Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples: What the Opt-Out Phenomenon Can Teach Us about Work and Family

INTRODUCTION

1  Introduction A woman, just like a man, may have a great gift for some particular thing. That does not mean that she must give up the joy of marrying and having a home and children. eleanor roosevelt, It’s Up to the Women, 1933  Eleanor Roosevelt’s words still resonate in America today. Her book It’s Up to the Women was published during a period of economic turbulence that rivals our own. It, like many books today about women and work, was met with great controversy, and her chapter on women and jobs upset people the most. Well into the twenty-first century, our society continues to struggle with how to accommodate women who seek to combine paid work and caring for their children. The contours of the dynamic have shifted substantially, but the central dilemma endures. In this book, we draw on our backgrounds as social scientists to chart a path through the complexity of how American women frame their relationship with work, and of the political, economic, demographic, social, and cultural forces that shape this relationship in the twenty-first century. In particular, we consider what the decisions women make about work mean to them and to their families. Drawing on hundreds of interviews from around the country, original survey research, and national labor force data, this book combines meaningful statistics and the experiences of real women and their families in order to explore the realities of combining a career with raising children. The movement of women into the workforce during the last cen- 2 Introduction tury represented a major demographic shift in American society that transformed the landscape of families and workplaces. When It’s Up to the Women was published, it was rare for women to hold paid jobs. Today, six in ten women are employed. Together, these women make up almost half of the American labor force. How women respond to the marketplace in terms of supplying or withholding their labor, therefore, has significant implications for the intersection of gender and work, as well as dramatic ramifications for economic growth in America. For many, women’s movement into the labor force is synonymous with societal progress. As the excerpt from Eleanor Roosevelt’s book reminds us, it was not that long ago when the idea of women holding paid jobs was radical. Some women today do work because they realize that they benefited from educational opportunities women in their mother’s generation never dreamed of having. Other women work because they find their jobs rewarding. Many, many more juggle work and children because their families depend on their income, and this financial imperative is central to any discussion of gender, work, and family. Given this march of women into the labor force, people were surprised when the new millennium heralded some important and unexpected shifts in women’s relationship to work. For example, the labor force participation of college-educated, married mothers of infants fell steeply, from 71 percent in 1997 to 63 percent in 2005.1 What’s more, the full-time labor force participation of married women with professional degrees and children under eighteen fell from nearly two-thirds to just over one-half between 1998 and 2005.2 Women who left their careers, particularly those who were big earners or who left high-profile positions, garnered the media-generated moniker “opt-out women.” This trend was simultaneously trumpeted as a revolution and derided as a myth. In our view, this phenomenon falls somewhere in the middle, neither revolution nor myth. Still, it is an important and very real part of the unfolding story of women and paid work. In this book, we explore what college-educated mothers who leave their jobs can teach us about the intersection of gender, work, and identity in America. Introduction 3 In this way, while this book speaks specifically to the situation of women who are, or who hope to become, mothers, it also is meaningful to those interested in how gender is at work in our society. Accordingly, this book shifts the nature of the discussion of these so-called opt-out women from one where they are the object of scrutiny to one where their aspirations and struggles serve as a lens through which we can consider much larger societal issues. Often dismissing these individuals as elite women who do not constitute a numerically significant...