I ran into a tired old phrase over there on Forbes.com the other day: “Opting out.”
Surely you’ve heard it. It refers to women who take a career-track detour. It’s a concept that won’t go away, implying that our choices are to go big or go home. That may be an actual choice for a a small number of women, but for most of us, it’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. Illusion rather than reality. And at that, a dangerous distraction.
Back at Forbes, writer Meghan Casserly bemoans the fact that “opting out” has become a catch phrase among women leaders who lament that we will never make it into the corporate suites if women continue to step off the ladder. And those words, they continue to confuse her:
… each time I hear the phrase, I have a very physical reaction. I stiffen up, I shut down. I often question her judgment entirely. Doesn’t the very phrase “opting out” imply making a choice? And more than making a choice, doesn’t opting imply making the preferred decision? How, then, can these bright so-called experts be criticizing women who make the decision to do what’s best for them, what’s best for their children? By focusing on the greater good of woman-kind, are we losing sight of the individual?
Interesting question, but not necessarily the one I would ask. I’ve opted in, out and all things in between and what I can tell you is this: It’s way more complicated than those two little words tend to imply. When my kids were small, I worked from home — only because I was lucky enough to have a career and family finances that allowed for it. When they grew up, I switched out magazine writing for teaching and what I realized was this: I never ever could have juggled the time crunch of being a full-time professor with raising a family without flipping out. To wit: there’s a reason male professors are more likely to have children than female professors, and even when the latter do have a family, it’s usually one child only.
This opt-out business began back in 2003 when Lisa Belkin wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine on a group of fast-track women who’d “opted out” of their high-flying careers once they had children. Ever since, a debate has raged as to whether or not the story reflected an actual trend, backed up by numbers, or was based on anecdotal information from a select group of women, but the phrase itself has earned a permanent place in the lexicon. The controversy flared back up, as we wrote in 2009, when the Washington Post reported on new census figures that seemed, at first glance, to debunk this so-called “mommy myth”:
A first census snapshot of married women who stay home to raise their children shows that the popular obsession with high-achieving professional mothers sidelining careers for family life is largely beside the point.
Census researchers said the new report is the first of its kind and was spurred by interest in the so-called “opt-out revolution” among well-educated women said to be leaving the workforce to care for children at home.
In other words, the census reports seemed to show that the vast majority of stay-at-home moms were not those who opted out – but more likely those who were never comfortably in. So case closed, right? But right after the report came out, several writers drilled down the numbers and found the snapshot to be a little more complex. WaPo blogger Brian Reid was one:
If you dig into the data, it does indeed show that, on average, stay-at-home moms are more likely to be young, foreign-born and less-educated than moms as a whole. But that’s hardly a stake in the heart of the idea that you’re seeing a lot of women with college degrees stepping out of the workforce. In fact, though college-educated moms are slightly less likely to be at-home moms, a whopping 1.8 million of the 5.6 million at-home moms have a college diploma. That’s hardly a “small population.”
Of course, the Census is interested in providing a snapshot of the current situation, not making a value judgment. I’ve taken the position that opting out of the workforce is not intrinsically bad: it’s only bad when parents are forced into it by a lack of other options. It’s clear that we’re still not living in a golden age of work flexibility: for too many moms and dads, there are only two choices:the 40+ hour week or the at-home option. I’d love to know where the numbers would go if there were ways to structure home and career with more precision.
Bingo. For all but a very few of us, our so-called choices to opt in or opt out are largely a matter of circumstance. One of them is a workplace that is often inhospitable to women and/or dual career families. Another is a social culture that still gives women ownership of the second shift. A third might be the reality check when we realize that when we bought into the “have it all” mantra, we were sold a bill of goods.
Back to that Forbes piece, Casserly quotes Pamela Stone, the author of Opting Out? and professor of sociology at Hunter College:
“The majority of women I’ve spoken to who have decided to stay home to raise children certainly frame their decision in terms of choices,” [Stone] says, “But when they told me their stories, the truth was very, very different.” Most of them had tried unsuccessfully to find flexibility with their employers—and here Stone stresses that the highly-educated successful women she researches often have serious leverage at the office—but found that even so they were mommy-tracked or saw their careers derailed. “They describe the decision as a choice,” she says, “But in the end it was a highly conflicted choice and truly a last resort.”
Precisely. And in fact, that’s what a number of the women we interviewed for our book told us. So here’s what I think: Instead of yammering about opting in or opting out and placing the weight of women’s progress on the backs of personal choices, wouldn’t our energy be better spent working for workplace and cultural changes that would benefit us all?
Barbara Kelley
Shannon Kelley
I just wanted to emphasise a point I rarely hear being, er, emphasised
What I find interesting about these kinds of debates and articles is that (when the woman does have the choice not to work, or to change careers etc) the discussion always seems to revolve around the woman’s desires/ needs/ choices rather than those of the CHILD.
No one would dream of suggesting a woman’s career is not going to suffer if she chooses to become a stay-at-home full time mother until her child is (at least approaching) teenage years.
And if you approached your boss with the idea of substituting yourself (a qualified, trained, experienced, well known, well integrated employee and highly valued and trusted member of the company and ‘team’) for an unspecified and unpredictable array of temps and caretakers who will take turns attempting to fill your shoes over the next decade, such a plan is unlikely to be received as a particularly satisfactory or even workable (not by anyone in the company, not just the boss)….
…. And yet….. suggest putting your child into daycare and in the hands of the state (ie schools) as well as (practically speaking) in from of the TV for much of the evening so you can carry on with your full time career and get home every evening exhausted as a result, and this is generally considered an acceptable and even a desirable ‘option’. (again I understand many mothers have no choice but to carry on working, I’m not talking about them).
My point is this:
The accepted wisdom seems to be that raising a child – raising a human being for those first ten years of his or her life! – is somehow a less difficult, less demanding, less highly skilled, less intensive, less important and less consequential a task than working full time in some office (or whatever the job entails).
We would NOT put our careers into ‘daycare’ for a decade and expect them not to suffer as a result. So why do we CHOOSE (when we have the option) to abandon full time motherhood in order to pursue a career? Do we (think we) believe the mother-child bond and deep interaction is not important in child raising after all? Where does this idea come from? Inside us or outside from society at large? Women’s magazines, Hollywood movies or perhaps our own parents? (and if so where did THEY get that idea from?)
The studies into child abandonment – even for a short period of time (or small number of hours per week) – appear conclusive. Children (especially infants) are adversely affected by abandonment both in the short term and long term (ie continuing right through their adult lives). This damage affects not only the child’s later life but (when combined) society in general. How many times have you ever heard anyone connect today’s ‘social ills’ *specifically* with the decline in full time parenting (ie not even one full time parent)? Shouldn’t that be one of the very FIRST factors to look at?!
If the majority of employees in a company went AWOL for most of the time over a ten year period we would expect that company to suffer greatly as a result. It would become a disorganised, dysfunctional, stressful mess. Yet when mothers start dumping their children into daycare en masse we wonder why children and teenagers end up with increasing psychological, developmental, social problems and why we end up with an increasingly dysfunctional society.
*Of course* this is a HUGE subject(s) and there are so many other complex variables for mothers, women in general and children. But I wnated to emphasise this because it seems that we can all get our heads around (for instance) more impersonal issues such as how a western diet (sugar, soda, caffeine, additives etc) might be adversely affecting our children’s behaviour and well being, and we can take steps to improve things on that front – but bringing up the idea of the need – the NEED – for full time motherhood in order to raise a child and it seems to trigger a very negative reflex action (an emotional trigger).
I’ll throw it out there that we have all been conditioned at a very deep level to view *full time motherhood* as a kind of euphemism for women’s enslavement and oppression by men….
And I would suggest that’s absolutely tragic for everyone – not least for children!
What if motherhood was viewed as being primarily about the child’s needs, needs which must always come before the mother’s desires? Options are one thing but so are responsibilities. Drunk driving is an option, safe driving is our responsibility. If the research shows that ‘detached parenting’ harms the development of a child (and I believe it does) then surely that makes it no different to smoking and drinking while pregnant (ie ‘responsibility’ trumps ‘option’).
What we consider acceptable/ responsible today may not always be thought of in the same way in the future. There was a time when it was socially acceptable to smoke when pregnant, and expectant mothers merrily puffed away.
So *WHY ISN’T* full time parenting by at least one parent (typically the mother) encouraged more, and valued more, and facilitated more in light of the evidence? Why do we live in a society where so many mothers are FORCED to work even thought they want to be at home raising their children full time?
Sadly, I think it’s completely obvious why. Ironically, being able to *raise our own children* is looking increasingly like the final and perhaps most difficult cause for women (and men) to fight for in this ‘oh so liberated’ age we now live in…
On a more upbeat vibe here’s a brilliant interview with Laurette Lynn – a self confessed ‘unplugged mom’ – from a few days ago. It’s long and chatty but a really fascinating and lively conversation.
Freedom for the Children! – The Unplugged Mom Plugs into Freedomain Radio – Part 1
Freedom for Humanity! – The Unplugged Mom on Freedomain Radio Part 2
(a part 3 is on its way apparently….)
That’s me done…. sorry to go on so long
I agree with abandonculture and would like to add to her point.
I truly believe that it is impossible to have a corporate high-flying career and bring up children at the same time. It may be possible to work part-time and look after your family at the same time, but in the corporate world, where working hours for a STARTING POSITION are 60 per week, I see no way of fitting in both a career and our family into our lives without having a breakdown.
It seems like ‘opting out’ of a career is viewed negatively by those who believe that gender equality = professional-achievement equality. Women now have equality of opportunity to be educated and to have a career, which is exactly what feminists at the beginning of the 20th century were fighting for. Now, it seems like women also want equality of outcome. But the outcome will NEVER be the same for men and women, because we are different by nature, we are different biologically. There are many ways in which we will NEVER be equal. And why should we strive to be so? Just because we are different, it doesn’t mean that this is a bad thing.
Striving to have a successful career is a relatively new obsession in Western society, and now women are using a successful career not only as a measurement of self-worth, but as a measurement of equality to men. It seems like the term ‘career’ is also used in a very success/status orientated way. I’ve never read anything saying “She had to decide between her passion for writing and being a full-time mum”. If our work is our passion, we will always find ways to fit it into our lives and we will never be bitter about it. If our work is just a career that brings us external approval/status/privileges, then picking between our career and our family is like regretting sacrificing our vanity over the health and happiness of our loved ones.
I know women who have been full-time mums their whole lives by their own choice. I know men who wish to be full-time dads, instead of having a full-time career. The real issue behind equality is not career, it is the reasoning behind our choices.
The only way that we can all be equal, the only way that all humans can be happy, is by using our equality of opportunity to make HONEST CHOICES based on our DEEPEST BELIEFS AND WISHES. If both men and women are able to do this, without being judged negatively or feeling limited by their society’s rules or outlooks, then there will no longer be a problem of inequality. If we make our choices because IT IS WHAT WE TRULY WISH then who is to judge whether this is bad for equality/economy/society/reputation? In any case, we cannot make everyone happy with our decisions, so we must make sure that our decisions make OURSELVES happy.
First of all sorry for my last comment which was kind of incoherent (I was tired and in a noisy environment – hard to focus!).
You say:
“..It seems like ‘opting out’ of a career is viewed negatively by those who believe that gender equality = professional-achievement equality…”
I agree 100%. This is the crux of it. Today society in general AND many women feel that their value and their worth is related to their wage and career path. Motherhood is simply not part of that value system!
Rather than just enabling women to compete with men in the workplace in order to gain that single aspect of ‘equality’, feminism could have raised the status of motherhood and the feminine attributes of women (nurturing, life creating (!), empathy, pragmatism, communication etc) so that they were as valued by society as building roads or investment banking or whatever!
There is enough evidence to show that the movement was manipulated by the ‘powers that be’ to stop this from happening. Most of the emphasis has been put on gaining this thing called ‘equality’ which has become a euphemism for women competing with men to live like men.
As I said previously this particular aspect of feminism led directly to women flooding into the workplace NOT to ‘start working’ (they were ALREADY working in the home cooking meals, cleaning and bringing up the children!), but working for *someone else* not connected to their families. And crucially this new kind of work meant they now started paying taxes to the state, as did the childminders employed to look after their children. This double income per household allowed the government to raise taxes which is why today both parents are typically forced to work just to put food on the table and in doing so they are forced to put their children in the hands of the state/ childcare/ TV etc.
In other words feminism was hijacked by ‘the powers that be’ to double the tax revenue stream, erode the family unit, gain more control over the indoctrination of the children and enslave everyone even more with debt.
Everyone lives so close to the wire these days and unlike 40 years ago there isn’t even the option of the stay-at-home partner (usually the mother) taking on extra full or part time work during tough times or in a crisis (accident/ illness etc) because today both parents are already working.
Had feminists insisted not *just* on the right to compete with men but also on a higher status for motherhood (and fatherhood), feminine values and the hard and valuable work of running a household and bringing up a child then we might be living in a very different world today. A world with a smaller government for a start……and less stress, more healthy, happy children (no Ritalin, no anxiety disorders, no street crime etc), more home education, more disposable income, more sanity!
There’s still a long way to go…
Right on! and Amen!
I’m really glad that I found this article. I think you’re touching on a topic which as a life coach, drives me crazy: the idea that society is telling us there’s only one form of success, and that’s having a high-powered corporate job. Now I am not disrespecting the career path, it’s wonderful if it’s for you. But I think we need to redefine success as fulfillment, happiness, relationships that matter, doing work that is meaningful at a personal level, earning enough money to meet our needs but not defining ourselves by our income, etc. I think the powerful statements that are sent to women about what we should and shouldn’t do makes it so easy for us to stop trusting our own judgment on what’s best for our lives. It’s hard enough trying to define your own life purpose, without having to cope with all the “shoulds” that press on us, especially women. I don’t know if this is interesting, but I do a lot of writing about how to empower yourself and define your own success on my blog http://www.mariewetmore.com.