The Global Sociology Blog

[Update on 7/19: Please read Philip Stone's comment below as well as his column on this topic at the Huffington Post. Philip is obviously a specialist on this topic.

Via Context Crawler , thanks to a new article in the American Sociological Review , we should revisit the zombie meme of Opt-Out, the already-debunked idea that women are leaving the workforce to return to homemaking responsibilities. It is a meme that won't die (hence, the zombie part) because it seems to validate the social conservative and "family values" crowd that women REALLY belong at home with their children and if everyone understood and abide by that, the entire society would be better off.

The correlated belief is that the family is the base institutional structure of society, which has not been true in several centuries, as Stephanie Coontz has aptly demonstrated. But then, social conservatives and "family values experts" are never really bothered by facts and truth. After all, they still maintain that abstinence-only program and virginity pledges work, despite the evidence.

But back to the Opt-Out myth.

According to sociologist Christine Percheski, the author of the ASR article , debunks the myth:

"Despite anecdotal reports of successful working women returning to the home to assume child care responsibilities, less than 8 percent of professional women born since 1956 leave the workforce for a year or more during their prime childbearing years, according to the study,

Percheski’s research shows that the number of women with young children who work full-time year-round has increased steadily, growing from a rate of 5.6 percent of women born 1926 to 1935 (referred to as the “Baby Boom Parents” by Percheski), to 38.1 percent of women from Generation X (born 1966 to 1975). More professional Generation X mothers of young children were working full-time year-round than their counterparts in any previous generation.

Percheski finds that among mothers of older children (those age 6 to 18), full-time employment is the norm for professional women of Generation X."

More women are working and they are working longer hours. Doing so has a cost of course, as society has not kept up with these changes and the world of work continues to operate as if most households were of the "breadwinner / housewife" type.

A recent piece of sociological research on the subject was published in the great sociological (and readable) ASA publication Contexts in its Fall 2007 issue focuses more on the experience of leaving work for professional women. It is an article by Pamela Stone, titled The Rhetoric and Reality of “Opting Out” . Pamela Stone examines the reasons why some women may be leaving the workforce, especially, professional women with interesting, stimulating, and potentially high-paying jobs that they love. As Stone writes, the media has a certain biased way of portraying such cases:

"Media stories typically frame these women’s decisions as choices about family and see them as symptomatic of a kind of sea-change among the daughters of the feminist revolution, a return to traditionalism and the resurgence of a new feminine mystique."

Something often called the "Opt-Out Revolution"... these darn feminists have torn women away from their natural societal roles, but now, it's over. Women are reclaiming their instinctive place, so the narrative goes, thereby invalidating feminists' views, and choose the lifestyle they "naturally" prefer, the one that is truly fulfilling. It is a simplistic narrative, that of the new traditionalism, and one that is periodically trotted back out by the media.

There are, of course, multiple reasons why women would leave their jobs. But the one reason revealed by Stone's research is what she calls the choice gap .

"The choice gap reflects the extent to which high-achieving women like Regina are caught in a double bind:
spiraling parenting (read “mothering”) demands on the homefront collide with the increasing pace of work in the gilded cages of elite professions."

Methodologically, Stone conducted in-depth interviews highly educated professional women who had thriving careers on which they had invested for at least a decade. And, as is typical of professionals, these women enjoyed a great deal of control over their jobs as well as good benefits.

"These women are important to study. Elite, educated, high-achieving women have historically been cultural arbiters, defining what is acceptable for all women in their work and family roles. This group’s entrance into high-status, formerly male professions has been crucial to advancing gender parity and narrowing the wage gap, which stubbornly persists to this day. At home, moreover, they are rendered silent and invisible, so that it is easy to project and speculate about them. We can see in them whatever we want to, and perhaps that is why they have been the subject of endless speculation—about mommy wars, a return to traditionalism, and the like."

The question is then, if these privileged women cannot pull off the balance between work and family, who can?

Stone's interviews reveal that the motherhood pull is real and undeniable. And these women were very receptive to what sociologist Sharon Hays calls the “ideology of intensive mothering ," defined by Deidre Johnston and Debra Swanson as

"A child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, financially expensive ideology in which mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture and development of the sacred child and in which children's needs take precedence over the individual needs of their mothers."

This comes alongside the socialization through what Annette Lareau calls "concerted cultivation ," defined by Stone as"a nonstop pace of organized activities scheduled by parents for school-age children." So, when one puts together intensive mothering and concerted cultivation, then, there is really no choice as there is no room for the intensifying demands of corporate life. It is a double-bind where both sides of the equation are increasingly demanding. Both raising children and professional careers demand more time and involvement.

At the same time that there is a motherhood pull, there is a workplace push involving employers and husbands. Husbands tended to offer emotional support, however, couples would fall back on a familiar pattern where women would end up with most of the second shift .

"Husbands did little to share family responsibilities, instead maintaining their own demanding careers full-speed ahead.

Similarly, many workplaces claimed to be “family friendly” and offered a variety of supports. But for women who could take advantage of them, flexible work schedules (which usually meant working part-time) carried significant penalties. Women who shifted to part-time work typically saw their jobs gutted of significant responsibilities and their once-flourishing careers derailed. Worse, part-time hours often crept up to the equivalent of full time."

For these women, it means their careers would reach a dead end or a plateau and that they would not be moving up because they were unable to meet the flexible demands of the workplace and the lack of actyal support from their partners:

"Over half (60 percent) of the women I spoke to mentioned their husbands as one of the key reasons why they quit. That not all women talked about their husbands’ involvement, or lack thereof, reveals the degree to which they perceived the work-family balancing act to be their responsibility alone. But women seldom mentioned their husbands for another reason: they were, quite literally, absent."

After all, we know that corporate pressure for time, flexibility and commitment (on the part of the employee, that is) also increased for men. These husbands were absent because they had to work 70 or more hours a week. And so, progressively, the women would take on more of the housekeeping / childreading responsibilities and let their husbands invest more fully in their careers at the expenses of theirs. And these husbands often put the choice into the hands of their wives, "it's your choice", but really meaning "it's your problem". Or the choice being, if the wife remained at work, then more childcare arrangements would have to be found, contradicting the ideology of intensive mothering pressure on women.

These ever more demanding pulls and pushes created a double-bind that had to be resolved. Both childrearing and professional life are all-or-nothing situations for one person to manage, a role conflict that cannot be indefinitely sustained. And although much has been made of part-time work or work sharing arrangements, the stigma attached to these kinds of juggling is still strong:

"This model was so influential that those working part time or in other flexible arrangements often felt stigmatized. Christine Thomas, a marketing executive and job-sharer, used imagery reminiscentof The Scarlet Letter to describe her experience: “When you job share, you have ‘MOMMY’ stamped in huge letters on your forehead.”"

And many of the women that Stone interviewed did try to make it work through a variety of arrangements but these would put them in undesirable situations and vulnerable to any type of organizational change or restructuring. So, back to the double bind.

"Between trying to be the ideal mother (in an era of intensive mothering) and the ideal worker (a model based on a man with a stay-at-home wife), these high-flying women faced a double bind. Indeed, their options were much more limited than they seemed."

This is the "choice gap":

"The difference between the decisions women could have made about their careers if they were not mothers or caregivers and the decisions they had to make in their circumstances as mothers married to high-octane husbands in ultimately unyielding professions."

What is then made obvious behind what looks like on the surface to be individual choices is the pressures imposed by the social structure (Emile Durkheim, anyone?). The combination between structural constraints (child versus career, women's careers versus men's careers), economic pressure (longer hours, more flexibility, meaning the end of the 9-5 schedule or when, often, part-time arrangements were denied) and cultural expectations (intensive mothering, concerted cultivation) create the thick web of constraints against which women make "choices".

And so, these women engaged in a solid dose of rationalizing and cognitive dissonance to pen their decisions in terms of choice and agency. After all, it is less privileged people who get forced or constrained into given situations. With education and privilege comes choice, that is also a cultural narrative that these women strongly internalized. They also explained their decision through their professional perfectionism: doing the best thing for their children.

"Women associated choice with privilege, feminism, and personal agency, and internalized it as a reflection of their own perfectionism. This was an attractive combination that played to their drive for achievementand also served to compensate for their loss of the careers they loved and the professional identities they valued. Some of these women bought into the media message that being an at-home mom was a status symbol, promoted by such cultural arbiters as New York Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. Their ability to go home reflected their husbands’ career success, in which they and their children basked. Living out the traditional lifestyle, male breadwinner and stay-at-home-mom, which they were fortunate to be able to choose, they saw themselves as realizing the dreams of third-wave feminism."

All this rhetoric of individual choice, of course, masks the structural and institutional reality of the choice gap. At the same time, many of the women blamed themselves for being unable to "make it work" that is to resolve the double bind in a way that found a balance between the pushes and pulls of motherhood and career. Most of them simply resigned themselves to the fact that workand family are incompatible. This very Durkheimian non-conscience made them rationalize their decision to quit to their employers as "for family reasons" rather than the structure of professional life and the culture of motherhood.

"By adopting the socially desirable and gender-consistent explanation of “family,” women often contributed to the larger misunderstanding surrounding their decision. Their own explanations endorsed the prevalent idea that quitting to go home is a choice. Employers rarely challenged women’s explanations. Nor did they try to convince them to stay, thus reinforcing women’s perception that their decision was the right thing to do as mothers, and perpetuating the reigning media image of these women as the new traditionalists."

In this way, the very contradictory arrangements that led them to the falsely understood choice of quitting are never questioned. But this is not professional women adopting traditionalist attitudes toward work and family. These are women who cannot find a structurally satisfying solution to an outmoded model of work (male breadwinner / housewife) combined with increasing pressure on both the professional and personal sides. No structural solution is on offer for this (especially not in the United States).

And if these women, who are supposed to have more option thanks to their education and their high-power jobs, cannot find a satisfactory solution to the double bind, one can only imagine what happens lower on the social ladder.

So, can we put to rest the myth of opting-out?

Don't count on it. As economist blogger Kathy G reminds us,

""Studies" and research that reinforce retrograde, sexist stereotype tend to get wall-to-wall saturation media coverage, while those that don't tend to be ignored. Wondering whether this was the case with the Percheski paper, I looked it up on Google News (using several different search terms -- "American Sociological Review," Percheski, "opt out", etc.). And what did I find? A grand total of four mentions of the study: in a Reuters article, in a column in the Orlando Sentinel, and in blog posts for the Wall Street Journal and Business Week websites. That was it.

Is there any doubt that if her study did indeed show a decline in women's labor force particpation[sic], that every newspaper and website in the land would be shouting it from the rooftops?"

No.