Homemaker: Women who ‘opt out’ usually do so for their families

Writing for a newspaper is like putting your child on the kindergarten bus. You send your words out into the world where they have their own adventures, make their own impressions, then report back, or not, come day’s end.

Some articles have longer (and bumpier) rides than others. Of everything I have written, an article called “The Opt-Out Revolution,” which ran three years ago in The New York Times Magazine, has had the most interesting journey. Not a week goes by that I am not asked about that article, which explored why highly educated, accomplished women were leaving their fast-track careers. Now the UC Hastings College of the Law has released a 67-page study titled ‘Opt Out’ or Pushed Out?: How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict.

It begins: “Coined in 2003 by New York Times journalist Lisa Belkin, the so-called ‘opt-out revolution’ attempts to explain many women’s decisions to leave the paid work force for full-time care of their children.” It then goes on to explain how I (among others) was wrong. The author, Joan C. Williams, is someone I deeply respect. I interviewed her for the original “opt out” article, and I have spoken with her over the years about her concerns about press coverage of this subject. In our most recent conversation she was careful to say that her study is not about just my report, but rather “a content analysis of 119 print news stories that discuss women leaving the workplace, published between 1980 and 2006.”

The first fault with this press coverage, she writes, is that it “focuses overwhelmingly on the lives of professional/managerial women, who comprise only about 8 per cent of American women”. This is the criticism I hear most often. It is also a tautology. What I set out to explore in the first place was why there are not more women in “the workplace stratosphere”. Writing about such women means, by definition, writing about accomplished professionals. To look at women who choose to leave requires looking at women who can afford that choice.

Williams tells me that policy makers, reading stories like mine, feel free to wash their hands of workplace reform, because it is a “wealthy woman’s problem”. This, she says, is why there is no organised push for legal protections for parents. But this is not irresponsibility of the Press as much as it is lack of vision by policy makers. This one article was about one small segment of the population, yes, but I have read and written about parents in all strata of society struggling with the life-work balance.

Williams goes on to say that overall press coverage “pinpoints the pull of family life as the main reason why women quit, whereas a recent study showed that 86 per cent of women cite workplace pushes (such as inflexible jobs) as a key reason for their decision to leave”. Here she has put her finger on a truth of human nature. All choices are made in a limited context — we can choose only among available choices. In this case, those were to stay in a workplace that made it exhausting to juggle life and family, or to leave that workplace. If the available choices included Door No. 3 — a workplace more conducive to balance — then the choice would be different. So what looks like a “push” to Williams feels like a “pull” to those I interview. The categories are not as clear from within as she presents them from without.

Next, she says, the articles give “an unrealistic picture of how easy it will be for women to re-enter the work force”. I would argue that any picture is unrealistic because the jury is still out. It is possible that workers who leave for a period will never regain traction and that they will regret the years lost. But it is also possible that a looming labour shortage will make them sought-after employees.

And finally, she writes, the reporting about women who leave “virtually always focuses on women in one situation: after they leave the work force and before they are divorced, which is unrealistic in a country with a 50 per cent divorce rate”. On that point, I could not agree more. I worried about the women when I wrote my article — concerned that they were leaving themselves vulnerable to the whims of men, whims that spawned the feminist movement.

©NYTNS