The XX Factor: What women really think.

Why Opting Out Still Has Not Been Proven False

A post from DoubleX writer Linda Hirshman:

The really elite women opt out at almost the same rate as the poor and uneducated ones. So the "over $100,000" slice beloved of the opt-out debunkers isolates the most working of all the women surveyed. Hardly the material for mythmaking ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

The Debunking of the Opt-Out Myth

A post from DoubleX Staff:

DoubleX is starting a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: A recent Census report refutes the idea that large numbers of women are quitting successful careers to become stay-at-home moms ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

The Complicated Calculus of Careers and Children

A guest post from Sharon Lerner:

Of course abortion and birth control have a large role in bringing down our fertility rate in America, as they have elsewhere. (I have spent much of the past decade-and-a-half writing about both.) But there is no need to be reductive; this is not an either/or issue. There are many factors contributing to the decline in fertility, including both the ability to control when and whether to become mothers and the policies that affect mothers’ quality of life ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Rough Mothers Are Everywhere

"She Would Have Made a Fantastic Anything"

In the excerpt of his memoir that ran in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Christopher Buckley says of his mother:

She would have made a fantastic spy. Really, she would have made a fantastic anything. She was beautiful, theatrical, bright as a diamond, the wittiest woman I have ever known...She could have done anything; instead, she devoted herself, heart, soul and body, to being Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr. (A full-time job.)

Christopher the son doesn't link his mother's roads not taken to her "serial misbehavior," as he calls her bitter upbraiding of dinner guests and anyone else who stumbled into her lair at the wrong moment. But to me, the connection makes itself. We all know women of Pat Buckley's generation—she had Christopher in the 1950s—who poured themselves into their marriages instead of their careers. And who were ever frustrated, on some level, as a result. Because despite that reassuring "A full-time job," was it really, in a satisfying way?

And does that whole debate belong to the past, or will we see a similar pattern, in decades to come, from educated women my age (thirtysomethings) who opt out of work to raise their kids? (Without entering into the fight about whether their numbers are growing or shrinking or in any way represent a revolution, I'm stipulating that there are some.) If you're a full-time Mrs. today, you are choosing from among a set of alternatives that Pat Buckley didn't really have? Maybe that changes the calculus in the future as well as the present. Or maybe not. Thoughts?

Opted Out or Pushed Away?

SWF Seeks Bright Lights, Big City

This week's renewed discussions about women "opting out" of the work force—or being forced out—make me think of Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That." It's about her life in 1950s New York as a twentysomething, when the city emblematized endless possibility, even though she was making very little money. She loved her career and reveled in the sensory experiences of just being there. And then her attitude toward the city soured with age, when she realized "that not all of the promises would be kept."

I was reminded of Didion's journey to disillusionment when I came across a couple studies about women's success and happiness this week. The first (which is new only to me) was a New York Times article from last summer about how young women in their twenties actually out-earn men in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and several other big cities. These women have more education than their male city peers and are less likely to be married and raising a family than their suburban female counterparts.

The second study (by USC's Richard Easterlin and Anke Plagnol of the University of Cambridge), forthcoming in the Journal of Happiness Studies, found that women overall are happier than men—until the age of 48. The authors measured happiness as a combination of financial and family satisfaction, and men exceeded women in the first category at the age of 41 and in the second at 64. This seems to suggest that somewhere between 41 and 48, women are more satisfied with their family situation than with their finances. Now add in the conclusions of the previous study of urban women—are young women happiest when facing bright prospects unrelated to their family situation or marital status? Or has the availability of greater professional opportunities simply postponed women's frustrations with the working world?

Is It "Moms Go Home"—or "Moms, Go Home!!" ?

Emily, I do understand what you and Linda are saying: It's demeaning to dismiss what women say about their lives as lying or mere rationalization. But I'm not suggesting that. I do know that both women and men say that they want to spend more time with their families (and not just when they are politicians who've been caught with their hands in the cookie jar). But for women, that explanation for leaving a job is socially acceptable, while for men it's appalling (except for the aforementioned politicians). Women are pushed in that direction by social structures, including stereotypes that have been peddled and internalized over a lifetime—for instance, by New York Times articles that say that say women leave their jobs to stay home with the kids, reinscribing that cultural narrative.

To Linda's point: I'm not proposing, as you say, that "the findings about working-class women apply to elite women." My post said nothing about your work, because I wasn't concerned with your work; my concern is with the New York Times' long history of treating women's economic lives as personal rather than public. You are writing about what elite women should and shouldn't do. I care about the pundits and policymakers who are influenced by articles about the elite women—and who make policy based on those anecdotal stories that then is applied to all women.

But news media coverage only about that side of things ignores important other factors at work, like subtle and overt discrimination, that women may be less willing to acknowledge to themselves. A story: A friend of mine got a promotion after her partner, the biomom, gave birth to their child. The co-mom concluded that her boss was a little mind-boggled about exactly how to treat her—and ended up treating her as a "dad," someone who needed a promotion and a raise to support her wife and new baby. That would be consistent with how researchers have found women and men are treated after a child is born: There's a "mommy penalty" and a "daddy bonus." For instance, in experimental reviews of comparable résumés, women with children are less likely to be hired,pare paid less, are more likely to be fired, and are allowed fewer absences or late arrivals than women without children or than men with or without children ... while men with children are treated better than men without.

The social scientists I interviewed all agreed that Lisa Belkin's "research" method—asking people after the fact why they did what they did—was invalid and would never pass peer review. (This would be true as well of Linda's questioning of NYT Styles section brides, although Linda, your goal is different than Belkin's, which is why I am not writing about your work: Your goal is to warn and counsel young elite women about navigating the hazards ahead, and you succeed admirably.) But basic social science and the new neurobiology have consistently shown that post-facto explanations for behavior are unreliable: Healthy people settle on the most livable and socially comfortable story. To find out why people actually do what they do requires prospective, not retrospective, research into what they are thinking as they are making their decisions, not after the decision has been made—as well as into studies of comparable populations' behavior with variables changed. This isn't saying that people lie; it's saying that the human psyche is complicated and resilient and that our internal story is shaped by many factors.

But here's my bigger beef with the news media on this story: Women's economic lives are covered as personal issues ... while men's economic lives are covered as public issues. Moms out of work = style section; dads out of work = business section. That's just appalling. There is no going back to June and Ward Cleaver; the American economy desperately needs to adapt to reality. Flip the issue, and consider the fact that 80 percent of American children are living in households in which all adults are in the work force. That leads to an entirely different set of public policy discussions than does the "moms just wanna go home" storyline.

I will now indulge myself and quote my CJR article here:

... yes, maybe some women "chose'"to go home. But they didn’t choose the restrictions and constrictions that made their work lives impossible. They didn’t choose the cultural expectation that mothers, not fathers, are responsible for their children’s doctor visits, birthday parties, piano lessons, and summer schedules. And they didn’t choose the bias or earnings loss that they face if they work part-time or when they go back full-time.

By offering a steady diet of common myths and ignoring the relevant facts, newspapers have helped maintain the cultural temperature for what [researcher Joan Williams] calls “the most family-hostile public policy in the Western world.” On a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, afterschool programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. ... And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on nineteenth century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?

The moms-go-home story’s personal focus makes as much sense, according to [Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers], as saying, "Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous."

Hurray again to Uchitelle and the NYT for doing it right this time.  

The Tangle of Opt-Out Rationales

E.J. and Linda, I'm glad you're reprising your debate, because I'm titillated by this new data about women dropping out of the workforce, paired with Heather Boushey's explanation: "When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement. ... We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.” I'm struck, as I am whenever this comes up, by how deeply some of us are invested in one explanation over the other. Lisa Belkin's 2003 thesis, that highly educated women were quitting work because, well, they just wanted to, was anathema to a lot of feminists. They (to a degree me included) just wanted her to be wrong. But of course she's not wrong entirely—in upper-middle-class circles, there are women who say their choices are driven by disaffection with the work they had and affection for taking care of husand and kids. E.J. has an interesting explanation for why they should frame their decisions in this way, and amen to her point that it's a mistake to let this small cohort of women stand for the whole. Linda responds, here in the Fray, that she doesn't see a link between the problems the economic downturn has created for lower-income women, and the conclusion that bad times are also the reason that well-off women drop out, since "the low wages and layoffs did not affect elite workplaces, where wages and demand continued to rise."

I'm eager to hear Boushey's response to this—I have a call in to her—and E.J., yours too. In the meatime, aren't all the explanations correct, to one degree or another, and isn't the argument really about how much various groups of women's choices are affected more by one (hooray for staying home) over another (I'd work if I had better childcare, more flexible hours)? I see why the numbers matter: If all women were staying home for one clear reason—or if lower-income women tended to have one reason, and higher-income women tended to have a different one—that would tell us a lot about where we're at, culturally speaking, and perhaps about the policy prescriptions we'd advocate for. But will it ever sort out neatly? So often, it seems to me, these intimate and difficult decisions are made for a tangle of reasons that shift over time.

Not Lying to You, Lying to Themselves—or, What Mother Will Say She Hates Being Home?

Oh Linda, are we going to go round on this again? You and I have had this discussion in person and in print. Those Sunday Styles women with children who told you they were "opting out" weren't lying to you; they were fully engaged in the very healthy psychological strategy of wanting what they had. Given the constraints facing them—hostile and inflexible workplaces, internal and social expectations that they (and not their husbands) were responsible for their children's well-being and daily schedules, sudden triggering off the "moms can't work" stereotype in the behavior of those around them (and probably a silent withdrawal of good assignments, promotion opportunities, and the like)—these women "chose" to stay home with their kids. Of course they fell in love with the children—but that wasn't the only force at work. Take any psych class and you will learn about this phenomenon: It's often called "sour grapes," but it's really very healthy. What, they're going to say: I hate spending my life stuck with snot-nosed screaming kids all day, I miss having adult conversations, but I was too angry at my condescending colleagues to accept the cut-rate hours and mommy-penalized pay and insane stress of making everyone happy—just for a few early years? (Most, of course, had a false idea of how easy it would be to get back into a good job—in part because of those rosy "opt-out" articles, as Joan Williams has documented in such detail.) Nope, they "chose" to stay home, as expected.

But what if those elite women (and men!!) had had some better choices—early childhood education and school schedules that match 21st-century workdays, less demanding hours, and the like? Then many of them, male and female, would "choose" reasonable, high-paying, well-respected, career-track work that also gave them some flexibility to care for their families. I had a long list of women tell me this when I interviewed them: If they were single mothers, they bit the bullet and took all the insulting treatment to keep feeding their kids. But if they were married to men with high-paying jobs, those who could sometimes bailed out.

As a point of fact, however, high-education women are more likely to be working once they have kids (presumably because they can afford better child-care options) than are the women for whom earnings are more marginal. If you press me on this I can find the correct BLS table; don't have it at hand (and I have another deadline just now!).

Most important, however, is that the Times has stopped peddling the suggestion that Lisa Belkin's Princeton-grad friends stand in for a wide swath of American working women. Uchitelle's coverage (and the front-page placement!!) is much more promising for the kind of working-family-friendly policies needed for this country's economic growth. I want the newspapers of record to talk about most people, rather than the few, when they're guiding our pundits' and policymakers' thinking.

Linda Hirshman on Opting Out

A guest post from Linda Hirshman, author of Get to Work:

XX Factor is full of talk of how the Times just corrected its 2003 opt-out story about why women quit their jobs (it's the economy, stupid). Short version: Female factory workers' wages decline and they won't work for less. Then they cover their decision with talk of falling in love with their babies.

I don't know about Lisa Belkin, who wrote the most famous version,  but I feel compelled to remind Slate's readers that her opt-out story was about high class dames, many her Princeton classmates, workers at the Maytag plant not so much. The women who announced their weddings in the New York Times and inspired me to tell them to Get (back) to Work, similarly tony bunch. Unclear to me why these stories are rebutted by a study of the working class, not to diss the working class, but during the recent economic bad stuff, Princeton grads didn't actually experience wage cuts. Here's the estimable Wikipedia on what happened to the classes, rather than the masses:

Considering how education significantly enhances the earnings potential of individuals, it should come as no surprise that individuals with graduate degrees have an average per capita income exceeding the median household income of married couple families among the general population ($63,813).[21][22] . . . While educational attainment did not help reduce the income inequality between men and women, it did increase the earnings potential of individuals of both sexes, greatly enabling many households with (a) graduate degree householder(s) to enter the top household income quintile.[21]

Household income also increased significantly with the educational attainment of the householder. The US Census Bureau publishes educational attainment and income data for all households with a householder who was aged twenty-five or older. The biggest income difference was between those with some college education and those who had a Bachelor's degree, with the latter making $23,874 more. Income also increased substantially with increased post-secondary education. While the median household income for a household with a household holding an Associates degree was $51,970, the median household income for those with a Bachelor's degree or higher was $73,446. Those with doctorates had the second highest median household with a median of $96,830; $18,289 more higher than that for those at the Master's degree level, but $3,170 lower than the median for households with a professionals degree holding householder.[18]

Congressional economists say that babies don't predict dropouts, even among the top earners, but they are bailing for some reason, and  it sure ain't plant closings at Debevoise. I tend not to think that women are lying to me when I interview them. Maybe the laid-off washer-makers tell sociologists they love their babies when they actually just hate their paychecks, but I don't think the Times brides were having me on.

The Opt-Out Myth—or, the New York Times Gets It Right This Time

Thanks, Meghan, for the pointer to Louis Uchitelle's sharp article in the NYT, noting that women have achieved a new and unwanted equality: equality in unemployment during and after a downturn. At long last we have a front-page correction to the opt-out myth—a myth that the Times has been peddling since 1952, when it first started publishing a decadeslong series of "Career Girls Just Wanna Go Home and Raise Babies" pieces. The most recent and most notorious iteration thereof was a 2003 Sunday Times Magazine article called "The Opt Out Revolution." Besides making many women spit out their coffee and fire off nasty e-mails, that article started up a whole industry of refutations. I published one such refutation in the Columbia Journalism Review last year, called "The Opt Out Myth"; you can find a footnoted version here, with links to some of the underlying social science research about how women get sidelined for "working while mother."

Kudos to Uchitelle for getting the story right—and to the NYT editors for putting it on the front page, above the fold!

Opting Out vs. Being Forced Out

The New York Times just posted an interesting story about women dropping out of the work force. It says that many economists now think that the supposed "opt out" movement has less to do with women's alleged desire to leave the work force and more to do with America's economic downturn. On Tuesday (tomorrow), a new congressional study will lay out all the data. As the Times reporter summarizes it:

The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. Ninety-six percent of the men held jobs in 1953, their peak year. That is down to 86.4 percent today. But while men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, that is often the assumption when women pull out.

As Heather Boushey, an economist who's written a lot about the opt-out movement, observes, women who lose their jobs and can't get another say that they're staying home with the kids—the implication being that saying so saves face. Whereas for a man that's not the case. Another economist observes that women's median wages have dropped since 2004. She notes that this is a relatively new experience for women in the work force—not since the 1970s has there been so prolonged a decline—perhaps making women more reluctant than their male peers to accept lower wages.