WHY WORKING MOMS DROP OUT

Posted by: Anne Tergesen on July 26

A few weeks ago, I interviewed several friends who’ve recently walked away from successful careers (“Working Moms Who’ve Recently Quit Working”). To me, the biggest surprise was that these women had stuck doggedly to the career path during the years when their children were infants and toddlers. Yet now, with their children in school, they had decided to throw in the towel. Some cited the growing needs of aging parents. Others said their husbands had recently received raises, making life on one income easier. Still others said they felt increasingly detached from and unfulfilled by their jobs.

I was intrigued. Was the phenomenon of highly educated mothers dropping out as widespread as my friends’ experience and recent media reports would indicate? For answers, I turned to Pamela Stone, professor of Sociology at Hunter College and author of “Opting Out: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home.”

Q: Are a greater number of high-powered women really dropping out?
A: No, it’s definitely been over-hyped. From the early 1980s to now, there has been a decrease in full-time stay at home mothers. But in mid 1990s, the downward trend reversed itself and there was a slight up-tick in stay at home mothers. We’re talking about a percentage point or so, not a massive shift. From 2000 on, it leveled off.

The story line is that this change is due to women’s preferences, that women are deciding they can’t have it all. I don’t believe that to be the case. You can explain away a lot of it by looking at larger economic trends, such as unemployement and increases in their husbands’ incomes. Moreover, the basic point is that over the long haul, the trend in staying at home is still downward.

Q: Why are those who are leaving the workforce doing so?
A: What I found when I looked at women who were highly educated, married, and home with kids, was that they were being shut out or pushed out of workplace. They were able to find good child care and they had good jobs. But their life vision had been to combine kids with careers. They found themselves unable to do so. They had all worked as managers. They found they had limited options in terms of pursuing those careers once they had kids. Those are jobs with high demands and long hours. Some were unable to obtain part-time or flex time arrangements. Others, when they were able to get these accommodations felt there were a lot of shortcomings to them. For part-time jobs, the number one complaint was that the hours started creeping up. All these things started undermining their work commitment.

The majority of the women I spoke to were trying to make work work, but just came up against the fact that these professional work cultures really haven’t evolved to the point where there’s anything but the full-time, full-tilt model.

Women also tend to take more responsibility for childrearing. They are definitely caught in this double-bind of rising pressures on the home front and rising pressures at work—much more so than men.

Q: Rising pressures at home?
A: These days both husband and wife are working extreme jobs. Meanwhile, being a successful mother today means providing more organized activities and more oversight of the children. There are a lot of reasons for that. For example, due to concern about security, we don’t let kids go out and play the way we used to. And there’s more pressure on children to perform at school. Kids are taking high stakes tests in fourth grade.

Q: How have these women fared since quitting?
A: This was a very tough decision for these women to make. They often turned this over for years. By the time they came to the decision, they were fairly well convinced it was the right decision. They often felt it was the only option they had, due to the demands of their jobs and their husbands’ jobs.

They were happy to be home with their kids and to have time for themselves. Many said they were getting healthy and fit, which they hadn’t been able to do when working so hard. But they felt the loss of their professional identities keenly. They lost a highly valued status and instead took on the status of a full-time at-home mom which they quickly discovered was a rather devaluated status. At-home moms are not respected and that was hard for them.

Q: What’s been the impact on their marriages?
A: They had been their husband’s professional equals. But after quitting, they were somewhat surprised to find their marriages quickly evolved into a more traditional division of labor. They were responsible for the home front and their husbands took their presence at home as an opportunity to work longer and harder. The gender division became much more pronounced. They would remark that this resembled their parents’ marriages. But they also accepted it and saw it as part of the trade-off to them having quit.

Q: What was the impact on the kids?
A: The kids by and large were happy to have them home. Those who had kids who were a little older – pre-adolescents or adolescents – experienced some pushback. They didn’t want their moms underfoot all the time.

Q: What impact will time off have on their careers?
A: My study was to look at women who are still at home, so they haven’t tried moving back into labor force yet. But I did ask them whether they thought they’d want to return to work. What I found is the vast majority do want to return. But even though these women had every reason to be very confident—they had gone to very good schools, just over half had advanced degrees, they had worked as professionals and managers and had good work experience—the tenor of interview shifted as they looked to future. About one-third of them were lacking confidence about their ability to re-enter the workforce.

These were women who were on top of game professionally and worked in fast-paced jobs where staying current was critical. They understood that being out would put them behind the eight-ball.

The number one reason they left work was due to a lack of flexibility. When I asked them what they would want if they were to return to work, the top criterion was flexibility. I interviewed women who were engineers, lawyers, and management consultants. Many are thinking about changing fields. Teaching was the number one job those who could articulate a goal spoke about. They were drawn to jobs that would not only give them flexibility but would give them a chance to give back to their communities.

For more from Stone, see my blog post from July 19.

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