The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Tangle of Opt-Out Rationales

E.J. and Linda, I'm glad you're reprising your debate, because I'm titillated by this new data about women dropping out of the workforce, paired with Heather Boushey's explanation: "When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement. ... We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.” I'm struck, as I am whenever this comes up, by how deeply some of us are invested in one explanation over the other. Lisa Belkin's 2003 thesis, that highly educated women were quitting work because, well, they just wanted to, was anathema to a lot of feminists. They (to a degree me included) just wanted her to be wrong. But of course she's not wrong entirely—in upper-middle-class circles, there are women who say their choices are driven by disaffection with the work they had and affection for taking care of husand and kids. E.J. has an interesting explanation for why they should frame their decisions in this way, and amen to her point that it's a mistake to let this small cohort of women stand for the whole. Linda responds, here in the Fray, that she doesn't see a link between the problems the economic downturn has created for lower-income women, and the conclusion that bad times are also the reason that well-off women drop out, since "the low wages and layoffs did not affect elite workplaces, where wages and demand continued to rise."

I'm eager to hear Boushey's response to this—I have a call in to her—and E.J., yours too. In the meatime, aren't all the explanations correct, to one degree or another, and isn't the argument really about how much various groups of women's choices are affected more by one (hooray for staying home) over another (I'd work if I had better childcare, more flexible hours)? I see why the numbers matter: If all women were staying home for one clear reason—or if lower-income women tended to have one reason, and higher-income women tended to have a different one—that would tell us a lot about where we're at, culturally speaking, and perhaps about the policy prescriptions we'd advocate for. But will it ever sort out neatly? So often, it seems to me, these intimate and difficult decisions are made for a tangle of reasons that shift over time.