So Mothers Are Opting Out of the Workplace
It seems that new data from the US Bureau of Labor is showing that more moms--at every income level--are taking time off from work to be with their kids. According to Shellenbarger, the data shows that women are staying out of the work force for one to three years, versus the longer breaks in the past.
Shellenbarger stresses that the women are returning to the workforce, and I'm sure the many feminist academics (who attacked the New York Times magazine's famous article on women "opting out" as reactionary and a distortion of the data) will chime in that the real message is that women aren't leaving permanently--just temporarily, like the European women do (although without the government support that European women get).
But I'm willing to bet that many of these women--if they, indeed, return---will go back part-time, or to slower-track jobs that afford them more family time and flexibility. Even Shellenbarger's article has anecdotes that seem to reflect that. What I'm seeing all around me is a general downshifting among women after having kids. So even those who are in the workforce are working part-time or at these slower track jobs. "Where have all the ambitious women gone?" a friend of mine once asked.
I know that conservative types are going to seize on this data as proof that mothers just are drawn to the home, that we really are essentially different from fathers in that way. But I don't think the movement home isn't quite for the reasons that conservatives would have, or that the journalist Lisa Belkin suggested in her infamous New York Times magazine article about "women opting out" of a few years ago. It isn't simply a matter of individual "choice." Our choices are inevitably constrained by the culture, so while women may be talking about their "choice" to quit work for a few years and stay at home, you have to look at what their realistic options were.
Our country is notable in the western, industrialized world for providing absolutely no social supports: quality child care is horrendously expensive and hard to find, paid maternity leave is ridiculously short (six weeks versus the six months and longer many European nations offer), and most workplaces offer limited or no flexibility, based on the 1950s assumption that there is a spouse at home.
For many American women, their "choices" are to go back to a full time 40 plus hour a week job six weeks after giving birth and put their baby in a less-than-wonderful day care center or hire an expensive nanny who may be illegal or less than reliable, or they can quit their job. That isn't much of a choice.
Stumble It!
posted by pam at 8:51 PM
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