The XX Factor: What women really think.

Is It "Moms Go Home"—or "Moms, Go Home!!" ?

Emily, I do understand what you and Linda are saying: It's demeaning to dismiss what women say about their lives as lying or mere rationalization. But I'm not suggesting that. I do know that both women and men say that they want to spend more time with their families (and not just when they are politicians who've been caught with their hands in the cookie jar). But for women, that explanation for leaving a job is socially acceptable, while for men it's appalling (except for the aforementioned politicians). Women are pushed in that direction by social structures, including stereotypes that have been peddled and internalized over a lifetime—for instance, by New York Times articles that say that say women leave their jobs to stay home with the kids, reinscribing that cultural narrative.

To Linda's point: I'm not proposing, as you say, that "the findings about working-class women apply to elite women." My post said nothing about your work, because I wasn't concerned with your work; my concern is with the New York Times' long history of treating women's economic lives as personal rather than public. You are writing about what elite women should and shouldn't do. I care about the pundits and policymakers who are influenced by articles about the elite women—and who make policy based on those anecdotal stories that then is applied to all women.

But news media coverage only about that side of things ignores important other factors at work, like subtle and overt discrimination, that women may be less willing to acknowledge to themselves. A story: A friend of mine got a promotion after her partner, the biomom, gave birth to their child. The co-mom concluded that her boss was a little mind-boggled about exactly how to treat her—and ended up treating her as a "dad," someone who needed a promotion and a raise to support her wife and new baby. That would be consistent with how researchers have found women and men are treated after a child is born: There's a "mommy penalty" and a "daddy bonus." For instance, in experimental reviews of comparable résumés, women with children are less likely to be hired,pare paid less, are more likely to be fired, and are allowed fewer absences or late arrivals than women without children or than men with or without children ... while men with children are treated better than men without.

The social scientists I interviewed all agreed that Lisa Belkin's "research" method—asking people after the fact why they did what they did—was invalid and would never pass peer review. (This would be true as well of Linda's questioning of NYT Styles section brides, although Linda, your goal is different than Belkin's, which is why I am not writing about your work: Your goal is to warn and counsel young elite women about navigating the hazards ahead, and you succeed admirably.) But basic social science and the new neurobiology have consistently shown that post-facto explanations for behavior are unreliable: Healthy people settle on the most livable and socially comfortable story. To find out why people actually do what they do requires prospective, not retrospective, research into what they are thinking as they are making their decisions, not after the decision has been made—as well as into studies of comparable populations' behavior with variables changed. This isn't saying that people lie; it's saying that the human psyche is complicated and resilient and that our internal story is shaped by many factors.

But here's my bigger beef with the news media on this story: Women's economic lives are covered as personal issues ... while men's economic lives are covered as public issues. Moms out of work = style section; dads out of work = business section. That's just appalling. There is no going back to June and Ward Cleaver; the American economy desperately needs to adapt to reality. Flip the issue, and consider the fact that 80 percent of American children are living in households in which all adults are in the work force. That leads to an entirely different set of public policy discussions than does the "moms just wanna go home" storyline.

I will now indulge myself and quote my CJR article here:

... yes, maybe some women "chose'"to go home. But they didn’t choose the restrictions and constrictions that made their work lives impossible. They didn’t choose the cultural expectation that mothers, not fathers, are responsible for their children’s doctor visits, birthday parties, piano lessons, and summer schedules. And they didn’t choose the bias or earnings loss that they face if they work part-time or when they go back full-time.

By offering a steady diet of common myths and ignoring the relevant facts, newspapers have helped maintain the cultural temperature for what [researcher Joan Williams] calls “the most family-hostile public policy in the Western world.” On a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, afterschool programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. ... And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on nineteenth century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?

The moms-go-home story’s personal focus makes as much sense, according to [Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers], as saying, "Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous."

Hurray again to Uchitelle and the NYT for doing it right this time.  

Not Lying to You, Lying to Themselves—or, What Mother Will Say She Hates Being Home?

Oh Linda, are we going to go round on this again? You and I have had this discussion in person and in print. Those Sunday Styles women with children who told you they were "opting out" weren't lying to you; they were fully engaged in the very healthy psychological strategy of wanting what they had. Given the constraints facing them—hostile and inflexible workplaces, internal and social expectations that they (and not their husbands) were responsible for their children's well-being and daily schedules, sudden triggering off the "moms can't work" stereotype in the behavior of those around them (and probably a silent withdrawal of good assignments, promotion opportunities, and the like)—these women "chose" to stay home with their kids. Of course they fell in love with the children—but that wasn't the only force at work. Take any psych class and you will learn about this phenomenon: It's often called "sour grapes," but it's really very healthy. What, they're going to say: I hate spending my life stuck with snot-nosed screaming kids all day, I miss having adult conversations, but I was too angry at my condescending colleagues to accept the cut-rate hours and mommy-penalized pay and insane stress of making everyone happy—just for a few early years? (Most, of course, had a false idea of how easy it would be to get back into a good job—in part because of those rosy "opt-out" articles, as Joan Williams has documented in such detail.) Nope, they "chose" to stay home, as expected.

But what if those elite women (and men!!) had had some better choices—early childhood education and school schedules that match 21st-century workdays, less demanding hours, and the like? Then many of them, male and female, would "choose" reasonable, high-paying, well-respected, career-track work that also gave them some flexibility to care for their families. I had a long list of women tell me this when I interviewed them: If they were single mothers, they bit the bullet and took all the insulting treatment to keep feeding their kids. But if they were married to men with high-paying jobs, those who could sometimes bailed out.

As a point of fact, however, high-education women are more likely to be working once they have kids (presumably because they can afford better child-care options) than are the women for whom earnings are more marginal. If you press me on this I can find the correct BLS table; don't have it at hand (and I have another deadline just now!).

Most important, however, is that the Times has stopped peddling the suggestion that Lisa Belkin's Princeton-grad friends stand in for a wide swath of American working women. Uchitelle's coverage (and the front-page placement!!) is much more promising for the kind of working-family-friendly policies needed for this country's economic growth. I want the newspapers of record to talk about most people, rather than the few, when they're guiding our pundits' and policymakers' thinking.

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!