While we’ve posted before on the “Opt-Out Revolution” -- the lingering claim over the past few years that more highly-educated mothers are supposedly “opting out” of the workforce to raise the babes at home -- a new and super interesting study says that the decline of women in the labor market is actually due to the weak economy, not babies.
“Are Women Opting Out? Debunking the Myth” by Heather Boushey, which contends that the crappy economy is the reason behind this change, not because of women’s desire to fulfill their motherly duties and abandon their career:
The impact of having children in the home on women's labor force participation (the ‘child penalty’) actually fell last year compared to prior years.The report, which analyzed Current Population Survey's Outgoing Rotation Group data (a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey), found that the child penalty on labor force participation for prime-age women, aged 25 to 44, was 20.7 percentage points in 1984 and has fallen consistently over the last two decades, down to 8.2 percentage points in 2004. This means that in 2004, labor force participation by women in this age group with children at home averaged 8.2 percentage points less than for women without children at home.
The early 2000s recession led to sustained job losses for all women - those with and without children at home - and the labor market only just returned to its 2000 employment level in January 2005, nearly four years after the recession began. During this recession, women experienced their largest employment losses in decades and once this is controlled for, the presence of children at home plays a smaller role in women's labor force participation than it did in previous years, going back to 1984.
The argument has been made that highly-educated, older mothers are increasingly opting out. However, between 2000 and 2004, 30-something mothers with advanced degrees saw no statistically significant change in the effect of children on their labor force participation rates. The child penalty is smallest for this group of mothers and they are more likely to work than other mothers.
While I do believe feminism is about choices and that work at home is just as valuable as work in the paid economy, this study could explain a lot. Click here to read the whole report.
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Did I already comment something? I was writing and pressed something and everything disappeared. In any case, I agree that this study shows the opt-out "revolution" not to exist, and it's not the only such study.
But I have a different take on this:
While we maintain that we believe feminism is about choices and that work at home is just as valuable as work in the paid economy
"Choices" are tricky things. See my post here:
The Longest Revolution
Brava! That's an amazingly insightful post...and you're right, is the word "choice" a really appropriate word? But I do feel that a goal of feminism should be to make those imaginary choices a reality.
Surely there must be a successful businesswoman or Wall Street exec on this sight who can help enlighten the schoolgirls who post this crap?
Tsk, tsk, kitty cat. I don't know if I'd be calling us schoolgirls when you're the one who apparently needs some spelling lessons.
Felix, the rich getting richer doesn't really help me out a lot.
Jobs being created doesn't necessarily mean good jobs being created (ever heard the term "under-employed?"). While GDP is increasing and average salaries are going up, median salaries are stagnating. That is, CEOs are being paid more for doing the same job, while the rest of us get to deal with less secure and less well-compensated jobs against inflation. Further, look at the "growth" industries sometime: food service, nursing, teaching. An Ivy-League grad is going to be turned down as overqualified if they even bother to apply.
Felix, please stick to replying to what I actually said. If you cut the good 40% of your response that had nothing to do with what I said, I might be silly enough to respond to your flame-baiting.
That was really just an erratum, wasn't it? “Errata” is plural. When writing a series of posts where you claim to be smarter than all the women of the world, you might consider consulting a dictionary to make sure that your grammar mistakes won’t further damage your credibility.