Opt-Out Revolution

Discrimination or Disinterest?

In her article, Belkin sought to explain a seeming paradox: although women and men both obtain elite professional degrees at comparable rates, women remain dramatically underrepresented in positions of great power, such as CEOs, partners in law firms, and national political officeholders. The reason for this persistent disparity, she concluded, could not be wholly attributed to gender discrimination in the workplace. Rhetorically asking, “Why don't women run the world?” she provocatively answered, “Maybe it's because they don't want to.” Belkin's thesis proved to be the opening salvo of a new chapter in the long-running and contentious debate over the relationship between motherhood and paid employment.

In the post-World War II period, employment among mothers rose dramatically: whereas a mere 17 percent of married mothers worked in 1948, a full 70 percent were employed or seeking employment by 1995. However, this trend stalled in the 1990s and then seemed to reverse itself, particularly among mothers of young children. The employment rate of married women with preschoolers, which peaked at 64 percent in 1997–98, had slipped to 60 percent by 2005. Likewise, the employment rate of married mothers with infants slid from a high of 59.2 percent in 1997 to 53.3 percent in 2000.

The opt-out controversy boils down to a fundamental disagreement over what these numbers reveal about American women and contemporary social realities. The retired lawyer and philosopher Linda R. Hirshman, the most polemical proponent of the opt-out thesis, believes that many highly educated women are leaving the workforce or scaling back their career aspirations to the detriment of themselves and society as a whole. The woman who follows this course, she argues, is making a bad choice that ultimately diminishes her chances for “a flourishing life.” To Hirshman's mind, the opt-out phenomenon is a real problem, and its roots can be traced to the feminism failure to successfully challenge the assumption that childrearing and homemaking are fundamentally women's responsibilities. Her solution is to urge young women to commit themselves to a career and to avoid partners unwilling to perform at least half the labor associated with domestic life.

In contrast, other commentators dispute the notion that mothers are increasingly choosing to opt out of the workforce. Legal scholar Joan Williams and sociologist Pamela Stone both argue that mothers who quit their jobs are responding less to the “pull” of the home and children than “push” factors in the workplace—namely, inflexible employers who won't accommodate their need for flexible schedules. Economist Heather Boushey has gone so far as to describe the opt-out revolution as a media-generated myth unsupported by economic data. According to Boushey, the decline in mothers' workforce participation between 2001 and 2005 was primarily caused by a weak labor market—a trend that affected non-mothers and mothers alike. Critics of the opt-out thesis also object to the media's tendency to privilege anecdotal accounts of well-educated, professional women who represent only a tiny fraction (less than 10 percent) of all American women. The problem, they argue, is that not only do such stories obscure the experiences of non-elite and minority women who cannot afford to opt out, they also threaten to distort public perceptions in ways that can negatively influence policy making. After all, if Americans come to believe that women want to return to the home and will quit their jobs as soon as it becomes economically viable for them to do so, then why should employers or the government invest resources in easing the burdens of working mothers?

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