The "women are staying home in droves" story is out again...

[atommom]

I have some problems with this article ... not least of which is that it admits, near the end, that the economy is the main reason for women's reduced participation in the workplace. I've been noticed a barrage of "women don't want to work" articles for several years. While balancing work and children is a real dilemma, and many women do finally choose to stay home for awhile, I don't think this trend is as big as the media makes it out to be. Why do you suppose it keeps resurfacing? Is it just easier and cheaper to recycle stories than to cover current events?

For four decades, the number of women entering the workplace grew at a blistering pace, fostering a powerful cultural and economic transformation of American society. But since the mid-1990's, the growth in the percentage of adult women working outside the home has stalled, even slipping somewhat in the last five years and leaving it at a rate well below that of men.

While the change has been under way for a while, it was initially viewed by many experts as simply a pause in the longer-term movement of women into the work force. But now, social scientists are engaged in a heated debate over whether the gender revolution at work may be over.

Maybe, but many researchers are coming to a different conclusion: women are not choosing to stay out of the labor force because of a change in attitudes, they say. Rather, the broad reconfiguration of women's lives that allowed most of them to pursue jobs outside the home appears to be hitting some serious limits.

Instead, mothers with children at home gained the time for outside work by taking it from other parts of their day. They also worked more over all. Professor Bianchi found that employed mothers, on average, worked at home and on the job a total of 15 hours more a week and slept 3.6 fewer hours than those who were not employed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/business/02work.html?...

[CornField]

1. As one of those women who moved from the "workforce" to "home"

In 1998, I dropped out of the traditional workforce and became a stay-at-home-mom... actually, I would be better termed a work-at-home-mom. That is, since (and previous to) that time, I have owned and operated a business from my home (design, layout, marketing, design and so-forth).

I think what many of these studies miss are women like myself; and there is a whole new herd of us. We do want flexibility to attend parent meetings at school. We are tired of scrambling for child care when one of our children has a runny nose and fever. We are sick of bosses who neither understand nor care what we must go through in order to hold down a job, make less than our male counterparts, and turn the vast majority of our earnings over to people who then do the home jobs our husbands feel they cannot/will not take (child care, laundry, cooking, cleaning, and more). In short, many of us have learned there is a better way.

I began to plan my escape in 1992, shortly after my first daughter was born. For more than six years I not only took care of both home and workforce employment, but built my own business from the bottom up. Sociologists need to wake up. Women aren't returning home to sit on their laurels and eat bon-bons while watching daytime soaps, we are heading back there to ensure our survival in a world which was not built to support us.

[Warpy]

2. Great points. It also has to be pointed out that dropping out of the

workforce "just for a little while" to raise young children is FATAL to a woman's career. She is never allowed to pick up where she left off. She's considered unreliable because she left due to family committments (unerliable!) and is penalized by being shunted into the less mobile, less well paid "mommy track."

Many women found this out the hard way, and have become entrepreneurs.

My generation was the one that flocked into the workplace in the 60s and 70s, mostly because the economy had soured to the point that men weren't making enough to support families. We were the ones who found out having it all meant DOING it all, and that didn't work, either.

I hope succeeding generations of intelligent and educated women figure out how to make thus far inflexible corporations recognize that people aren't cogs in a machine, that the contributions of women are essential, and that our brains don't come out when the babies do.

Until then, entrepreneurship seems to be the only recourse.

[atommom]

3. Very true. I get frustrated when I see these stories, because

they're usually not well-researched, they exaggerate/mischaracterize the "trend", and they also seem to miss the larger point about the f'edupness of the corporate world. Instead, they usually give us a few snapshots of attractive stay-at-home moms who are soooo much happier now... Staying home has its benefits, but it won't work for everyone.

[Hello_Kitty]

5. They generalize and extrapolate

The experience of an elite tiny minority of women to all women. If I see one more article about blah blah woman with Ivy League degree from prominent family chucking her 'high powered' career to stay home and bake bread in her designer kitchen I'm going to spit nails. Good for them but their lives have nothing to do with mine or most of the rest of us and I'm tired of them being held up as guilt-inducing examples to women who are struggling enough as it is.

And I don't even have kids!!

[atommom]

6. I agree, and it annoys me too, even though I not only have kids

but am currently at home with them! Parenting is hard enough without having extra guilt thrown your way.

[ismnotwasm]

7. I hear you

Like these little comments from the article:
"They married later and had fewer children. They turned to labor-saving machines and paid others to help handle household work; they persuaded the men in their lives to do more chores."
Labor saving machines? What, a vaccum cleaner? "Paid others"-- to use archaic language--that means hiring a maid. Of course we call it a cleaning service now.
And
"There is one big exception to the trend: while the rate of labor participation leveled off for most groups of women, the percentage of single mothers in the work force jumped to more than 75 percent from 63 percent. That of high school dropouts rose to 53 percent from 48 percent

I'm not sure of the conection they were trying to make here, single divorced mothers, combined with high school dropouts? Or just mothers with out partners? Both?
An Upper Bound Economists say that these women were pushed into work with the help of changes in government policy: the expansion of the earned-income tax credit and the overhaul of welfare in the mid-1990's, which replaced long-term entitlements with temporary aid."

I like that. "Helped" Not the word I'd have choosen. "Pushed into work" are we subtly bringing back the "welfare queen" meme?

[VelmaD]

8. I want to meet this mythical man...

who actually was "persuaded" to do more chores. :eyes:

[Katherine Brengle]

4. Exactly---

I would fall into that category, "stay-at-home" mom, but I spend most of my day working--writing articles and doing research for my book.

I think the real trend they are missing is that mothers are starting to really think outside the box when it comes to work--the world is more accessible from a home office these days than it was even 10 years ago.

I think it's great--it's really that "best of both worlds" kind of scenario that feminists were fighting for 40 years ago--I can stay at home and enjoy being with my daughter, teaching her things and watching her grow up, and I can simultaneously advance my career. If I had a traditional outside of the home job, I don't think that I could do this.

God Bless the Internet, lol.

[politicat]

11. Not just mothers....

I have no children and want no children of my own. But when my "alternate" career (user interface computer programming and technical documentation) short circuited after 9/11 (because who needs things like usability??) and I went back to my primary career (psychology), I decided to work independently. It's not easy building a practice, but it was better than working for the state or county, and far better than working in a clinic or partnership practice where I wasn't a partner.

When I went back to a regular clinic, in fact, as a favor to a friend, I ended up paying for it in stress and anxiety (or at least, the clinical setting was a contributing factor to stress-induced exhaustion).

Even if we don't have children, there are so many things that are just tacitly expected of women, from knowing where things are put away to how to do the grocery shopping, and so many things I'd just rather do myself because I was socialized to be in control of my domestic environment, that even my very willing to take half of the household labor husband doesn't end up doing half of the labor. Really, I'm not a control freak. I'm a control enthusiast.

Of course, there's also the fact that, because we don't have children, we would hit the AMT much quicker than people who do have kids if I worked in software development or as a full-time partner in a practice, and I don't want this government having that much of our money....

[femrap]

9. Do they just keep regurgitating the same damn story

over and over? And never do they mention how CORPORATIONS TREAT WOMEN. They put up barriers at every office cubicle. It got to the point that I wanted to see the companies I worked for fail...I had some of the stupidest bosses...totally in over their heads. I worked with men who were just like W...screw up and blame somone else or lie or back stab. I guess it was only a matter of time before we got one for President. The only reason these people had the jobs was because they were men. It was rare that I had the pleasure of working for or with a ineffective, stupid woman. I worked with 'Queen Bees' but most of the women I worked with knew they had to be better than their male counterparts or would be subject to ridicule, dismissal, or probation.

There is no reason why there couldn't be on-site child care at major corporations. Hell...if the CEO gave up for 1% of his stock options, these centers would be paid for. Very few do...but those who do noticed productivity rise...parents could have lunch with their kids...stop in and say 'hi' during a break. And the parents weren't worrying about their kids, as a result, their work improved. Duh.

Let's be honest here....these CEOs don't want a bunch of women telling men what to do. They will use any excuse they can to keep the women out of the high paying jobs. And no matter what you do, it is wrong. Either you don't have enough education for a position....or after you get the degree, you have become overqualified. You are in your child-bearing years and they don't want to invest in you because you might have children...and leave...or you're post-menopausal and you supposedly don't have the energy or the understanding of the 'youth market.' I HATE CORPORATIONS...most of them anyway. Grubby little greedy inefficient assholes.

And never mind today's economy....geez. All I see are a bunch of men entering fields that used to be dominated by women. All of those used to be in manufacturing jobs and now they are working in retail. And the fastest growing jobs are what? Janitorial, Fast Food, Convenience Clerks, Maids. Physical therapists....hard to outsource that one. I was shocked when I looked at the list from the Labor Bureau.

No wonder women left corporations and started their own businesses....a women gets sick of being treated like crap. Did I say how much I hate corporations? lol.

[geniph]

10. It's so nice that they ignore the realities

that the vast majority of women face. Most women don't have the luxury of deciding whether or not to work; it's either work or starve, or else there is the brutal economic reality of paying for daycare, commuting, clothing, etc., all the costs associated with working when one has children. This is such a middle-class to upper-class mindset - poor women have always had to work outside the home. My mother never had a choice. Neither did my grandmother. These idiot studies spend all their time focusing on the women who have the money to own homes, hire help, who worked as professionals, who have the LUXURY OF CHOICE.

Let's see them talk honestly about the women who are working three jobs and still have to come home and do housework, and make desperate stopgap arrangements to take care of a sick kid, the mothers who send the kids to school with a reused brown paper bag with a tortilla and an apple in it. Let's see them focus on the issues of whether or not to work outside the home for a family of five that makes minimum wage and can never hope to afford the down payment for their own home.

I'm so sick of the boo-hooing about what happens to the affluent and completely ignoring the reality of the majority of the population!

[raccoon]

12. You said that right, sister! nt