Lots of working mothers stop working, including yours truly. Sometimes it is just too hard to be a super mom. However, it always struck me that this wasn’t the best solution. Really great, talented women spent a lot of time stuffing back-to-school mailings, standing around chatting with other moms during practices for swim team, soccer, … Some even got involved in local fund-raising to make up for the short fall in state funding for education.

These are really amazingly creative, enthusiastic and capable women who by most accounts seemed to be under-utilized at a time when the US is clearly slipping in global stature. Can’t these women be involved in some way?

In this article, the answer is “No, not as things stand” – it looks at how women are pushed out in more or less subtle ways, why they can’t / won’t get back in the game, and the economic impact that results. The article looks at media coverage on the topic of opting-out as well as corporate behaviors toward mothers.

Financial independence is at issue. What happens to these women and their lifetime earning and saving potential? What about their long-term financial security, even if they don’t divorce or become widows?

The article goes on to suggest some remedies. Will these be implemented? We’ll see…

The Opt-Out Revolution Revisited
By Joan C. Williams, The American Prospect
Monday 05 March 2007 Issue

Women aren’t forsaking careers for domestic life. The ground rules just make it impossible to have both.

… Another 2005 study by Christy Spivey published in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review found that women experienced a significant negative effect on wages even 20 years after a career interruption.

… only 12 percent of the U.S. news articles we surveyed discuss the negative impact on the economy of that loss of talent. Instead, upbeat opt-out stories feature a steady diet of interviews with women after they opt out, and before any of them divorce, in which affluent women explain how they made ends meet by giving up expensive vacations, shopping sprees, and dining out. This story hardly describes the typical American family. Given that American women bring home an average of 28 percent of the family income, most families cannot make ends meet after a mother stops working simply by giving up luxuries.

Very few of the 119 articles we surveyed linked women’s opting out with long-term economic vulnerability. In a society in which “displaced homemakers’” incomes fall very sharply after divorce, only two out of 119 articles mentioned any divorced women. Yet, if past trends are any indication, close to half of opt-out women will end up in this position, with not only their own long-term economic futures in jeopardy, but also those of their children (who are statistically less likely than other children to reach the education level or class status of their fathers).

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/031607WA.shtml