The opt-out myth

Kathy G.

I've been meaning to blog about an important scholarly paper that was recently published in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, which concerns trends in women's labor force participation. The paper is not publicly available online, but you can find a press release about it here.

The main findings of the study, which is by a sociology graduate student at Princeton named Christine Percheski, is that the notion that increasing numbers of women are opting out of the work force is a myth. Using government data from the Census and the American Community Survey, she shows that the labor force participation of professional women has continued to increase. Moreover, these women are working longer hours, and the employment rates of women with children and women in male-dominated professions continue to climb. In addition, the fertility rates of professional women have remained steady, and college-educated women have the highest marriage rates of all educational groups.

Now, there is nothing new about these findings. As I wrote last summer when I was guest blogging for Ezra, all the recent empirical studies done by economists like Cornell's Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, Harvard's Claudia Goldin, and Heather Boushey of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, who all, like Percheski, used large datasets and rigorous methodologies, showed the same thing: no opt-out revolution. Controlling for the business cycle and population trends, there has been no decline in labor force participation among women in general, or mothers in particular, or even among professional class mothers or the mothers of very young children.

Yet, in spite of these strong and consistent findings, the myth of the "opt-out revolution" persists. Perhaps the most interesting part of Percheski's paper is the section that explores why this is so. First, she says, for women, having children does continue to be associated with lower levels of employment, and even though more professional women are working than ever before, many of them still don't work full-time, year-round.

Related to this, since there are more professional working women than ever before, "there are more women available to exit." Writes Percheski:

The average person is thus more likely to personally know a professional woman who has left the labor force. A woman who does not work full-time and long hours may now seem anomalous and be more noticeable than the thousands of professional women who are working full-time in demanding jobs while raising young children. Additionally, although the percentage of women with advanced degrees who are not working is declining across cohorts, the percentage of non-working women who have an advanced degree is growing because the whole population is becoming more educated.

Finally, Percheski surmises that the overblown accounts of "opting out" may reflect anxieties that women's work and family lives are not changing fast enough, and that more progress in gender equity should have been achieved by now. The work/family conflict is still, for many women, a very real one. Public policies and workplace institutions have not made many of the accommodations -- such as paid family leave policies, affordable and widely available child care, a shorter work week, and flexible scheduling -- that would make it easier for women to balance work and family. Though women's labor force participation has not significantly declined, the growth of women's employment rates in many fields have slowed or stopped altogether. And this is indeed a cause for concern.

In addition to Percheski's arguments, I would add that the media has a lot to answer for here. Over the past decade, the New York Times has run many flimsy, poorly sourced but attention-getting articles that would have you believe that women were leaving the work force in droves. Even the liberal American Prospect published an excerpt from Linda Hirshman's book Get to Work, in which Hirshman, a feminist, claimed that women were indeed opting out -- her main evidence for this being a survey of women whose wedding announcements ran in the New York Times, which obviously is not exactly a representative sample.

Echidne of the Snakes often makes the point -- as she did here -- that "studies" and research that reinforce retrograde, sexist stereotype tend to get wall-to-wall saturation media coverage, while those that don't tend to be ignored. Wondering whether this was the case with the Percheski paper, I looked it up on Google News (using several different search terms -- "American Sociological Review," Percheski, "opt out", etc.). And what did I find? A grand total of four mentions of the study: in a Reuters article, in a column in the Orlando Sentinel, and in blog posts for the Wall Street Journal and Business Week websites. That was it.

Is there any doubt that if her study did indeed show a decline in women's labor force particpation, that every newspaper and website in the land would be shouting it from the rooftops?

Comments

[Dan Miller]

In semi-defense of Hirschman and the Prospect, wasn't her book most concerned with elite-level, highly-educated, high-status women? Getting a representative sample might not have been a high priority for her.

[Jill]

What I'd really love to see is more results/more studies related to the editorial process at the influential media outlets, on a matrix with the gender of the editors making those decisions. We really need to uncover that - I know we feel that we see it in what is and isn't covered and how it reflects or fails to reflect what we know is true or untrue. But I do like it when there are studies to point to now and then.

Do you know if any have been done? I'm not aware of any.

[Kathy G.]

But Dan, that's exactly what the academic studies have done -- they've looked not only at women's labor force participation in general but at the participation of elite, highly educated, professional class women in particular. And they find no evidence of declining labor force participation for either group.

[ninja_zombie]

>Echidne of the Snakes often makes the point -- as she did here -- that "studies" and research that reinforce retrograde, sexist stereotype tend to get wall-to-wall saturation media coverage, while those that don't tend to be ignored.

I think it's much simpler. Stories which are easy to write ("your pre-existing beliefs are confirmed by science!") get published. Stories with ambiguity, no punch line, and require work of the reporter don't.

Another example:

http://jaltcoh.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-to-write-new-york-times-article-to.html

[Dan Miller]

Sorry, missed that in your post--very interesting.

[Rob32]

Hi, I just read this article on alternet and thought I'd comment. This seems to confirm what I have read in other places. My wife and I often discuss why this myth continues despite empirical data from numerous sources to the contrary. The reason I'm writing though was to share something that occurred yesterday as my wife and I were playing with our son at the park. There were a couple of other parents (moms) discussing returning to work. To paraphrase one mother, "the math didn't add up--I could go back to work after he was 6 months old and pay more in child care than I make or stay home and take care of him while my husband worked. Now that he's starting pre-school, I'm looking to go back." I wonder how many of the women who "opt-out" aren't really given a choice like this mother wasn't? I also wonder how many return to work once it is more feasible. Now, I do have to add that this all took place in a more afluent university town where working or staying home is still an option. What do the numbers look like in lower SES areas? This myth is bad all around and a lot more work needs to be done to kill it. Thanks for the article!

[Ken Houghton]

Percheski got an acknowledgment in a 2004 Sara McLanahan paper that documents the split between rich and poor during "the second demographic transition." (in Demography).

Why does the research that documents that the rich are getting richer always come from the rich, private institutions?

[Barry]

ninja_zombie: ""your pre-existing beliefs are confirmed by science!"

But why are the pre-existing beliefs, considering that they're factually wrong?

When somebody holds factually incorrect beliefs, there's something going on.

[psyche]

I suspect the "opt-out revolution" myth persists because it's politically very useful to two different groups of people: social conservatives who want to claim that women really want to be home with the kids in the kitchen, and a certain group of feminists (largely white, older and well off) who feel that issues like universal childcare and paid leave aren't getting enough attention from younger feminists. It's worth noting that both these groups tend to have strong access to prestigious media outlets.

The incongruity of these two groups agreeing on anything also tends to reinforce the perception that it must be true.