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  The Opt-Out Myth—or, the New York Times Gets It Right This Time

  Thanks, Meghan, for the pointer to Louis Uchitelle's sharp article in the NYT, noting that women have achieved a new and unwanted equality: equality in unemployment during and after a downturn. At long last we have a front-page correction to the opt-out myth—a myth that the Times has been peddling since 1952, when it first started publishing a decadeslong series of "Career Girls Just Wanna Go Home and Raise Babies" pieces. The most recent and most notorious iteration thereof was a 2003 Sunday Times Magazine article called "The Opt Out Revolution." Besides making many women spit out their coffee and fire off nasty e-mails, that article started up a whole industry of refutations. I published one such refutation in the Columbia Journalism Review last year, called "The Opt Out Myth"; you can find a footnoted version here, with links to some of the underlying social science research about how women get sidelined for "working while mother."

  Kudos to Uchitelle for getting the story right—and to the NYT editors for putting it on the front page, above the fold!

  Published Tuesday, July 22, 2008 4:33 PM by E.J. Graff

  Filed under: women, workplace equity, motherhood, opting out

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.