Half Changed World

Last week’s 60 Minutes story on (Women) Staying at Home, included the statement that "Census bureau statistics show a 15 percent increase in the number of stay-at-home moms in less than 10 years." I hadn’t seen any hard numbers supporting the claim that there’s been a big increase in the number of women staying home, so I set off in search of this statistic.

First stop was the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s useful databook on Women in the Labor Force. I soon learned that the labor force participation rate (meaning the fraction of the population employed, or looking for work) for women was in 2002 was 59.6 percent, a slight (0.7 percent) decline from the 1990 peak of 60.0 percent, but higher than any year between 1970 (when it was 43.3 percent) 1996.

But, of course, women with children are only a small fraction of all adult women, so there’d have to be a pretty big drop in the number of working mothers for it to show up in the overall labor force participation rate. So I kept looking.

The same databook reports that the labor force participation rate for all women with children under age 18 was 72.2 percent in 2002, down from a peak of 72.9 percent in 2000.* Looking only at women with children under age 3, the rate is 60.5 percent, down from a peak of 62.2 percent in 1998. We’re still looking at changes in the 1-3 percent range, nothing earthshattering. So I kept looking.

Next, I found an interesting article from the Monthly Labor Review, a journal put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics with the headline: "Are women leaving the labor force?" It includes this quote from Barron’s, claiming that "In just the past two years, a quiet counterrevolution has begun…" The most interesting thing about this article, however, is that it’s from July 1994, shortly before women’s labor force participation hit new all-time highs. (For the record, the author, Howard Hayghe, correctly concluded "it is too early to proclaim that the trend of increasing labor force participation rates of women has been halted.") So, is the claim of the retreat from the workforce just hype? I kept looking.

Moving over to the Census bureau’s bi-annual report on the Fertility of American Women, which turns out to be the source for this Womens eNews story from last year. This report says that of women who had a child in the last year, 54.6 percent were in the labor force in 2002, down from a peak of 58.7 percent in 1998. That’s a 7 percent decline — albeit from an extremely high point. Looking at the breakout by education, it looks like the biggest percentage decrease is for women without a high school degree, and the smallest decrease is for women with a high school degree, but no college.

So what’s going on? I think there are two different stories, at different ends of the labor market. At one end, is the story about the stars and planets aligning in the late 1990s to get more low-income mothers into the labor force than ever before**: welfare reform removed an alternative to working, increased federal and state support for child care made working more possible, the Earned Income Tax Credit made working more profitable, and the strong economy made jobs available. The economy isn’t so strong these days, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that fewer poor mothers are working. (The big unanswered question is what are they living on, because it’s not welfare, but that’s a topic for another day.)

The second story is about well-off well-educated women who have the choice whether or not to work because they have other sources of income, most often husbands. For the last 30 years, this group has been more likely to work, not less, than other women, because they have access to the most interesting, renumerative, and flexible jobs. And it does look like there’s a small increase in the number who have chosen not to work in the past few years. Whether this is a blip in the trends (as the apparent decline in the early 1990s was), possibly caused by the weak economy, or is the start of a real change (post 9/11 reprioritizing?), I have no idea. And no one else does, either, no matter what they tell you.

Coming tomorrow: The plot thickens: another source of data on stay-at-home moms is found. And stay-at-home dads, too!

Footnotes:

* Yes, mothers have a higher labor force participation rate than all adult women; it’s because "all adult women" includes senior citizens.

** I am aware that not all never-married mothers are low-income, but this was the closest graph I could find to what I wanted to show.

In that infamous article on the "Opt-Out Revolution," Lisa Belkin argues that –on average — women are less ambitious than men, less interested in the conventional measures of success — money, power, titles — and suggests that it may be due to biological differences between men and women.

This conclusion is firmly rejected by Anna Fels, author of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. She makes a classic liberal feminist argument: ambition is not seen as a "feminine" quality, especially in the mainstream white middle-class definition of femininity; many women censor their own ambitions and choose not to compete with men as a result; and society penalizes women who are overtly ambitious and competitive. This argument should be familiar to anyone who has read Susan Faludi’s Backlash or taken an introduction to Women’s Studies class.

What’s new and interesting in this book is Fels’ emphasis on recognition as a fundamental human need. She has a very specific definition in mind here:

"Recognition means being valued by others for qualities that we experience and value in ourselves; it involves appreciation by another person that feels accurate and meaningful to the recipient. Because recognition affirms a person’s individual experience or accomplishment, it is different from other forms of attention."

Fels’ description of how women simultaneously hunger for this sort of recognition and deny that they desire it (and are uncomfortable when they receive it) rang very true to me. For example, she cites repeated examples of women running for elected office — perhaps the ultimate action of seeking public recognition — who frame their activitism as just another form of caregiving. However, she sometimes pushes this argument to the edge of absurdity. Reading this book, one might think that the biggest danger of divorce to homemakers is the loss of the recognition provided by their ex-husbands rather than the financial threat or that the biggest advantage of the "old boys network" is the recognition it provides rather than the doors to power it opens.

Fels is about as negative about full-time parenting as anything I’ve read since The Feminine Mystique. She writes that a body of literature "document[s] the large component of child care that consists of demanding, low-control, repetitive tasks. This aspect of child care undoubtedly accounts for the fact that virtually everyone who can afford some kind of child care has it. It is the reason that full-time parenting, frequently praised as the most important and meaningful job in the world, is not one that men are lining up to do." Further, she argues that few people receive recognition for their parenting skills, because children are notoriously self-centered (Fels says "comically oblivious") and no one else is paying attention to what you’re doing.

Fels argues that — except for the very stressful years of the late 20s and early 30s when both careers and young children are highly demanding — working mothers are happier and more satisfied with their lives, their marriages, and their sense of self than at-home mothers. Her basic recommendations are for more government support for child care, more paternal care, and for women who are unhappy at work to seek out better jobs rather than to give up on paid employment entirely. She is concerned that women who "opt-out" will be buying temporary relief at the cost of long-term depression.

For today’s book review, I turn to Ann Crittenden’s new book If You’ve Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything: Leadership Begins at Home. I felt bad about having taking a bit of a cheap shot at it a few weeks back, without having actually read it. So I read it.

The good news is that Ann Crittenden has not taken leave of her senses — she’s very well aware that the business world does not currently value the skills developed through parenting. The bad news is that this book is unlikely to convince anyone of the value of parenting experience who isn’t already a believer — even if they read the book, which they won’t. I’m not quite sure who the target audience for this book is, other than weirdos like me who are obsessed with the work-family literature. Maybe stay-at-home parents who are looking for a confidence boost as they consider moving back into the paid workforce? (There’s an appendix discussing how to list skills gained through parenting on a resume.) As of today, it’s somewhere in the 4,000s on the Amazon sales list, which I think is pretty good.

To be honest, I found this book a slow read. Crittenden makes her case with exhaustive quotes and examples, but after a while it felt awfully repetitive. And, to a great degree, it felt like she was attacking a straw-man (straw-woman?) argument — that parenting rots your brain. Except for those awful sleep-deprived mornings, that’s not a claim that anyone I know takes seriously.

RebelDad shared his perspective on this book a few weeks ago, and commented that Crittenden lumps all parents together — those combining paid work and parenting, and those returning to the workforce after time spent exclusively parenting. I think I’d go further than that — while the interviews that Crittenden cites were with both "juggling" and "sequencing" parents, I think the book is really aimed at promoting sequencing.

This makes sense when you think of If you’ve raised kids… as sort of an addendum to Crittenden’s last book, The Price of Motherhood. As throughly documented by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, it’s not just the years out of the labor force that cripple women’s lifetime earnings, it’s the effect of these years on their earnings when they try to return. (The limited evidence suggests that it’s just as bad, or even worse, for men who take time out to parent.) And, as I’ve argued before, it’s crazy that in a potential lifespan of 80 or more years, we shouldn’t be able to focus on parenting for the few years when our children are very young or otherwise needy.

However, I wish that Crittenden hadn’t let her bias in favor of at-home-parents show through so much. There are several passages in the book that made me wince as a working parent, including the one in which Crittenden imagines herself telling her teenage son "I gave all that [a prestigious job at the New York Times] up so that you would have at least one parent at home who would be there for you and make sure you didn’t turn out pathetic!" Ouch! Crittenden also shares a horror story of a poor working mother whose children died in a fire when she left them unattended to go to work, a story of a union leader whose daughter was "still angry about her frequent absences and for a long time remained more deeply attached to her grandmother," a story of a media executive who had to remain on the job at September 11, not knowing whether her son was safe, and the story of a lawyer who became an at-home-mom because her job forced her into an "inauthentic persona." Not exactly the most reassuring reading.

This is particularly unfortunate, because, as Crittenden suggests, if the doors are going to be opened to recognize parenting skills any time soon, it’s probably going to be other parents who open them. And by and large, it’s going to be working parents who are going to be in the position to open them.

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1/14/05: This post is getting a zillion hits via google all of a sudden.  I’m assuming this is part of some sort of assignment.  Please read my comments about the internet and plagarism on my About page.

Flexibility is the holy grail for working parents these days. Flextime, telecommuting, conference calls, checking email from home, all of these are eagerly sought after as ways to make it a little more possible to combine a satisfying family life with a full career. But flexibility has some downsides, as well as some limitations, that aren’t often considered.

1. Flexibility doesn’t really add more hours to the day. It can save you the commute and the need to dress up, but it doesn’t magically make the time bind go away. I know someone who after the birth of her first child successfully negotiated to convert her job into a part-time, work-from-home position, with flexible hours. She didn’t have paid childcare, however, planning on working while her baby napped, or after her husband came home from work. After several months, she reluctantly resigned, having discovered that she was working every night from 10 pm to 2 am.

2. Flexibility makes it hard to set limits. Cell phones, blackberries, email at home — while these may free you from the office, they make you more a prisoner of work. We all know the people who check their messages constantly, even while on vacation.

3. Flexibility reduces your negotiating position. Until I read Kidding Ourselves, it had never occurred to me to think about the effects of workplace flexibility on household choices. Mahony points out that when a couple negotiates over child care and housework, having the less flexible job can be an advantage. Moreover, she argues that, unless there are significant social changes, increased flexibility will only reinforce the current gendered division of labor, because predominantly women will take advantage of it.

4. Flexibility forces you to make a constant stream of small decisions. If you know that there’s no way you can take off from work on a weekday morning to pass out muffins at your child’s preschool, there’s no decision that needs to be made. If you have a flexible job, you find yourself constantly weighing the alternatives: maybe you could go in two hours early the day before, but then you won’t be able to help get the kids ready for school, and is this more important than your older child’s field trip, and what about the dentist appointment next week, and how likely is it that your boss will reschedule the meeting that was cancelled last week for that morning? If you consciously or subconsciously believe that a "good mother" would always be there to hand out muffins, you wind up feeling like you’re letting your child down each time you could possibly have rearranged your schedule to be there, and didn’t.

Today’s book is Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power, by Rhona Mahony. This is an absolutely fascinating book, published in 1995, that I don’t know anyone else who has ever heard of. I encountered it through a footnote in another book, perhaps The Second Shift.

Kidding Ourselves is almost two books in one. The first two-thirds is an attempt to answer the question of why so many smart ambitious feminist women in egalitarian marriages have kids and all of a sudden find themselves responsible for more than half of the child care and household work. As Naomi Wolf puts it in Misconceptions:

"Our generation did not think we were marrying breadwinners; we thought we were marrying our best friends. But the husbands were pulling rank in a way that best friends don’t do."

Mahony’s answer is that it’s a matter of power, and negotiating positions. And she goes through an interesting list of negotiating strategies that women can use to try to persuade their husbands to do more: Telling them how unhappy the current situation is making, make moral arguments about equality, offer other things in return that will make them happy, nag, threaten to leave. Some of these are more or less effective. Wolf makes similar points, and grimly concludes that men simply aren’t going to make real career sacrifices unless forced to, and women aren’t going to be able to force them to do it, because their threat to leave isn’t serious.

I found Mahony a more optimistic read, even though she also thinks that — on average — women are going to lose these negotiations, necause she believes that there are things that women can do to increase their leverage. The key point, however, is that these are mostly choices made long before the children are born — what career to enter, what spouse to marry.

Mahony argues that as long as women choose careers that don’t maximize their earning potential and that give them flexibility, marry men who have more earning potential and less flexibility, and care more for their children as infants, they will always wind up doing more of the child care and housework.

Is it Ms magazine that used to refer to "click" moments? CLICK.

The earning potential part is generally understood. The marriage point is interesting, because it’s not just about money. It’s that if you want a husband who is intensely involved in child-rearing, you have to marry someone who values it, even if it has a career cost. And career-oriented ambitious women tend to marry equally career-oriented ambitious men.

The child care is a point that I keep making to everyone I know. Child care is not an inherent skill. You can get some ideas of how to do it by reading books or taking classes or talking to other parents, but mostly you learn how to do it by doing it. And you make some mistakes — forgetting to bring a change of clothes on an outing, bouncing the child too much after a feeding — but you learn from them. Most fathers spend ridiculously little time on their own with their infants, which puts them behind. And once one parent is "the expert" and the other "the assistant" it becomes far too easy to maintain that role.

The last third of the book, much to my surprise, is a vision of a world in which breadwinning mothers and caregiving fathers are as common as breadwinning fathers and caregiving mothers. Like me (!) Mahony rejects the goal of having all families divide breadwinning and childrearing equally. She writes:

"Not all fathers can do half the child rearing, or want to, or should. Much more to the point, some fathers can do lots more, and want to, and should. People give the incorrect answer [a 50-50 future[, I think, because they can’t boost their imaginations over the hump of the present to imagine a future in which there really exists no sexual division of labor. "

I’ve got about a hundred and one books that I’d like to write about, so I think I’m going to have a weekly book review. Note that the "books I’m talking about" list will include books that ticked me off as well as ones I’d recommend, so check out the review before you treat the inclusion as an endorsement.

I wanted to talk a bit more about Flux. In brief, the author, Peggy Orenstein, interviewed dozens of women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s to see how their attitudes about work/family/life issues differed at different life stages. The synthesized findings are wrapped around portraits of individual women, and her own musings about whether to become a parent. This book is an easy, mostly enjoyable read. The women are portrayed sympathetically, and largely allowed to speak in their own words.

The sections on parenting largely cover ground that has been covered by other authors. What I hadn’t seen elsewhere (at the time) is the wledgment that by the time you’ve been in the workforce for 10 or so years, the bloom is often off the rose. Obviously, it depends on your career path, but in lots of jobs, you’re starting to hit the flat side of the learning curve, the excitement has worn off, and you’re starting to ask "is this really what I want to do with the next 30 years of my life?" For many of the women in their 30s in Orenstein’s book, becoming a mother was a socially acceptable opportunity to step back from their careers and to see their lives as a whole and to reflect on their priorities, a sabbatical of sorts.

The other part of Orenstein’s book that I liked is her recognition of what seems obvious to me — the main reason that many women postpone childbearing until their late 30s isn’t because they’re so focused on their careers, as Sylvia Ann Hewett suggests, but because they’d rather not go it alone, and they haven’t met a partner who is ready to parent.

Our thoughts about work and family are strongly shaped by the choices that we have made. Books and articles are tested against our own experiences to see if their findings ring true. So, as I begin this blog, I feel that I should describe some of my choices, laying my cards on the table.

I am a working mother to young children — 3 1/2 years and 10 months as of this writing. I work full-time, but not especially long hours — it’s rare that I’m not able to leave my desk by 5.30. I’m a civil service (e.g. not political) employee of the federal government. [And in case it isn’t screamingly obvious, this blog in no way represents the official position of the Federal Government.]

So, if you see the world of mothers as divided into those who are at-home and those who work for pay, I’m firmly in the working camp. But, if you see the world of families as divided into those who have an at-home parent, and those who don’t, we’re on the other side — my husband quit his job when I returned to work after my first maternity leave, and has been a full-time at-home dad ever since. So my perspective on these issues is a bit different from most.

It’s often hard to talk about our parenting choices and why we think they’re the right ones without casting subtle (or not-so-subtle) aspersions on people who have made different choies, but I’m going to try. Let me start by saying that I think we’ve made the right choice, for us, for now, but I don’t think there’s a single right choice for everyone, for all times. (This isn’t just a wishy-washy plea for tolerance, but a general statement of principle, which has implications when we start talking about policies to support families — but I’ll get into that another day.)

So why did we choose this arrangement? I never really considered staying home full-time myself. I don’t think I’d be very happy doing it. The social isolation, the repetition, the impossibility of ever completing a project (food gets eaten, diapers, dishes, clothes and floors all get redirtied), my own absurdly high standards, all would have driven me crazy. While I was home on maternity leave with my older son, I found myself counting the hours until my husband would come home. I’m sure I would have gotten more relaxed and happier with practice, but it wasn’t something I was burning to do.

And my husband really wanted to do it. He’s got the temperament to handle it, and he’s good at it. And he was bored and frustrated with his job, and was really only doing it for the paycheck. Unlike many at-home parents, he was earning more than enough to pay for high quality child care, but it still seemed crazy to us for him to keep working at a job that was meaningless to him, in order to pay for someone else to care for our child.

Some people believe that parental care is inherently better for kids than any child care (cf Caitlin Flanagan). I’m not so sure — I think there are good parents and not-so-good parents and good child care settings and not-so-good child care settings. I think my husband does a terrific job taking care of our boys, but I also think that we know enough about child care options and have enough money that if we decided to keep working we’d probably be able to find an excellent provider or center. But our lives would be that much more stressful and hectic.

In re-reading this, I feel like I keep harping on how much money we have. We’re not rich, certainly not compared to most professionals. But I’m overwhelmingly aware of how the money we have gives us choices that just aren’t there for the vast majority of Americans. Another theme that I’m sure will be recurring in this blog.