Professional women who leave the workforce may have fewer options than it
Answer the following questions using the attached text: The word count for individual questions may vary but your responses should total 1,200- to 1,400-words for the entire worksheet. Answers must be 100% plagerism free and Original work. 1. What are some of the strengths associated with the Pro side of the issue? What are some of the weaknesses? 2. What are some of the strengths associated with the Con side of the issue? What are some of the weaknesses? 3. Based on the statements presented in this critical issue, which author do you agree with? Provide supporting evidence. 4. Explore two other roles that can be acquired during early and middle adulthood, such as through parenthood, romantic relationships, and career. How have these roles changed through the past generations? 5. What psychological adjustments are made during early and middle adulthood to adapt to aging and changes in life style? How does this affect development? Professional women who leave the workforce may have fewer options than it seems. What does that tell us about work in America today? As a senior publicist at a well-known media conglomerate, Regina Donofrio had one of the most coveted, glamorous jobs in New York. A typical workday might include “riding around Manhattan in limousines with movie stars.” She loved her job, had worked “a long time,” and felt “comfortable” in it. So when the time came to return to work after the birth of her fi rst child, Regina did not hesitate. “I decided I would go back to work, because the job was great, basically,” she told me. Before long, Regina found herself “crying on the train,” torn between wanting to be at home with her baby and wanting to keep up her successful, exciting career. She started feeling she was never in the right place at the right time. “When I was at work, I should have been at home. When I was at home, I felt guilty because I had left work a little early to see the baby, and I had maybe left some things undone.” Ever resourceful, she devised a detailed job-share plan with a colleague who was also a fi rst-time mother. But their proposal was denied. Instead, Regina’s employer offered her more money to stay and work full time, and Regina left in a huff, incensed that her employer, with whom she had a great track record, would block her from doing what she wanted to do—continue with her career and combine it with family. Despite mainstream media portrayals to the contrary, Regina’s reasons for quitting are all too typical of what I found in my study of high-achieving, former professionals who are now at-home moms. While Regina did, in fact, feel a strong urge to care for her baby, she decided to quit because of an infl exible workplace, not because of her attraction to home and hearth. She gave up her highpowered career as a last resort, after agonized soul-searching and exhausting her options. Her story differs from the popular depiction of similar, high- achieving, professional women who have headed home. 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. The quintessential article in this prevailing story line (and the one that gave the phenomenon its name) was published in 2003 by the New York From Contexts, Vol. 6, No. 4, Fall 2007, pp. 14–19. Copyright © 2007 by University of California Press, Journals Division. Reprinted by permission via the Copyright Clearance Center. 352 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ? Times’s work-life columnist, Lisa Belkin, titled “The Opt-Out Revolution.” “Opting out” is redolent with overtones of lifestyle preference and discretion, but Regina’s experience counters this characterization; her decision to quit was not a lifestyle preference, nor a change in aspirations, nor a desire to return to the 1950s family. Regina did not “opt out” of the workplace because she chose to, but for precisely the opposite reason: because she had no real options and no choice. High-achieving women’s reasons for heading home are multilayered and complex, and generally counter the common view that they quit because of babies and family. This is what I found when I spoke to scores of women like Regina: highly educated, affl uent, mostly white, married women with children who had previously worked as professionals or managers and whose husbands could support their being at home. Although many of these women speak the language of choice and privilege, their stories reveal a choice gap—the disjuncture between the rhetoric of choice and the reality of constraints like those Regina encountered. The choice gap refl ects the extent to which highachieving 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. Some Skepticism I approached these interviews with skepticism tempered by a recognition that there might be some truth to the popular image of the “new traditionalist.” But to get beyond the predictable “family” explanation and the media drumbeat of choice, I thought it was important to interview women in some depth and to study women who, at least theoretically, could exercise choice. I also gave women full anonymity, creating fi ctitious names for them so they would speak to me as candidly as possible. The women I interviewed had outstanding educational credentials; more than half had graduate degrees in business, law, medicine, and other professions, and had once had thriving careers in which they had worked about a decade. By any measure, these were work-committed women, with strong reasons to continue with the careers in which they had invested so much. Moreover, they were in high-status fi elds where they had more control over their jobs and enjoyed (at least relative to workers in other fi elds) more family-friendly benefi ts. While these women had compelling reasons to stay on the job, they also had the option not to, by virtue of their own past earnings and because their husbands were also high earners. To counter the potential criticism that they were quitting or being let go because they were not competent or up to the job, I expressly chose to study women with impeccable educational credentials, women who had navigated elite environments with competitive entry requirements. To ensure a diversity of perspectives, I conducted extensive, indepth interviews with 54 women in a variety of professions—law, medicine, business, publishing, management consulting, nonprofi t administration, and the like—living in major metropolitan areas across the country, roughly half of them in their 30s, half in their 40s. NO / Pamela Stone 353 To be sure, at-home moms are a distinct minority. Despite the many articles proclaiming a trend of women going home, among the demographic of media scrutiny—white, college-educated women, 30–54 years old—fully 84 percent are now in the workforce, up from 82 percent 20 years ago. And the much-discussed dip in the labor-force participation of mothers of young children, while real, appears to be largely a function of an economic downturn, which depresses employment for all workers. Nevertheless, these women are important to study. Elite, educated, highachieving women have historically been cultural arbiters, defi ning 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. While they do not represent all women, elite women’s experiences provide a glimpse into the work-family negotiations that all women face. And their stories lead us to ask, “If the most privileged women of society cannot successfully combine work and family, who can?” Motherhood Pulls When Regina initially went back to work, she had “no clue” that she would feel so torn. She advises women not to set “too much in stone,” because “you just don’t know, when a human being comes out of your body, how you’re going to feel.” For some women, the pull of children was immediate and strong. Lauren Quattrone, a lawyer, found herself “absolutely besotted with this baby. . . . I realized that I just couldn’t bear to leave him.” Women such as Lauren tended to quit fairly soon after their fi rst child was born. For others, like Diane Childs, formerly a nonprofi t executive, the desire to be home with the kids came later. “I felt that it was easy to leave a baby for twelve hours a day. That I could do. But to leave a six-year-old, I just thought, was a whole different thing.” But none of these women made their decisions to quit in a vacuum. In fact, they did so during a cultural moment when norms and practices for parents—mothers—are very demanding. These women realized they would rear children very differently from the way their own mothers raised them, feeling an external, almost competitive pressure to do so. Middle- and uppermiddleclass women tend to be particularly mindful of expert advice, and these women were acutely aware of a well-documented intensifi cation in raising children, which sociologist Sharon Hays calls an “ideology of intensive mothering.” This cultural imperative, felt by women of all kinds, “advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children.” A corollary is what Annette Lareau terms “concerted cultivation,” a nonstop pace of organized activities scheduled by parents for school-age children. Among the women I spoke to, some, like Diane, felt the urgency of “concerted 354 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ? cultivation” and reevaluated their childcare as the more sophisticated needs of their older children superseded the simpler, more straightforward babysitting and physical care required for younger children. Marina Isherwood, a former executive in the health care industry, with children in the second and fourth grades, became convinced that caregivers could not replace her own parental infl uence: There isn’t a substitute, no matter how good the child-care. When they’re little, the fact that someone else is doing the stuff with them is fi ne. It wasn’t the part that I loved anyway. But when they start asking you questions about values, you don’t want your babysitter telling them. . . . Our children come home, and they have all this homework to do, and piano lessons and this and this, and it’s all a complicated schedule. And, yes, you could get an au pair to do that, to balance it all, but they’re not going to necessarily teach you how to think about math. Or help you come up with mnemonic devices to memorize all of the countries in Spain or whatever. Because academic credentials were so important to these women’s (and their husband’s) career opportunities, formal schooling was a critical factor in their decisions to quit. For some, the premium they placed on education and values widened the gap between themselves and their less educated caregivers. Depending on the woman, motherhood played a larger or smaller role in her decision whether and when to quit. Children were the main focus of women’s caregiving, but other family members needed care as well, for which women felt responsible. About 10 percent of the women spoke of signifi cant elder-care responsibilities, the need for which was especially unpredictable. This type of caregiving and mothering made up half of the family/career double bind. More important, though, motherhood infl uenced women’s decision to quit as they came to see the rhythms and values of the workplace as antagonistic to family life. Workplace Pushes On top of their demanding mothering regime, these women received mixed messages from both their husbands and their employers. Husbands offered emotional support to wives who were juggling career and family. Emily Mitchell, an accountant, described her marriage to a CPA as “a pretty equal relationship,” but when his career became more demanding, requiring long hours and Saturdays at work, he saw the downside of egalitarianism: I think he never minded taking my daughter to the sitter, that was never an issue, and when he would come home, we have a pretty equal relationship on that stuff. But getting her up, getting her ready, getting himself ready to go into work, me coming home, getting her, getting her to bed, getting unwound from work, and then he would come home, we’d try to do something for dinner, and then there was always NO / Pamela Stone 355 something else to do—laundry, cleaning, whatever—I think he was feeling too much on a treadmill. But 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, fl exible work schedules (which usually meant working part-time) carried signifi cant penalties. Women who shifted to part-time work typically saw their jobs gutted of signifi cant responsibilities and their once-fl ourishing careers derailed. Worse, part-time hours often crept up to the equivalent of full time. When Diane Childs had children, she scaled back to part time and began to feel the pointlessness of continuing: And I’m never going to get anywhere—you have the feeling that you just plateaued professionally because you can’t take on the extra projects; you can’t travel at a moment’s notice; you can’t stay late; you’re not fl exible on the Friday thing because that could mean fi nding someone to take your kids. You really plateau for a much longer period of time than you ever realize when you fi rst have a baby. It’s like you’re going to be plateaued for thirteen to fi fteen years. Lynn Hamilton, an M.D., met her husband at Princeton, where they were both undergraduates. Her story illustrates how family pulls and workplace pushes (from both her career and her husband’s) interacted in a marriage that was founded on professional equality but then devolved to the detriment of her career: We met when we were 19 years old, and so, there I was, so naive, I thought, well, here we are, we have virtually identical credentials and comparable income earnings. That’s an opportunity. And, in fact, I think our incomes were identical at the time I quit. To the extent to which we have articulated it, it was always understood, well, with both of us working, neither of us would have to be working these killer jobs. So, what was happening was, instead, we were both working these killer jobs. And I kept saying, “We need to reconfi gure this.” And what I realized was, he wasn’t going to. Meanwhile, her young daughter was having behavioral problems at school, and her job as a medical director for a biomedical start-up company had “the fax machine going, the three phone lines upstairs, they were going.” Lynn slowly realized that the only reconfi guration possible, in the face of her husband’s absence, was for her to quit. 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. 356 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ? Helena Norton, an educational administrator who characterized her husband as a “workaholic,” poignantly described a scenario that many others took for granted and which illustrates a pattern typical of many of these women’s lives: “He was leaving early mornings; 6:00 or 6:30 before anyone was up, and then he was coming home late at night. So I felt this real emptiness, getting up in the morning to, not necessarily an empty house, because my children were there, but I did, I felt empty, and then going to bed, and he wasn’t there.” In not being there to pick up the slack, many husbands had an important indirect impact on their wives’ decisions to quit. Deferring to their husbands’ careers and exempting them from household chores, these women tended to accept this situation. Indeed, privileging their husbands’ careers was a pervasive, almost tacit undercurrent of their stories. When talking about their husbands, women said the same things: variations on “he’s supportive,” and that he gave them a “choice.” But this hands-off approach revealed husbands to be bystanders, not participants, in the workfamily bind. “It’s your choice” was code for “it’s your problem.” And husbands’ absences, a direct result of their own high-powered careers, put a great deal of pressure on women to do it all, thus undermining the façade of egalitarianism. Family pulls—from children and, as a result of their own long work hours, their husbands—exacerbated workplace pushes; and all but seven women cited features of their jobs—the long hours, the travel—as another major motivation in quitting. Marketing executive Nathalie Everett spoke for many women when she remarked that her full-time workweek was “really 60 hours, not 40. Nobody works nine-to-fi ve anymore.” Surprisingly, the women I interviewed, like Nathalie, neither questioned nor showed much resentment toward the features of their jobs that kept them from fully integrating work and family. They routinely described their jobs as “all or nothing” and appeared to internalize what sociologists call the “ideal worker” model of a (typically male) worker unencumbered by family demands. This model was so infl uential that those working part time or in other fl exible arrangements often felt stigmatized. Christine Thomas, a marketing executive and job-sharer, used imagery reminiscent of The Scarlet Letter to describe her experience: “When you job share, you have ‘MOMMY’ stamped in huge letters on your forehead.” While some women’s decisions could be attributed to their unquestioning acceptance of the status quo or a lack of imagination, the unsuccessful attempts of others who tried to make it work by pursuing alternatives to full-time, like Diane, serve as cautionary tales. Women who made arrangements with bosses felt like they were being given special favors. Their part-time schedules were privately negotiated, hence fragile and unstable, and were especially vulnerable in the context of any kind of organizational restructuring such as mergers. The Choice Gap Given the incongruity of these women’s experiences—they felt supported by “supportive” yet passive husbands and pushed out by workplaces that once prized their expertise—how did these women understand their situation? How NO / Pamela Stone 357 did they make sense of professions that, on the one hand, gave them considerable status and rewards, and, on the other hand, seemed to marginalize them and force them to compromise their identity as mothers? The overwhelming majority felt the same way as Melissa Wyatt, the 34-year-old who gave up a job as a fund-raiser: “I think today it’s all about choices, and the choices we want to make. And I think that’s great. I think it just depends where you want to spend your time.” But a few shared the outlook of Olivia Pastore, a 42-year-old ex-lawyer: I’ve had a lot of women say to me, “Boy, if I had the choice of, if I could balance, if I could work part-time, if I could keep doing it.” And there are some women who are going to stay home full-time no matter what and that’s fi ne. But there are a number of women, I think, who are home because they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. . . . There’s a lot of talk about the individual decisions of individual women. “Is it good? Is it bad? She gave it up. She couldn’t hack it,” . . . And there’s not enough blame, if you will, being laid at the feet of the culture, the jobs, society. My fi ndings show that Olivia’s comments—about the disjuncture between the rhetoric of choice and the reality of constraint that shapes women’s decisions to go home—are closer to the mark. 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-fl ying women faced a double bind. Indeed, their options were much more limited than they seemed. Fundamentally, they faced a “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. This choice gap obscures individual preferences, and thus reveals the things Olivia railed against—culture, jobs, society—the kinds of things sociologists call “structure.” Overall, women based their decisions on mutually reinforcing and interlocking factors. They confronted, for instance, two sets of trade-offs: kids versus careers, and their own careers versus those of their husbands. For many, circumstances beyond their control strongly infl uenced their decision to quit. On the family side of the equation, for example, women had to deal with caregiving for sick children and elderly parents, children’s developmental problems, and special care needs. Such reasons fi gured in one-third of the sample. On the work side, women were denied part-time arrangements, a couple were laid off, and some had to relocate for their own careers or their husbands’. A total of 30 women, a little more than half the sample, mentioned at least one forced-choice consideration. But even before women had children, the prospect of pregnancy loomed in the background, making women feel that they were perceived as fl ight risks. In her fi rst day on the job as a marketing executive, for example, Patricia Lambert’s boss asked her: “So, are you going to have kids?” And once women did get pregnant, they reported that they were often the fi rst in their offi ce, which made them feel more like outsiders. Some remarked that a dearth of 358 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ? role models created an atmosphere unsympathetic to work-family needs. And as these women navigated pregnancy and their lives beyond, their stories revealed a latent bias against mothers in their workplaces. What some women took from this was that pregnancy was a dirty little secret not to be openly discussed. The private nature of pregnancy thus complicated women’s decisions regarding their careers once they became mothers, which is why they often waited until the last minute to fi gure out their next steps. Their experiences contrasted with the formal policies of their workplaces, which touted themselves as “family friendly.” The Rhetoric of Choice Given the indisputable obstacles—hostile workplaces and absentee husbands— that stymied a full integration of work and family, it was ironic that most of the women invoked “choice” when relating the events surrounding their decision to exit their careers. Why were there not more women like Olivia, railing against the tyranny of an outmoded workplace that favored a 1950s-era employee or bemoaning their husbands’ drive for achievement at the expense of their own? I found that these women tended to use the rhetoric of choice in the service of their exceptionality. Women associated choice with privilege, feminism, and personal agency, and internalized it as a refl ection of their own perfectionism. This was an attractive combination that played to their drive for achievement and 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 refl ected 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. The goals of earlier, second-wave feminism, economic independence and gender equality, took a back seat, at least temporarily. Challenging the Myth These strategies and rhetoric, and the apparent invisibility of the choice gap, reveal how fully these high-achieving women internalized the double bind and the intensive-mothering and ideal-worker models on which it rests. The downside, of course, is that they blamed themselves for failing to “have it all” rather than any actual structural constraints. That work and family were incompatible was the overwhelming message they took from their experiences. And when they quit, not wanting to burn bridges, they cited family obligations as the reason, not their dissatisfaction with work, in accordance with social expectations. 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 NO / Pamela Stone 359 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. Taken at face value, these women do seem to be traditional. But by rejecting an intransigent workplace, their quitting signifi es a kind of silent strike. They were not acquiescing to traditional gender roles by quitting, but voting with their feet against an outdated model of work. When women are not posing for the camera or worried about offending former employers (from whom they may need future references), they are able to share their stories candidly. From what I found, the truth is far different and certainly more nuanced than the media depiction. The vast majority of the type of women I studied do not want to choose between career and family. The demanding nature of today’s parenting puts added pressure on women. Women do indeed need to learn to be “good enough” mothers, and their husbands need to engage more equally in parenting. But on the basis of what they told me, women today “choose” to be home full-time not as much because of parenting overload as because of work overload, specifi cally long hours and the lack of fl exible options in their high- status jobs. The popular media depiction of a return to traditionalism is wrong and misleading. Women are trying to achieve the feminist vision of a fully integrated life combining family and work. That so many attempt to remain in their careers when they do not “have to work” testifi es strongly to their commitment to their careers, as does the diffi culty they experience over their subsequent loss of identity. Their attempts at juggling and their plans to return to work in the future also indicate that their careers were not meant to be ephemeral and should not be treated as such. Rather, we should regard their exits as the miner’s canary—a frontline indication that something is seriously amiss in many workplaces. Signs of toxic work environments and white-collar sweatshops are ubiquitous. We can glean from these women’s experiences the true cost of these work conditions, which are personal and professional, and, ultimately, societal and economic. Our current understanding of why high-achieving women quit—based as it is on choice and separate spheres—seriously undermines the will to change the contemporary workplace. The myth of opting out returns us to the days when educated women were barred from entering elite professions because “they’ll only leave anyway.” To the extent that elite women are arbiters of shifting gender norms, the opting out myth also has the potential to curtail women’s aspirations and stigmatize those who challenge the separatespheres ideology on which it is based. Current demographics make it clear that employers can hardly afford to lose the talents of high-achieving women. They can take a cue from at-home moms like the ones I studied: Forget opting out; the key to keeping professional women on the job is to create better, more fl exible ways to work. . . .