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October 27, 2003

The Opt-Out Revolution

When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to be a writer, and, considering my options, drew up a list of all the women writers that I admired, and researched how many of them had children. I don't remember most of the writers (Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson were on the list) but I do remember that most of them, not surprisingly, were childless. Wrote Cyril Connolly, "There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall."

Desiring to be William Shakespeare or Carly Fiorina are not, perhaps, dissimilar in the scope of their ambition. This weekend, The Opt-Out Revolution by Lisa Belkin, appeared in the New York Times Magazine (you can use my NY Times login: caterinanet/caterinanet). A few paragraphs in, Belkin issues this salvo, which caused me to shudder:

Why don't women run the world?

Maybe it's because they don't want to.

From what Belkin has found after many years of observation, interviews and research is that high achieving women with law degrees and MBA's have been leaving the career track to upper management positions in remarkable numbers to stay home and take care of their children. Given the choice between working nights until 4 AM, or being there to participate in their children's childhood, they're choosing the latter.

There isn't a lot about partner roles within the women's marriages (they all appear to be upper-middle-class and heterosexual). I would have thought this would have a lot to do with the decision to work or raise kids. One woman is quoted:

''My fantasy is a world where there are two kinds of people -- ones who like to stay home and care for children and ones who like to go out and have a career,'' she says. ''In this fantasy, one of these kinds can only marry the other.'' But the way it seems to work now is that ambitious women seem to be attracted to ambitious men. Then when they have children together, ''someone has to become less ambitious.'' And right now, it tends to be the woman who makes that choice.

I was heartened to find that, according to an article in Fortune a couple months back, more than one-third of the women on the FORTUNE 50 Most Powerful Women in Business list have husbands that stay at home and take care of the kids. This jives with the conclusion that Belkin draws at the end of her article, which is that the workplace is changing because women have been refusing to make the concessions demanded of them:

Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too -- the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men.

An article in the Oct. 13 edition of Fortune, Power: Do Women Really Want it? draws similar conclusions. It's not that their reach exceeds their grasp, but that the sanctioned grasp grasps at things women don't really care about.

"The dirty little secret," [Jamie Gorelick of Fannie Mae] adds, "is that women demand a lot more satisfaction in their lives than men do." Asks Hillary Clinton: "Are women willing to pay the price for corporate life? They have to play by the same rules as men do. And right now there are really brutal rules for women who want to have families.

Posted by Caterina Fake at 04:06 AM in General | Permalink

Comments

The passage I found the most interesting in this article discussed the desire for women to have their success correlate with their childrens' success:

''I am so conflicted on this,'' says Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and author of ''Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection.'' Female primates, she says, are ''competitive'' in that they seek status within their social order. So it would follow that women strive for status too.
But there is an important qualifier. When primates compete, they do so in ways that increase the survival chances of their offspring. In other words, they do it for their children. ''At this moment in Western civilization,'' Hrdy says, ''seeking clout in a male world does not correlate with child well-being. Today, striving for status usually means leaving your children with an au pair who's just there for a year, or in inadequate day care. So it's not that women aren't competitive; it's just that they don't want to compete along the lines that are not compatible with their other goals.

Depending on your current situation in society when you have children, continuing to work can confer benefits on you and your family, or just on you. For me personally, continuing to work would have conferred benefits on me, but not enough benefits to really improve my childrens' quality of life. My temperament, the fact that I didn't really need the money (I lived frugally and invested the money I did get in rental property), and my child's temperament, and the circumstances of my job -- which required very long hours -- meant the "family math" didn't make sense. For other women, the math is going to turn out differently -- either the income they recieve really will improve their childrens' lives over time more than their presence at home will, or the sense of self they get from their job is strong enough that taking it away diminishes their sense of themselves as people and thus as parents, etc., are all factors in how the family calculus will tote up for them.

Of course, few women are comfortable with the idea of arguing from biology, because that's so often been used (and still is being used) to support a status quo in which men have more of the money and women have more of the childcare duties. What's interesting is the way in which biology can become a double edged sword in social change -- Francis Fukuyama, in his book Our Posthuman Future points out that gays often support arguments that their sexual preference is a biological characteristic, but that other groups don't like the idea that their behavior is influenced by biology, because it undercuts religious claims that homosexuality is a "choice" and can be "reversed" by "deprogramming." Arguments from biology have been used both to restrain groups trying to change the status quo but also has been used by other groups to bolster their claims for equality.

Posted by: Lisa Williams at Oct 27, 2003 9:48:52 AM

How you present yourself to the world of men and women is very much a matter of how you learned about the world in the first place. I was lucky enough to have a mother who told me I could do anything and be anyone (very lucky, given that my father believed women should marry well, have children, and keep an elegant house). I always carried that within myself, telling the men I met that I never intended to stay home (and this was in the fifties when career women were odd).

If you've never been told you can't have it all, maybe you can. My daughter assures me that she never felt neglected because I worked -- and she grew into a loving, intelligent, and very self-possessed young woman.

It does trouble me that women seem to shun technology careers, afraid perhaps that they are unfeminine -- or that they will not succeed. We need to figure out how to persuade them that technology is no tougher than law or medicine -- and can be equally rewarding.

Amy Wohl

Posted by: Amy Wohl at Oct 27, 2003 5:18:46 PM

With all of the offshoring of technology work, I don't think that I will try to persuade my children to go into technology careers (nor manufacturing, for that matter).

Having said that, I am very glad that my career is in technology. I left a great corporate technology position and created a fulfilling consulting career which allows me to raise my two children.

Posted by: Colleen at Oct 28, 2003 12:08:21 AM

I'd like to take a look at the article "The Opt-Out Revolution" by Lisa Belkin that appeared in the New York Times Magazine. You offer your NY Times login: caterinanet/caterinanet, but its not allowing me to access the article. It asks for a user name and a password - are they both "caterinanet"?

Posted by: Melissa Hursey at Nov 5, 2003 1:24:35 PM

Terrific response to this NYT article: "Post-Feminist Swill Redux" by Susan J. Douglas in In These Times magazine: http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=446_0_3_0_C

Posted by: Emily at Dec 3, 2003 4:26:18 PM

I 've just read in a german magazine an abstract about "the opt-out-revolution". Now I'd like to have a closer look to that article and I tried to log in with the passwords "caterinanet/caterinanet". But malfunction.
I'm a german female scientist with child and phD, and there is no work for high-educated women with children in good old germany, they have forced me to stay at home - perhaps I can get some new aspects and ideas for my "working career" as a classical biologist after reading this article

thanks a lot

Posted by: angelika at Dec 9, 2003 5:59:17 AM

I 've just read in a german magazine an abstract about "the opt-out-revolution". Now I'd like to have a closer look to that article and I tried to log in with the passwords "caterinanet/caterinanet". But malfunction.
I'm a german female scientist with child and phD, and there is no work for high-educated women with children in good old germany, they have forced me to stay at home - perhaps I can get some new aspects and ideas for my "working career" as a classical biologist after reading this article

thanks a lot

Posted by: angelika at Dec 9, 2003 5:59:26 AM

In britain girls have long surpassed boys in GCSE examinations and gain more A grades atA.level.They are poised to over take men in the race for first -calss degrees .There are now more women than men training to be accountants and lawyers .Having achieved so much, whyare they abandoning theprofessional and managerial jobs they have carved out for themselves in order to be full-time wives and mothers?

Posted by: fredy at Jan 3, 2004 8:39:59 AM