Abstract
Liana Christin Landivar has written an eight-chapter book on opting out that tracks national trends over the past four decades. Landivar begins by describing the personal choice narrative associated with opting out promulgated by the media, a narrative that fits only a small proportion of women, namely, highly educated women married to spouses in lucrative positions. She also points out that many studies on opting out are based on narrow samples of professional women. To fill the lacuna, Landivar uses large nationally representative samples for her analysis; her main sources of data include the U.S. Census, modules from the Current Population Survey, and the American Community survey.
Landivar sets the stage for her analysis by discussing married women’s employment during World War II, the Equal Pay Act, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 as well as changes in societal expectations that have led to increased support for women’s employment. Nevertheless, cultural scripts promoting intensive mothering as well as the pressure to be an ideal worker shape women’s decisions and also cause fathers to feel ambivalent about taking family leave. Landivar then describes trends in employment over the past 40 years, including variations by age, educational attainment, race and ethnicity, marital status, age of children, and broad occupational categories. Many of the figures display trends for both women and men, though not for fathers with children. One subheading reads, “Women Still Earn Less Than Men, Contributing to Women’s Higher Rate of Labor Force Exit”; however, the variability in the gender wage gap by race, namely, that there is a discernible wage gap between men and women who are white or Asian but not for those who are Black or Hispanic, is not mentioned, though women’s wages by race do appear later in the book. Landivar then reveals that the weekly work hours in managerial and professional jobs have actually declined in the past decade, thus contributing to the welcome data-supported myth busting evident in the book.
In the next four chapters, Landivar uses the results of her extensive quantitative analyses to describe who opts out and who stays in. She explains “that it is women in lower-paying short-hour occupations who are most likely to opt out” (p. 63), another myth-busting result. Since labor force exit rates vary by occupation, Landivar makes a unique and important methodological choice to examine the exit rates of mothers by comparing them to the exit rates of nonmothers in the same occupations. Schedule flexibility and the ability to reduce work hours, more available to women in professional and managerial occupations, help explain why women in these occupations tend to remain employed. She carefully distinguishes between part-time work and scaling back hours and examines variations by occupational groups as well as by race and ethnicity. Using hierarchical logistic and linear models, Landivar then assesses the impact of the age of mother, age of children, and occupational group on labor force participation and weekly work hours. She finds “that young mothers with younger children were more likely to leave employment” (p. 139) and further shows the importance of comparing multiple categories of women with a table that lists key factors associated with opting out compared to scaling back (p. 147). In the last of the four data analysis chapters, Landivar evaluates the impact of full-time/part-time work, marital status, age, employment characteristics, delayed fertility, and especially being a mother or nonmother on earnings and the potential “motherhood wage penalty.”
In the final chapter of the book, Landivar not only highlights the most important patterns, but she also reminds readers of how the availability of affordable child care, access to paid leave, flexible work hours, and control over work schedule may impact women’s decisions. The large representative samples allow the author to look at the intersection of several background variables simultaneously; this intersectionality (though Landivar does not refer to it as such) is key to understanding women’s labor force participation. Given the variability in the patterns of reasons that women opt out, Landivar emphasizes that one solution will not fit all and indicates that men must be part of the solution, too.
Landivar has written this book in a clear, organized manner using national-level data to explain the factors associated with staying in and opting out of the workforce. Her results challenge some commonly held beliefs about who opts out and why, but the large national samples should make readers feel confident in the findings, and such data complement already existing studies that are mostly qualitative. This book should be valuable to scholars interested in women’s labor force participation as well as to those teaching courses on family, gender, and work.