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.

Opting Out vs. Being Forced Out

The New York Times just posted an interesting story about women dropping out of the work force. It says that many economists now think that the supposed "opt out" movement has less to do with women's alleged desire to leave the work force and more to do with America's economic downturn. On Tuesday (tomorrow), a new congressional study will lay out all the data. As the Times reporter summarizes it:

The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. Ninety-six percent of the men held jobs in 1953, their peak year. That is down to 86.4 percent today. But while men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, that is often the assumption when women pull out.

As Heather Boushey, an economist who's written a lot about the opt-out movement, observes, women who lose their jobs and can't get another say that they're staying home with the kids—the implication being that saying so saves face. Whereas for a man that's not the case. Another economist observes that women's median wages have dropped since 2004. She notes that this is a relatively new experience for women in the work force—not since the 1970s has there been so prolonged a decline—perhaps making women more reluctant than their male peers to accept lower wages.