Abstract
Can professional women return to work after taking time out to raise children? This is the subject of Opting Back In, the much-anticipated sequel to Pamela Stone’s (2007) book Opting Out: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. The original study responded to a popular media claim that droves of professional women were “opting out” of employment in the early 2000s, leaving successful careers to return to hearth and home in a renewed embrace of traditional gender roles. Through poignant interviews with highly educated, mostly white women—bankers, doctors, lawyers—Stone exposed the myth that these women chose to leave their jobs. Instead, she showed that “opting out” is a strategy stemming from a lack of options at work. When faced with competing expectations of the “ideal worker” and the “good mother,” privileged women used the individualist rhetoric of choice to explain their decisions to quit their jobs. But Opting Out demonstrated how they were in fact pushed out by institutional barriers and inflexible policies that punished women for trying to manage employment and motherhood. This forced choice reflects and reproduces gender inequalities at home and at work. Yet most of these women planned to return to the labor force when their children grew up. So, did they? And if so, what happened? This is the topic of Stone and Lovejoy’s new book, Opting Back In.
In their follow-up study 10 years later, the authors ask whether women were able to realize their intentions and transition back to paid work. Interviewing about 80 percent of their initial sample and using the same life history interview approach, they find that four-fifths of women did return to work—but not in the same fields, and in positions far less lucrative and prestigious than their previous careers. In short, women do not resume their careers. They restart and reconstruct them.
After an average of 10 years away from paid work, these elite women had little interest in returning to their former professions for the same reasons they originally left. In a context of affluence—what the authors call “privileged domesticity” (p. 70)—many mothers found their time at home seductive. So when mothers did reenter the workforce, their class status and husbands’ salaries (they were all married to men) enabled them to be choosy. Unlike their former jobs, women wanted work that (1) felt personally meaningful and (2) allowed them the flexibility to continue prioritizing their families. New jobs should not interfere or compete with partners’ careers. Securing meaningful, family-accommodating jobs required committing to retraining, lower wages, and few pathways to promotion. Mothers primarily turned to freelancing and jobs in female-dominated sectors like teaching and nonprofit work.
The process of reentry was halting and unsteady, proceeding in two stages—an important phenomenon previous research had yet to identify. The first was a “family-first” period when women returned to casual, very part-time work. Mothers wanted to keep a toehold in the labor force but remain deeply involved with their young, school-age children: volunteering, coaching, overseeing homework, and generally “status keeping” for their families. The second “career relaunch” phase involved various proactive, sustained efforts to find new careers when their older children left the home.
Time and again, women reported contentment with their new jobs. But the authors show that opting out and then returning back to paid work is a Catch-22 for professional mothers. With their pedigree, skills, and experience, these women are best positioned to overcome obstacles to career reentry and close gender gaps in elite fields. But instead, they adopt work–family strategies that are effective for them individually but that ultimately perpetuate gender inequality more broadly. The authors suggest that professional mothers highlight a “paradox of privilege” (p. 20) that reinforces women’s marginalization at home and in the workplace. Over the life course, women’s gender interests in professional success, equality at home, and economic independence are at odds with their class interests in maintaining their families’ privileged status through intensive mothering in a historical moment marked by increasing precarity and insecurity.
Understanding the risks and costs of opting out is possible only if we take a long-term view of women’s employment trajectories. The authors argue convincingly that “opting out” serves to reinforce male privilege, women’s unequal domestic responsibility, the sexist structure of contemporary work, and social class divides among U.S. families. In these ways, elite women “become not only status keepers but keepers of patriarchy” (p. 174). I welcomed the more robust intersectional analyses, arguments, and conclusions Stone and Lovejoy offer in the sequel. Their calls for change are powerful and their policy recommendations are clear: Create a family-friendly workplace by reining in overwork. End gender discrimination. Encourage men to co-parent. Opting Back In provides vital insights into the processes and consequences of career interruption for professional women who take time out for motherhood.