What do women really want?(employment patterns)

WITH journalists as well as social scientists continually on the lookout for new trends, the public is regularly treated to the discovery of social "revolutions." One of the latest concerns women and work. In October 2003, Lisa Belkin detected an "opt-out revolution" in her New York Times Magazine article about accomplished women leaving high-powered jobs to stay home with their kids. Six months later, reports on the revolution were still going strong. For example, the March 22, 2004 cover of Time showed a young child clinging to his mother's leg alongside the headline, "The Case for Staying Home: Why More Young Moms Are Opting Out of the Rat Race." But the evidence on this score is thin. Both the New York Times and Time stories are based mainly on evocative anecdotes. Princeton college graduates with law degrees from Harvard staying home to change diapers may be absorbing as a human-interest story. But as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.

The limited empirical evidence offered in support of the opt-out revolution draws upon facts such as these: 22 percent of mothers with graduate degrees are at home with their children, one in three women with an MBA does not work full time, and 26 percent of women approaching the most senior levels of management do not want to be promoted. However, with information of this sort one needs a ouija board to detect a social trend, let alone a revolution. The fact that 57 percent of mothers from the Stanford University class of 1981 stayed home with their young children for at least a year gives no indication of whether the percentage of Stanford graduates remaining at home with their children has increased, decreased, or remained the same over time.

But we know that some things have changed over time. The main difference between women in the 1970s and today is that a substantially higher percentage are currently receiving degrees in law or medicine, or obtaining graduate education in general. Between 1970 and 1997 the proportion of degrees awarded to women soared by almost 500 percent in medicine, 800 percent in law, and 1000 percent in business. Even if one-third of all the women currently receiving these degrees opt out of professional life, the remaining two-thirds amount to a significant increase in women's employment in these areas over the last three decades.

At the moment, women opting out of high-powered careers to stay home with their children are a minor element in a profound life-style trend that has extended over the last several decades--a development deftly portrayed, some might say celebrated, in the media. After a six-year run, the popular HBO series "Sex and the City" ended in 2004 with what was widely reported as a happy ending. Each of the four heroines, in their late thirties and early forties, found partners and commitment, while also pursuing gratifying careers. The series finale was a paean to love and individual fulfillment. But as for family life, these four vibrant, successful women approaching the terminus of their childbearing years ended up with only two marriages and one child between them. As a mirror of society, the media shift from kids bouncing off the walls in the "Brady Bunch" to the .25 fertility rate in "Sex and the City" several decades later clearly reflects the cultural and demographic trends over this period.

Today, a little over one in five women in their early forties are childless. That is close to double the proportion of childless women in 1976. Compared to a relatively few Ivy-League law graduates who have traded the bar for rocking the cradle, the abdication of motherhood poses an alternative and somewhat more compelling answer to the question: Who is opting out of what? Women are increasingly having fewer children and a growing proportion are choosing not to have any children at all. And those who have children are delegating their care to others. If there has been an "opt-out revolution," the dramatic increase in childlessness--from one in ten to almost one in five women--and the rise in out-of-home care for young kids would probably qualify more than the shift of a relatively small group of professional-class women from high-powered careers to childrearing activities.