“Opting Out”: What’s Really Happening

by Debra Levy

Mothers & More POWER Loop founder and facilitator Debra Levy talks with Pamela Stone, a sociologist, professor and author of Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. According to the publisher, “Based on a series of candid, in-depth interviews with women who returned home after working as doctors, lawyers, bankers, scientists, and other professions, Pamela Stone explores the role that their husbands, children and coworkers play in their decision; how women’s efforts to construct new lives and new identities unfold once they are home; and where their aspirations and plans for the future lie.” Stone also offers suggestions for “redesigning workplaces to make it easier for women—and men—to attain their goal of living rewarding lives that combine both families and careers

Q Why did you write this book?

A Someone I knew as a neighborhood stay-at-home mom revealed that she had been a Harvard law school grad, and it just struck me that someone I knew had been, as we call in my field of sociology, professionally committed. You don’t go to graduate school typically unless you are committed to working in a field, seriously, professionally committed to a line of work. I just began to wonder what makes somebody with such a serious background and credentials quit?

Also, as mothers we are always thinking about these issues if we have any chance of quitting. Many of us don’t. But also from a larger perspective as a workplace and gender scholar, I know that a lot of the gains women have made in the past decades have really been made by college-educated and professionally-educated women. We’d like to believe there has been improvement across the board, but regrettably, women working in retail sales or as receptionists haven’t seen their salaries close the gender gap. What if women who have pursued these credentials are now deciding against having them? That has larger implications. It’s an interesting issue for us as individual women, for how we make our decisions, but when those individual decisions start accumulating, something is happening. I was both really intrigued about why and how individuals made these decisions; I was also really intrigued about what these decisions meant to the larger issues of women in the workplace and gender and equality. What happens when you end up either stopping or cutting back on your work life, you inevitably earn a lot less money.

Q You also approach this investigation as a researcher and a sociologist. How does a sociologist define motherhood—is it a relationship, a job?

A I talk in the book about Sharon Hays and Annette Laroux—I use their perspective—but I’m a scholar of the workplace, not motherhood. What their perspective tells me, for example, is that definitions of motherhood change over time and that we are in a place in history where the definition of motherhood is particularly demanding. We have a way of defining motherhood as requiring much more hands-on involvement. This really came up beautifully in my interviews because the women I was interviewing would say, “I had a great mom, but she would just open up the back door and we would go.” The women today are very aware that the tasks and demands are greater than they were for their mothers. I can tell you that my friends and I have looked at each other at PTA meetings and said to ourselves: “I don’t think my mom ever even entered the school except maybe for a conference or a concert.” In schools today, mostly moms are involved—though there are some dads—and as a sociologist I don’t take motherhood as a sort of fixed, essentialist definition. I see it as something that is socially constructed and ever evolving. At the moment we are in a period of especially intensive mothering, to use Sharon Hays’ term. I agree that there has been a simultaneous intensification and professionalization of motherhood, but it’s a conundrum since we’ve been trained as professionals, we’ve taken those skills to motherhood. But also, as more mothers are away from their kids for large parts of the day, there is a real need to have that time away be high quality learning time. So I think the expectations have gone up about what really is quality time.

Children have to get ahead and can’t without a college education. The larger pressures are real and emanate from the larger society and are put upon Mom. All of these things are coming from different places, but they are very real and they make mothering a much more high demand role. I lose patience with media portrayals that make it look like mothers are vacuous bubble heads out making more work for themselves. That’s not what’s happening. There are big demands occasioned by a lot of larger forces. We are seeing the case where the U.S. is being influenced by larger social, cultural, external forces. Why do mothers volunteer in schools? Public funding for schools is eroding. The pressures are very real; it’s no accident that mothers are being called on.

Q Do you think mothers have a cultural role as a scapegoat? Even the term “opting out” trivializes mothers to an extent.

A In the ’50s women were characterized as “smother mothers.” Whatever mothers are doing is caricatured. You saw it with welfare moms. Now the target seems to be the upper middle class mothers who are “opting out.” It takes groups like Mothers & More speaking out to help stop this. You can’t tell me that mothers who quit their jobs are doing so without considering the consequences. To say that is to really misunderstand these women. They are making very tough decisions, which is why I object to the term “opting out.” It makes the decision sound glib and easy. In using this terminology we shortchange and mischaracterize mothers. I hope my research will help to overcome these stereotypes.

Q You talk about how motherhood intensifies as the mothers stay home longer and find satisfaction in it. Doesn’t that reinforce for employers and policy makers the concept that there is a new traditionalism?

A This is so interesting. It does seem like it reinforces some traditional beliefs about women and the home. The book was reviewed in Business Week, and so what I hope employers can take from this book is that these women were quite interested in work. They seem traditional, but they were committed to a different model of work, a third way. I want employers to realize that they are losing women and do not have to lose them.

I saw these women enter a brand new world—part of the intensification in that they saw a world that they might have disparaged before. They found themselves being helpful and important in the lives of their community and children, and it gave them a feeling of an ethic of care, which I think is very, very real. You then have an enriched world of non-paid work. Many of the women who returned to the workplace or wanted to were not interested in going back to their earlier jobs. They sought more roles rooted in this ethic of care. This redirection was borne again out of their frustration—feeling shut out and really drawn through volunteer and mothering experiences to something else, another path.

Q You talk about the “silent strike” where these women have demonstrated their frustration by simply leaving. They are pointing to deficiencies in the culture of work with their exit and to their desires to make their communities better.

A That’s why it’s so important to understand the relationship to work, but also their experiences at home. “They are into consumerism” is something you hear sometimes. This stereotyping short changes these women and this movement. I used “start your engine,” a phrase from Arlie Hochchild, at the end of the book. Mothers & More represents an opportunity for mothers to be activists, to begin to create change in these areas. I always say at-home moms because that’s where I studied them, but mothers are not in one camp or the other camp. They go in and out, they change work patterns. Working mothers and at-home mothers both want a way to create a better, more integrated life. The things all women want are not that different, and many of us face the same problems.

Q A lot is being said about “leave policies” in recent campaigns for paid family leave in this country. You talk about framing our policies using different language—such as “stay policies.” Can you describe them? Would they include part-time work options?

A It would be explicit recognition, before women take leave, of the need to build re-entry plans with contingencies and flexibility as, especially, first-time moms are entering uncharted waters. It would mean more transparency, more institutionalization of policies, so that it’s not every woman for herself, on her own. It would definitely mean part-time options of all sorts as well as off-site work, and it might mean some stepping out for women who want/need it. I found that most women are looking to continue in their careers rather than take time out (can’t afford loss of salary and recognize costs), but this is an important option to have available when needed, because time out is often attached to medical/health issues around children or parents. Part-time can’t be the only option, however, as some women can’t take the pay cut. We really have to re-imagine work, and think not about how the work gets done, or where, but be task- and deadline-oriented. Get the job done, not put in face-time, for example.

Q Do you believe that “stay policies” would help to forestall the erosion of bargaining power and the loss of confidence that some women experience after being home?

A I do. It would let them stay in the game, use their skills. But I do think we have to re-think part-time. It has to include benefits and proportional pay. As currently configured, it’s not working—as I found—too stigmatized, etc. So, when I suggest part-time, it’s a new and improved version that includes work re-design, a workplace that is task- and goal-oriented.

So much of what the women in the study wanted in terms of workplace changes were small things: flexible hours, telecommuting. Small things can make a critical difference. What these women wanted was flexibility at the margins. We could get far with even just small changes. Mothers do have a desire to be fair. They want to do a good job.

Q Would workplace changes allow the subjects you studied a chance to rethink the workplace; to reattach to it?

A I focus on the workplace as I think it’s the primary culprit in my findings, and I think it’s amenable to change for a variety of reasons. I’m a sociologist, so I see change in terms of social movements and organizational dynamics. Not to say that change can’t begin at home, but I find that women want work-family arrangements that they cannot broker individually, so I think the role of informed policy is to help them. And I use policy with a small p—not necessarily government intervention. It can also be employer-driven.

Q Aren’t we talking about making the workplace reflect the lives of both men and women, acknowledging that both parents need time to care?

A Absolutely. It’s clear from my research that men are the missing piece of the puzzle. But they’re MIA for the same reasons women quit—long work hours and 24/7 accountability. There is reason to believe that men want more family time, but as I show, there are a lot of reasons why they take on the primary breadwinner role. So we need solutions that are gender-neutral. Tough to do, but I think we’ll see it happening, especially with younger generations, post Boomers. This new demographic, Boomers retiring, and an economy that is increasingly knowledge based, are part of the reasons that change will happen. This new generation, they are not willing to give up everything for work.