The XX Factor: What women really think.

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!