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The media's obsession with the "opt-out revolution" has become pretty annoying, but Jane Leber Herr of the University of Chicago has some interesting research on which educated women are most likely to drop out of the labor force and why. Fifteen years after graduation, doctors are much more likely to keep working than lawyers, who are more likely to keep working than women with MBAs. Data like those could just tell us something about the kinds of women who choose to pursue medical degrees and the kinds of women who opt for financial careers, but Herr thinks something more is going on. She controlled for "factors that might proxy for a woman's underlying taste for time at home with her children" and the value women place on their professional identities, but she still found the aforementioned differences to be statistically significant. One plausible conclusion is that family-friendly work alternatives generally are more available to educated women with, say, JDs than they are to women with MBAs.
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Dahlia, now I'm cracking up at the image of you racing off to give talks on work-life balance while two midgets yank at your coat begging you not to go. "Hands off! I have to go talk about work-life balance!"
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