussion—and their own thoughts about what we accomplished, or how we moved our conversation forward, during the panel. (Later this week I will try to do the same, and will also post some of the questions we were asked by the audience—just to offer more potential follow-up.) I have no doubt that you TPMCafe denizens will jump in to comment and add questions as well. I can't wait to see what you all have to say!
That was a very helpful summary. Thank you.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
November 26, 2007 1:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, John!
EJ
November 26, 2007 2:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Advice from a mother of sons to other people's daugters (although I have to admit that I wish her sons had taken the first part of her advice.)
SUMMIT IN WASHINGTON;
Family First, Mrs. Bush Tells Friend and Foe at Wellesley 44
By FOX BUTTERFIELD, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: June 2, 1990
LEAD: Barbara Bush today gently confronted seniors at Wellesley College who had protested her choice as their commencement speaker, telling them that husbands and children are ultimately more important than careers.
Barbara Bush today gently confronted seniors at Wellesley College who had protested her choice as their commencement speaker, telling them that husbands and children are ultimately more important than careers.
''As important as your obligations as a doctor, a lawyer or a business leader may be,'' said Mrs. Bush, with her fellow speaker, Raisa M. Gorbachev, seated behind her, ''your human connections with spouses, with children, with friends, are the most important investment you will ever make.
''At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal,'' said Mrs. Bush, wearing a black academic gown. ''You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend or a parent.''
A Spouse of Another Stripe
But Mrs. Bush softened her lecture on family values with wit. ''Who knows,'' she told the graduating seniors, their family members and professors, ''somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps and preside over the White House as the President's spouse.''
Then, after a pause, she added, ''And I wish him well.”
November 26, 2007 4:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
As a single dad (for the past 12 years), I'm growing more than a little weary of the assumption that only women are responsible for childcare.
Even on liberal blogs such as this one, it's pretty much taken for granted that men don't have to deal with these issues.
I'm not sure it's consistent to rail against gender bias in one sentence, then make broad gender-based assumptions in the next.
November 26, 2007 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Women must work outside the home, she wrote, because family doesn’t offer enough opportunity “for full human flourishing.”
I sympathize with Hirschman's position, not so much for the "full human flourishing" reasons, but because of the importance of economic independence. (Which, one hopes, might incorporate some temporary "opting out" by parents, without getting pushed out of the workforce. But women and men will have to demand those options, which will require more women refusing the status quo, I suspect...)
It doesn't get emphasized enough, I think, the ways in which our cultural expectations are shaped by hundreds of years of women's enforced economic dependence on men. I doubt that we will get past sexism in a capitalist society until women have acquired more economic power.
When a group of people is viewed as economically dependent, they also tend to be viewed as children. Along with that, for women, comes stuff like being treated as sexual property, and the general fear and derision of things feminine.
If your spouse beats the crap out of you, and you are economically dependent on your spouse, what do you do?
The cultural fallout from that situation alone, repeated over and over again with women as the economically dependent spouse across the centuries, is huge. (It's a difficult situation today. And back in the day, whoa, a wife might not even be legally allowed to leave her husband.) As a mother in that situation, what do you teach your female children about surviving in the world? As a male child in that situation, what do you learn about women?
I wouldn't presume to tell any individual woman what to do with her life, but I would say that in the aggregate, women need jobs and power, both economic and political.
If you can't take care of yourself economically, are you really free?
November 28, 2007 4:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem with EJGraf is she couldn't ever possibly accept that the "opt-out" could be real because it cuts against her entire ideology.
Personally, I'm open to it being true or false statistically, though I'm certain on an individual basis there are women (and men) who prefer to "opt-out" and others who "opt-in." Personality type and societal norms have a lot to do with it, and it wouldn't surprise me if a larger number of women choose to "opt-out" because they can, and have other skills in high demand. If men could get pregnant and breast feed, many more would probably choose to "opt-out" too.
And why is Graff so obsessed with defining women and men to meet her world view? If another woman wants to opt-out, or man for that matter, what's it to her?
I think it's rather sad that people like Graff seemed obsessed with proving that women are just like men in every way they find positive, and dissimilar in every way they find negative. If we're talking about career enthusiasm and competitiveness or some other perceived positive, then they'll insist women are in every way the same as men. But if it's a discussion about violence or a perceived negative, they'll insist that women are different, being more nurturing, less aggressive, and so on. And if you discuss a crossroads where the two intersect, such as a woman's choice to either aggressively pursue a career, or be a nurturer to children and homemaker, people like Graff will insist that women statistically are actually just as aggressive as men in careers, and nurture the children and make the home, and are better managers in the workplace, at the same time as they're aggressively shooting for the top, being only held back by the glass ceiling, due to the great injustice of misogyny of course.
Individual people can be aggressively trying to get to the top, and nurturers, and homemakers, and beloved by fellow employees, and everything else all at the same time? And such totally superior people can be continually held back by the evil, but totally inferior, misogynists?
Come on. It's all such baloney. There have to be some trade offs.
November 29, 2007 12:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting that you should assign such thoughts to me. A number of feminists (Linda Hirshman, for instance) tend to think I'm insufficiently hard on women who don't go full speed ahead on their careers. I'm not so big on judging who should want what; hey, we're all different, who am I to presume how you should live your life? Rather, I'm interested in the social structures that push people to behave in certain ways, based on their categories ... and that interpret that behavior according to some ideology rather than based on the facts of the actual situation (i.e., "mothers want to stay home" as opposed to "women get pushed out of the workforce once they have children, by a variety of social forces.")
I don't think I ever use the word "misogyny," since it doesn't convey the kind of normal subtle social/psychological forces that I'm talking about, and which the cognitive psych people have been exploring. Lemme know if I slipped up somewhere. (By normal social/psych forces, I mean things like the studies that show that a comparable job application will be graded as less worth hiring or promoting if the candidate is perceived as a woman with children (as compared to the same resume for a man with or without children, or a woman without children).)
All these I've referenced elsewhere, if you wanna see them. Check out my CJR article & my Working Families post from last spring to see more on what I actually think. Links are in my post, above. Or see Joan Williams' work generally. Or go to my Institute's website, www.brandeis.edu/investigate.
EJG
November 29, 2007 12:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
It seems fairly obvious to me that the author of this post doesn't think that only women should be responsible for childcare. I mean, that's kind of the whole point, isn't it?
And she certainly doesn't seem to think that only women have to deal with these issues, since the post speaks directly to "fathers getting pushed off the job." (That many more women than men leave jobs to take care of children, though, is made plain by the statistics.)
But the proposition being discussed is a generally popular notion captured in an article titled "Why Don’t More Women Get to the Top? They Choose Not To." Calling that proposition into question pretty much requires talking about women.
When the "Why Don't More Men Get to the Top? They Choose Not To" proposition becomes viable as a topic for debate due to women wielding outsize political and economic power relative to men, we will be living in a different world. Right now we are not in it.
November 29, 2007 2:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
If the implications of that were actually true, I don't think you'd claim a misogynistic/coercive bias in our society as the automatic causation of statistical skews in the workforce, as you've done repeatedly, and is a frequent theme of your posts.
And the avoidance of the word misogyny isn't fooling anyone when it's written between the lines in every speech that was given. The opening speaker discussed male bias and injustice to women in the system, and all the speakers focused almost exclusively on coercive forces against women. You're now saying the glass ceiling is in the home, making husbands the new (ongoing?) misogynists. Come on. It's all women are victims, men oppress women in the workplace, the home, and everywhere else. Get serious.
Alleging everything is caused by misogyny without actually saying the word, while speaking before an almost exclusively female audience, at New College of all places, is about as subtle and clever as Bush failing to directly mention how the "gays" are ruining Western civilization at a fundie mega church, while continually dropping phrases like "family values."
So, let's be clear, are you seriously allowing for the possibility that women may freely choose to opt-out in greater numbers? And not merely malicious causes, glass ceilings (in the home or workplace) force outs, and so on?
And by extension do you accept that will in turn skew labor statistics, and especially top-flight career paths, towards male bias? In other words, do you allow for some truth to the opt-out theory?
If so, do you concede complete gender parity would not be a rational goal, as there would in fact be freely chosen and real differences?
And furthermore, where do the vast majority of your peers and social network register on that subject, and what would you say is the dominant theme in "ongoing" movement feminism, third wave or whatever?
Please answer those questions directly.
And please, no artful dodges about existing injustice preventing one from theorizing what might occur in utopia, because I don't see any such restraint when speculating it's all due to misogyny and victimization in some form or another.
*****
I actually watched your New College video, and despite a few chuckles as it was referred to as a university with the implication such discussions are finally receiving legitimacy (which couldn't be further from the truth, as New College is considered pretty disreputable and fringe with poor academic standards, including by liberals of the left end of the spectrum) the reoccurring theme was the notion that there was a coercive and misogynistic force removing women from the workplace, and that _alone_ was emphasized as the explanation for the opt-out trend. It was variously referred to as the "force-out" and so on.
The references to Marxist dogma, the "petite bourgeoisie" the labor movement faux controversy, the backslapping, was really just the icing on the cake. It's rather sad to see so many supposedly serious intellectuals so happy to be home, backslapping and networking like Ralph Reed at a mega-church. So much for rigorous debate.
Regardless, the repeated harping on supposedly malicious causations, fails to account for the possibility of multiple causations and real differences, which are generally anathema to movement feminists who fear it's conceding ground, and therefore take intellectually dishonest hardliner stances.
It's the same broken record of intellectually dishonest and zealous feminism which has turned off the vast majority of people including the left. Which is why such discussions are held before small audiences before mostly women's studies majors at places like New College, and not taken seriously by others concerned about the issues, even at other accredited and prestigious liberal universities.
I'd also add your phone-in participant made one of the few serious points, that feminism had been rather over-zealous and unrealistic by failing to prepare women for the realities of attempting to have children and a career, their cake and eat it too. I could add extensively to the list of myths pandered to feminists in the 60's onwards, which generally failed to pan out.
Unfortunately, again showing the lack of intellectual seriousness, such criticism is only tolerated because immediately the blame is shifted again to misogyny; and the proposed solution was simply that government fix it, through more maternity leave and so on, which had already been cited as examples of injustice to women. Which again I'm overall for, but it's not likely going to be a complete solution, and there are still going to have to be trade offs between career and family life, even in a perfect world. Which again, nobody in your group is serious enough to admit or explore at length, or question the victim dogma of feminism.
In France for example, which has wonderfully family friendly leave policies, women still choose to opt-out, or opt-in to home-making, more. Which of course most movement feminists again dismiss as French misogyny, in so many words, and refuse to consider it might be a natural outcome.
November 30, 2007 12:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
So?
Barbra Bush is obviously a terrible person in too many ways to count. And her family values agenda is certainly way too conservative for my tastes. And the jab at Clinton was nasty. But that doesn't make everything she says automatically wrong either.
Frankly, the idea that having children, as a deliberate choice and responsibility, which should be a person's primary responsibility if they undertake it.... Is that really controversial?
If a man said that, like if for example Steve Jobs said something to the extent of how valuable his family was to him, and that he always put it first, even before his power career, who wouldn't gush? Even if it was BS, people would still probably gush. Who doesn't thank their spouse and family first when accepting an award?
So Bush said child rearing, once undertaken, is of primary responsibility. So? Isn't that obvious? It's rather pathetic people are so knee-jerky and ideological.
****
Btw, All of my responsible, career oriented, liberal friends have said pretty much the same thing when having children. That's including couples graduated from top universities, with PhD in hard sciences, with dual income high power careers.
They all say nurturing and diaper-changing can't wait, that having children basically takes over your life and that it's an extremely difficult juggling act between parenting and career, and that it's hard for a career person to be constantly on-call to family duties, and that one parent probably has to absorb more parenting duties so the other can be on-call for work to pay the bills.
And every couple I know who set out to be totally enlightened, liberal, 21st century co-parents, soon discover that when the baby cries in the night, it doesn't want dad, it wants mom's breast. I have a friend who expressed his remorse that he simply couldn't bond with his infant boy the way he had hoped to, how the mother was, because they have an intimacy during breast feeding that he simply can't match. And so, when the baby has needs, it intuitively wants mom. Later in life, that'll change, as the boy grows up and wants dad-ish things.
But the point is that real world child raising isn't this wonderfully PC, gender neutral thing a lot of ideologues would like it to be. There are some biological realities which aren't gender neutral.
November 30, 2007 10:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Still waiting for a response to the above questions, and still noticing that EJ Graf is unable to even acknowledge the possibility of some truth to the Opt-Out. I don't blame her, as she'd probably be lynched by peers. So much for intellectual rigor and free speech in her version of feminism.
She did, along with her panel of self described proscription feminists, repeatedly deride it as the "push-out" and other obvious examples of the same old victim/angst mindset. Because she's open minded like that. Which is typical also of the intellectual honesty of so called third-wave feminists who are typically the old proscriptive second-wave repackaged in "bitch" tees and makeup but relying heavily on a grotesquely paranoid and distorted Dworkinite world view based in victimization and angst.
December 6, 2007 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
btw, I noticed in the video and in your comments you've repeatedly claimed books like "opt-out" are part of a conspiracy to market to women's "anxiety" which seems to be a meme you're comfortable with.
It's also just about the epitome of hypocrisy and self serving intellectual dishonesty.
First of all, large numbers of women are in fact rather tired of hearing from proscriptive feminists, such as your self described peers, that they're inferior and not leading full enough lives if they choose to opt-out of the power career track. In fact, for decades, large numbers of women have been telling movement feminists they're sick of it and leaving movement feminism for exactly that reason.
Secondly, I know the kind of people who attend New College, and buy your books. And these are the most anxious, and frankly paranoid and dysfunctional people I've ever met. A pretty typical caricature is someone with serious social issues, often hypersensitive emotionally, with a shelf full of self-help and feminist victim dogma, who then goes to New College while working at a cafe or some other job they hate passionately, usually after some years of heavy drinking and smoking while occasionally attending CC, who then graduates to be unemployed, and move to Humbolt or Oregon or such, or goes into social services, which usually attracts a caliber of person up there with the DMV.
If anyone has been making women anxious, paranoid, confused, and dis-empowered while profiting by the angst they're sowing, its movement feminists. In fact, I believe that's the whole premise of 3rd wave feminism, that they need to stop doing that. Only they can't help it because they don't actually have any serious intellectuals or solutions, and if you take away victim and misogyny dogma from these demagogues, they've got nothing. So, most continue the practice, including your self described peers, as 3rd wave is still rooted in the victim complex of second wave which must see misogyny everywhere, so long as it continues selling books to emotionally dysfunctional and confused women.
And that you say you're less zealous and not as bad as your peers... how telling.
We were long overdue for a book rationally exploring women's options, including the "opt-out" of the career path, as a viable lifestyle choice with some admitted popularity. It's unfortunate movement feminism is too entrenched and rigid to appreciate it, and must see it as a threat to feminist orthodoxy.
Proving once again why movement feminism is unpopular across the spectrum, and third wave is for the most part still second wave, warmed over and repackaged.
And btw, you're misusing the term prescriptive. Condemning home-making is not prescription, it's the same old proscriptive feminism of the second-wave. I think you would benefit from education in terminology somewhere outside New College and institutions and fields known for lax academic standards.
December 6, 2007 4:50 PM | Reply | Permalink