Raise your hand if you know of a new mother who has opted out for a year or more after having children? Yes, that's what I thought. We all know of women who became moms and ditched the rest of us in the workforce. I can name off former co-workers who've opted out just as fast as I can name Thomas the Train engines. Being a full-time working mom it sometimes feels like "another one bites the dust" when you see another protruding belly in the office and the distant responses about "not really sure" if they'll be returing to work.
So when I read about a new study that de-bunks the "opt-out revolution" as a myth, I was shocked. Yes, I know of plenty of working mothers. In fact, nearly all of the women who are on my project are working mothers. But I also know plenty of professional women that are taking 3-10 years off to focus on motherhood. When you belong to mother's club that seems to only cater to SAHMs, you can get a little jaded about the opt-out revolution.
According to Christine Percheski, the revolution is more like a drop in the bucket. Using cross-sectional data from the US Census, Percheski examined trends of college-educated professional and managerial women in the US from 1960 to 2005.
Despite all the anecdotal evidence of working women leaving their career to stay home, she found that less than 8 percent of professional women leave the workforce for a year or more during their prime childbearing years.
More women in my generation (that's Gen X if you are curious) work full-time year-round than our counterparts in any previous generation.
So why does it feel like there are more moms at home than in the work force if the evidence proves otherwise?
Many women who end up working part-time still consider themselves to have "opted-out." While Percheski's study does look at the number of full-time women who took a year or more off in pursuit of motherhood, it does not compare the number of full-time women who decided to work fewer hours. I'd be curious to see how that would change the number.
Percheski only examined college-educated professional women. Of course the Opt-Out Revolution typically only looks at white, affluent, educated women. I suppose the assumption is that those without college degrees never had the choice to opt-out. Or perhaps their wage was so low that having children didn't give them the choice to opt-in. Same goes for single moms. I'm pretty sure that those women who are "opting out" are relying on their spouse's income. How many single moms do you know of that have opted out? I don't know of one.
Census-data is just not enough data. The idea of opting out is still a new one. Even the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't agree. It reports that 60 percent of married mothers are now in the work force, 4 percentage points lower than in 1997. The rate of married mothers of infants who work fell 6 percentage points to 53 percent. Which one is right?
Regardless of whether working mommas are staying in the workforce or opting out, corporations could do a lot more to make sure that we stick around. The workplace fails working mothers - inflexible scheduling, maternal profiling, lack of child care, lack of paid maternity leave, lack of sick leave - just to name a few.
Some are pushed out, some have the luxury of choice, many would like to stay but leave because their employer won’t provide the flexibility. Once women leave, they often struggle to return. Flexibility is the secret sauce and once employers figure this out, opting in and out will become much more fluid and acceptable.
