Why Opting Out Still Hasn't Been Proven False
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Commenter Alphabet Soup is right about one thing: It is a little odd to have a discussion of opting out on DoubleX (or, of course, anywhere) without Linda Hirshman. One explanation is, as Alphabet suggested, that I'm in the special place in hell for people who report findings that are later debunked, sentenced to read unredacted Census data for eternity. Another, which has the virtue of being true, is that I was in Europe spending my gains on a well-deserved vacation.
I'm back now, and predictably unimpressed with the so-called "findings" in the Post article. In fact, this whole DoubleX discussion starts by buying, without further inquiry, the Post suggestion that the opt-out revolution is a myth. But, as Emily correctly says, there's been a small rise in the number of families with kids under 15 and a stay-at-home mom. So, where’s the myth?
Professional economics writer David Leonhardt skewered the Post’s journalism in his Economix blog on the New York Times (sorry, Post):
The Washington Post has a front-page article today arguing that the so-called opt-out revolution — the alleged increase in stay-at-home mothers—is largely fiction. ... But then you get to the final paragraphs:
Historically, the Census Bureau’s annual population survey shows that there are more mothers at home now than in the mid-1990s. In 1994, 19.8 percent of married-couple families with children younger than 15 had a stay-at-home mother. Last year, it was 23.7 percent of families — an increase that Elliott said was statistically significant.
“I don’t think we exactly know why,” she said. It sure sounds as if those numbers undercut the thesis of the story, doesn’t it? And those are the only historical statistics in the story.
Well maybe, as Emily suggests, the opt-out revolution is STILL a myth, because, as the Post reports, the affluent, educated women supposedly making the "revolution" aren't opting out. It's the poor ignorant ones who are. But Leonhardt even disputes that, citing well-respected economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who reported that "earlier this decade 60.3 percent of female Harvard graduates in their mid-30s were working full time. In the 1990s, the equivalent number was 63.5 percent."
But, but, you debunkers might be thinking, Goldin and Katz must be wrong, too, because the Post said women in families with incomes over $100,000 and bachelor's degrees have not increased their opting-out. And you would be right. Your problem is that you think making a family income of over $100,000 a year makes you elite, or, so to speak, one of Lisa Belkin's BFFs. I don't know about Lisa, but I wasn't talking about the random $100,000 bachelor of arts woman. I was talking about the women who announced their weddings in the Styles section of the New York Times, which, like graduating from Harvard, often means never having to say family income of only $100,000.
Well, what about the really, truly elite? In Opting Out: An Exploration of Labor Force Participation of New Mothers, Barbara Cheeseman Day and Jennifer Downs of the same United States Census Bureau that fueled the Post article just told the Population Association of America 2009 Annual Meeting that, "Women at the highest income levels of $200,000 or more are slightly more likely to opt out than those with incomes between $100,000 and $199,999." Actually, if you read the Census ladies’ charts you see that the really elite women opt out at almost exactly the same rate as the women making between $50,000 and $100,000.
I don’t know if the opt-out phenomenon is a myth (the revolution is a whole other story). Cheeseman and Day’s snapshot and Goldin's Harvard data suggest opting out among the truly elite, but, since the Bureau has yet to see fit to publish historical data about the truly elite population, we don't know if, like their sisters in families under $100,000, these elite women have decreased their work-force participation over time or not. But what we do know is that the "over-$100,000" slice so beloved of the opt-out debunkers isolates the most working of all the women surveyed. The poorer ones stay home more and the richer ones stay home more. Hardly the material for myth-unmaking.
Linda Hirshman writes "The Princess" column for Double X and is the author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. Before she retired, she taught Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University.
Comments
WHY
By: feministworkingmom | Mon, 10/26/2009 - 13:33
I'm wondering why this really matters. A small increase in stay-at-home mothers is mirrored by an increase in stay-at-home fathers. WHY might matter if it is because people are losing their jobs, cultural mores are changing to accept men as child nurtures, more women are receiving pay so low that they cannot work for economic reasons, etc. The fact of the numbers I really don't care about.
What if you gave a revolution and nobody came
By: Linda Hirshman | Mon, 10/26/2009 - 12:20
commenter is quite right, which is why I said the revolution part is another discussion entirely. Belkin's risible suggestion is that by quitting their jobs to tend their children, her subjects would revolutionize the workplace. Instead they weakened their own power vis a vis the workplace, as well as the power of everyone who resembled them. I'm glad there aren't as many as she seemed to suggest. That would have only made matters worse.
On the other hand, whether a small number of people changing their behavior can make social change is a deep and important matter. I would say, yes, especially if they come from the highly visible stratum that is the subject of the weekly Times wedding announcements. The feminist movement, for all its current vaunted race/class intersectionality, is still mostly a white, upper class, highly educated, urban bunch, the same people, who, in Gail Collins' words, "changed everything" for women in the Sixties and Seventies. It may be politically correct to assert that the feminist movement started on the shop floor, as one of my critics asserted years ago, but it's historical nonsense. So when I found my Times Brides (class of 96) hanging out in the playground (50% fully out of the work force, 35% working part time), I thought their behavior mattered, if not, ahem, quite in the way that Belkin did.
David Leonhardt astutely theorized that women deny the opt out behavior because they don't want to talk about whether it's right or wrong. Right and wrong makes for a tough conversation. But I never saw a revolution without it.
Language barrier
By: amysee | Mon, 10/26/2009 - 12:20
I think the language that is used to characterize this phenomenon both incites us to disagreement and obscures the greater structural and other issues that might cause it.
"Opt-out" implies choice, and it seems we haven't figured out whether or not the women who started working and then stopped had, or felt they had, a choice in the matter. "Revolution" implies not only widespread phenomenon, but also a dramatic overthrow of the status quo, which seems a little overblown.
I'm not a researcher, I don't work in this field, etc. etc., but it seems like there is some economic rationality at play here. If it costs, as it does in my state and many others, $15,000 a year to put a child in daycare, those women making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year may decide (or we should say, the families in which women earn in that range may decide) that providing child care in the home is a better use of available resources than dumping a huge chunk of the woman's salary into childcare and still having to pay income taxes at a higher rate etc. This of course points to the role of America's family-unfriendly policies in constraining women's decision-making. There may not be much here in the way of "options."
There are also cultural issues which cast doubt on the "revolution" aspect. The idea that women shouldn't, or don't have to, work is not a new one. As a career-driven, unmarried, childless woman, I still on occasion toy with the notion that if my partner and I had a kid, I could quit this grind and stay home and bake bread and play on the floor with the baby, and I know I am not alone in fantasizing about this*. Because I am a woman, our culture dictates that this is a totally acceptable thing for me to do. Whereas my male partner does not have the ingrained cultural support for this. The idea that he could stop working, and that staying home with the [imaginary] child has equal value as making money, would never occur to him**. I think what the culture would prefer for him to do, once he gets sick of the grind, is to leave me for a younger woman and have a new family with her. Our society has expectations for all of us, and there is implicit and explicit support for us to live up to those expectations.
Anyway, I'm not an expert on any of this, but my sense is that the way we talk about this issue is getting in the way of us really understanding and exploring it. And we need to explore it, if our families and culture and country are ever going to work the way we want them to.
*I am not saying that raising kids (or baking bread, for that matter) is in any way easier than working outside the home. It's just different.
**I am not saying that men don't "opt-out," or that they don't want to, or like taking care of their kids, or whatever. I'm just saying that our culture still thinks it's super weird, most of the time.
What if you gave a revolution and nobody came
By: Linda Hirshman | Mon, 10/26/2009 - 12:19
commenter is quite right, which is why I said the revolution part is another discussion entirely. Belkin's risible suggestion is that by quitting their jobs to tend their children, her subjects would revolutionize the workplace. Instead they weakened their own power vis a vis the workplace, as well as the power of everyone who resembled them. I'm glad there aren't as many as she seemed to suggest. That would have only made matters worse.
On the other hand, whether a small number of people changing their behavior can make social change is a deep and important matter. I would say, yes, especially if they come from the highly visible stratum that is the subject of the weekly Times wedding announcements. The feminist movement, for all its current vaunted race/class intersectionality, is still mostly a white, upper class, highly educated, urban bunch, the same people, who, in Gail Collins' words, "changed everything" for women in the Sixties and Seventies. It may be politically correct to assert that the feminist movement started on the shop floor, as one of my critics asserted years ago, but it's historical nonsense. So when I found my Times Brides (class of 96) hanging out in the playground (50% fully out of the work force, 35% working part time), I thought their behavior mattered, if not, ahem, quite in the way that Belkin did.
David Leonhardt astutely theorized that women deny the opt out behavior because they don't want to talk about whether it's right or wrong. Right and wrong makes for a tough conversation. But I never saw a revolution without it.
Revolution?
By: K_Allen | Mon, 10/26/2009 - 11:43
So let's say small percentages of women are opting out more than in the past (3.2% more opt-outs among female Harvard grads, 3.9% according to Census Bureau figures, etc). That doesn't make for an opt-out "revolution." I would argue it makes for an opt-out flux, or a small opt-out shift. But a "revolution" implies some sort of significant movement, as though massive numbers of women are opting out. Is that really the case?