Half Changed World

Last fall, the New York Times magazine ran a long cover story called “The Opt-Out Revolution,” by Lisa Belkin which talks about the choices that some highly educated professional women have made to either leave paid employment entirely, or to leave the “career track.” Belkin suggests — while carefully noting both that this is an extremely selective sample, and that it is “dangerous and loaded” to suggest that women are inherently different from men — that “women are rejecting the workplace.”

Another day I’ll come back to this claim and look at the statistics more closely, but for today I want to talk about why this article was so controversial, especially among working mothers.

1) They’re worried that it will lead employers to be less likely to hire and promote women and mothers, because they’ll think that they’re not going to stay around after they have kids (what economists call “statistical discrimination.”) No matter how much Belkin tries to insert caveats, the fact that this was on the front cover of the Times magazine gives it much more than the usual anecdotal weight.

2) Where are the men? There’s absolutely no discussion of the husbands of these women — whether they were involved parents, whether they ever considered cutting back the hours they worked, what they thought about being totally responsible for the family’s income. Maybe they’d love to “reject the workplace” but don’t feel like it’s a viable option. Who knows? Not the reader of this article.

3) Almost in passing, through a quote from a single anthropologist, the article suggests that child care is bad for kids: “‘At this moment in Western civilization,’ [Sarah Blaffer] 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.'” Excuse me? There’s plenty of inadequate child care out there, but the odds of kids whose parents earn this much being in it are pretty low. [Thanks to Salon’s Ann Marlowe for pointing out the dishonesty of “I Don’t Know How She Does It” in this regard.] Belkin doesn’t necessarily endorse this point of view, but she doesn’t offer any countervailing voices.

4) The article doesn’t offer any hope or advice for the large numbers of working men and women who agree that the workplace is ludicrously unfriendly to families, but who don’t have the luxury of choosing to just walk away. Maybe it’s possible, as Belkin suggests at the end of the article, that large numbers of women walking away from the workplace will change employers’ behavior, but I’m not holding my breath.

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A tip of my hat to Russ at the Daily Yak for noting my arrival in the blogosphere. This is a “journal” type blog, from the perspective of a SAHD. I wonder if SAHDs are more likely than SAHMs to blog, or if I’m just more aware of them…

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Tomorrow the Census Bureau will release the poverty statistics for 2003. I’ll kick off my weekly statistical report by checking in on them. They’re unlikely to be good news.