Opt Out or Pushed Out?

The Center for Work Life Law has a new report called Opt Out or Pushed Out? The True Story of Why Women Leave the Workforce (PDF), a detailed analysis of how the press has covered/created the “opt-out revolution” — plus an examination of the real reasons women exit and enter the workforce.
Findings include:

• although mothers are not increasingly likely to stay home with their children, a real trend is that both men’s household contributions and women’s work hours have stalled;
• better educated women are more likely to be in the labor force than less educated women; and
• women’s decisions to opt out do not represent a return to “traditional� values; in fact, much of what contemporary professional moms stay home to do is not traditional.

The report kicks off with a breakdown (and takedown) of Lisa Belkin’s 2003 piece that coined the phrase “opt-out revolution,” explaining that Belkin’s “success in naming and framing reshaped and refreshed a well-entrenched story line: that women are returning home as a matter of choice, the result of an internal psychological or biological ‘pull’ rather than a workplace ‘push.'” And story after story, in her own New York Times and in countless other outlets, has gone on to reinforce that narrative.

The report points out that Belkin’s story wasn’t anything new, even though her spin on it may have been. This damning list of headlines shows how hard the Times has worked to frame this as a growing trend, over and over:

• “Case History of an Ex-Working Mother� (1953)
• “Career Women Discover Satisfactions in the Home� (1961)
• “Many Young Women Now Say They’d Pick Family Over Career� (1980)
• “Putting Career on Hold� (1986)
• “Professional Women Do Go Home Again� (1988)
• “Ideas & Trends: For Some Two-Paycheck Families, The Economics Don’t Add Upâ€? (1991)
• “One Who Left and Doesn’t Look Backâ€? (1994)
• “Once Employed, Now Discussing Problems of Coping at Homeâ€? (1996)
• “Women Leaving Medicine for Home� (1997)
• “More Mothers of Babies Under 1 Are Staying Home,� (2001).
• Plus “opt out” cover stories in both Newsweek (2001) and Time (2004).

But just because it’s a story hyped and distorted by the media doesn’t mean opting out isn’t occurring. The headlines only go to show (and the numbers back this up) that educated women opting being pushed out of the workforce has been occurring for decades. This isn’t a trend that began with Belkin’s article.
The report also responds to the analysis by Heather Boushey, who found mothers’ and non-mothers’ employment rates were nearly identical — that there hasn’t been an overwhelming uptick in the number of educated mothers leaving the workforce.

This response is convincing as far as it goes, but it overlooks the elephant in the room: The effect of children on women’s employment may not have increased over time, but it is substantial. The Opt Out story reflects the brute reality that most highlevel jobs remain overwhelmingly male, and in fact, large numbers of mothers stay home full time and many more have left the fast track.

In other words, Boushey’s research proves what the headlines show: there’s been no “revolution.” Women are opting being pushed out of the workforce at the same rates they have been since the 60s. And most journalists fail to note is that this exodus was and is caused by inflexible, outdated policies and, in some cases, outright discrimination.
Read the whole report here.