Women at Work … or Home?

Why are moms giving up careers?

Should women leave work for home to take care of their children?

Opting Out is a real scenario.

A growing number of high level professional women are choosing to leave their jobs to pursue a home life.

Why would highly educated, successful women give up promising careers?

Moms struggling to balance both work and family, noticing that women often aren't opting out — instead they're being shut out.

Even the brightest women have fewer options around balancing work and family than society assumes.

It might make sense the incongruity of an Yale Law graduate and at-home soccer mom?

Women: What are the choices they make and how they understand them, the lives they create, and the implications of their choices for themselves and those around them?

I don´t had any friends who left their careers and became full-time moms.

But, I’d always wondered about how they’d come to this decision, but didn’t have the courage to probe, cautious about the sensitive nature of the subject (or any subject in which women’s “choices” are involved), aware that I had pursued a different path by working while raising kids and that my questioning might be perceived as judgmental.

But these subject piqued more than my personal curiosity.

Related to women’s labor force participation and careers, I see the changing gender roles, the challenges of combining work and family, and various forms of workplace discrimination, but I wasn’t familiar with anything specifically about women who want to become a stay-at-home mothers, who have left professional careers.

About women leaving careers, I noticed that most of what we know about women, work, and family is based on the experiences of women who are working.

Little research has actually explored the lives of women who leave the workforce.

This vacuum leaves to many unanswered questions:

- Who are they?

- Why do they walk away from years of training and accomplishment to take on full-time motherhood — the job that is simultaneously revered and reviled, vaunted and devalued, but never paid and with no prospect of promotion?

- What happens after they do?

- What are the implications of their leaving for the workplaces they leave behind, perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently?

- What, if any, impact do their decisions have on other women, those who carry on with careers as well as younger women who are just embarking on theirs?

- Why are they really leaving and what are the larger lessons we can learn from them and their experiences?

There had been no systematic, in-depth, research-based answers to these questions.

But, a so-called trend of high-achieving women “returning home” since the 1980´s, a trend depicted primarily as a function of women’s changing preferences and choices.

When a highly successful woman walks away from her career, a predictable flurry of articles appears.

This was the case, for example, in 1998 when Brenda Barnes, then CEO of PepsiCo-North America, left to spend more time with her family, and in 2002 when Karen Hughes, one of President Bush’s White House advisors, did likewise.

These stories are remarkably similar: The women love their jobs, they have great employers who accommodate their family responsibilities, but motherhood is the most rewarding job in the world, children the greatest love affair of their lives, there is no such thing as quality time, and they need to “be there” for them.

The real world shows that women, even successful women, encounter obstacles of all sorts, that the workplace can be hostile and chilly, especially to mothers, despite family-friendly rhetoric to the contrary.

The skeptical idea in me had to ask: If work had been so great why were they leaving?

The reasons they gave all revolved around family, and I wondered why they had nothing to say about their jobs?

Decisions were often represented as symptomatic of a kind of sea-change among the daughters of the feminist revolution, a return to traditionalism and the resurgence of a new feminine mystique.

Stay-at-home moms were suddenly fashionable, and recently become the “latest status symbol”.

Working mothers, on the other hand, were pronounced “passé” by a more widely-acknowledged arbiter of hip-ness.

Women, especially high-achieving, college-educated women, are choosing motherhood over careers, “rejecting the workplace” and the feminist vision of having it all, trading aspirations to professional success for the values and comforts of home and family, their actions representing not a passive acquiescence to traditional gender expectations but rather a proactive “option-out revolution”.

So “Why don’t more women get to the top?” - Answer: “They choose not to.” ...

These women’s stories are multi-layered and complex and counter the common understanding that their decisions can be reduced to babies and family alone.

Rather the existence of a choice gap, a gap that is a function of a double bind created primarily by the conditions of work in the gilded cages of elite professions.

Married to fellow professionals, who face the same pressures at work that they do, women are home alone and go home because they have been unsuccessful in their efforts to obtain flexibility or, for those who were able to, because they found themselves marginalized and stigmatized, negatively reinforced for trying to hold on their careers after becoming mothers.

These women had alternative visions of how to work and be a mother, yet their attempts to maintain their careers on terms other than full-time plus were penalized, not applauded; it was quitting that earned them kudos.

Once home, women create rewarding lives, but struggle to reconcile their current and former identities.

Home was a crucible of change.

Adapted from: “Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home” by Pamela Stone, 2007.

Other related subject is the fact that in the United States of America, under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, it’s unlawful to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions – a fact that an increasing number of employers seem to have forgotten ...