Opting Back In: What Really Happens When Mothers Go Back to Work

By Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy

Taking a career break is a conflicted and risky decision for high-achieving professional women. Yet many do so, usually planning, even as they quit, to return to work eventually. But can they? And if so, how? In Opting Back In, Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy revisit women first interviewed a decade earlier in Stone’s book Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home to answer these questions. In frank and intimate accounts, women lay bare the dilemmas they face upon reentry. Most succeed but not by returning to their former high-paying, still family-inhospitable jobs. Instead, women strike out in new directions, finding personally gratifying but lower-paid jobs in the gig economy or predominantly female nonprofit sector. Opting Back In uncovers a paradox of privilege by which the very women best positioned to achieve leadership and close gender gaps use strategies to resume their careers that inadvertently reinforce gender inequality. The authors advocate gender equitable policies that will allow women—and all parents—to combine the intense demands of work and family life in the twenty-first century.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780520964792

Pamela Stone

As an only child, Pamela spent her summers at her grandparent’s house in the country. She would while away long hot afternoons reading romance or creating her own fantasies and imaginary friends. These days, she loves to travel. From Hawaii, to California, to Florida to the Caribbean, if there’s a beach, she’s there. She has combined her romantic nature and love of the ocean to become the author of great beach reads.

Book preview

Opting Back In

UC Logo

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Barbara S. Isgur Endowment Fund in Public Affairs.

Praise for Opting Back In

Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy show clearly how women’s cheerful language of reinvention following ‘opting out’ veils status anxiety about their children’s future in an age of increasing income inequality and disillusion with the family-hostile and often sexist atmosphere in high-stakes, high-status jobs.

— Joan Williams, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for WorkLife Law, University of California Hastings College of Law

Vividly captures the dilemma facing professional women wrestling with family obligations. Sympathetic and incisive, this book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the personal and public toll America’s lack of family policy enacts even on the advantaged.

— Sharon Sassler, Professor of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University and coauthor of Cohabitation Nation

Demonstrates how the personal decisions of a group of elite women reverberate throughout our social world and become consequential both for those equally privileged and those with far fewer advantages. Beautifully written and impeccably organized.

— Margaret K. Nelson, Hepburn Professor Emerita of Sociology at Middlebury College and coauthor of Random Families

This book provides keen insights on challenges professional women face as they exit careers and later attempt to reestablish them. Founded on rich data and crisply written, it is a must-read for anyone interested in work-family concerns.

— Stephen Sweet, Executive Officer, Work and Family Researchers Network

"Opting Back In is a book that we badly need. Stone and Lovejoy probe the lives of the very women who could and should be earning the same high salaries and leading the same companies and law firms as their male counterparts but are not. They demonstrate where and how the pipeline of female talent leaks, while also identifying paradoxes of privilege that reinforce existing power structures. It should be required reading at professional schools across the country."

— Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO, New America

Opting Back In

What Really Happens When Mothers Go Back to Work

Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2019 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stone, Pamela, author. | Lovejoy, Meg, author.

Title: Opting back in : what really happens when mothers go back to work / Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019006654 (print) | LCCN 2019009633 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520964792 () | ISBN 9780520290808 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Women—Employment re-entry—United States. | Work and family—United States. | Choice (Psychology) | Life change events.

Classification: LCC HD6054.2.U6 (ebook) | LCC HD6054.2.U6 S76 2019 (print) | DDC 331.4/40973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006654

Manufactured in the United States of America

26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In memory of Ruth Sidel

For her heart, smarts, wit, and integrity, and for the gentle mentorship that advanced so many women’s careers, including my own

Pamela Stone

For my mother

Determined, impassioned—a forerunner and role model Meg Lovejoy

Don’t think about making women fit the world—think about making the world fit women.

Gloria Steinem

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Great Expectations

2. The Siren Call of Privileged Domesticity

3. Putting Family First: The Slow Return

4. Career Relaunch: Heeding the Call

5. Questing and Reinvention

6. The Big Picture

7. The Paradox of Privilege and Beyond

Appendix. Study Methodology

Notes

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1. Women’s representation in leadership positions

2. Gender composition of former and current jobs

3. Median occupational earnings of former, reentry, and current jobs

4. Median occupational prestige scores of former, reentry, and current jobs

5. Contingent/permanent nature of former and current jobs

6. Job satisfaction in former and current jobs

TABLES

1. Follow-up study participants at a glance

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Our greatest thanks, first, to the forty-three women who made this book possible for their extraordinary generosity in sharing their stories not once, but twice. Their reflectiveness and surprising candor about how their lives had unfolded since the first time we came knocking, a decade earlier, form the bedrock of this study.

We might never have reached out to these women, however, had it not been for the remarkable group of Stone’s undergraduate and graduate students who formed our research team: Katherine Cross and Lira Skenderi, then at Hunter College, and Lisa Ackerly Hernandez, Erin Maurer, and Robin Templeton of the sociology doctoral program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (where Cross is now a student). We owe them a huge debt of gratitude for their outstanding research assistance, which ranged from interviewing and initial coding to transcription and recordkeeping. Their interest in the topic, coupled with their incredible energy, intellect, competence, and creative sociological imaginations, was inspiring, and their collective insights and commentary on our emerging findings inform and enrich this book.

We also want to thank our editor, Naomi Schneider, for her unflagging support—and patience—in seeing this book through to publication. Indeed, it is because of Naomi’s advice and advocacy that this research resulted in a book rather than an epilogue. We cannot thank her enough for her many contributions to making this book immeasurably better and for being such fun to work with.

Funding provided to Stone by Hunter College’s Presidential Research Grants, Roosevelt House Fellow Research Grants, and PSC-CUNY Research Awards was also critical to making the research a reality. In addition to the aforementioned research assistants, we want to thank others who provided important backstage support. For their literature review, preliminary qualitative data analysis, and transcription prowess, thanks go to Meghan Amato, Nicole Rios, and Nichole Whitney. For carrying out quantitative data analyses with accuracy, speed, and endless patience for one more run, our thanks to James Guerra.

We would also like to thank those whose careful review and editorial advice on our initial manuscript improved and clarified our prose. Special thanks go to Dawn Raffel, editor extraordinaire, for helping us smooth over the rough patches, and to our reviewers, for their careful reading and instructive comments.

Stone would like to acknowledge the many people who supported and encouraged her along the way, sometimes simply by listening enthusiastically. Particular appreciation goes to Judith Warner of the Center for American Progress for taking an early interest in this research. Her New York Times Magazine cover story building on what were then preliminary findings helped convince Stone of the research’s broader appeal and book potential. She thanks Jennifer Raab, president of Hunter College, for her ongoing interest in the issues this book addresses and for providing opportunities to bring her work to a larger audience. Thanks also goes to Stone’s department colleagues at Hunter and the Graduate Center, especially Janet Gornick and Karen Lyness, and her colleagues on the Life and Leadership research project she’s been fortunate to be part of at Harvard Business School: Robin Ely, Colleen Ammerman, Laurie Shannon, and Elizabeth Johnson. Stone spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, which came at a pivotal moment and facilitated completion of some of the research fieldwork as well as informing some of her early thinking about the project. A particular debt of gratitude goes to Director Shelley Correll and Executive Director Lori Mackenzie for their support in making this wonderful opportunity available and for innumerable small kindnesses throughout her stay there. Stone benefited greatly from feedback she received on presentations of preliminary findings at conferences and seminars at Harvard Business School, Stanford, and University of Southern California.

For their friendship and support of many kinds, Stone would like to thank Lisa Cornish, Cynthia Rhys, Tonia Johnson, Jackie Carroll, Katie Shah, Peggy Northrop, Lesley Seymour, Kris Klein, the Crystal Lake gang (Jayne Booker, Catherine Bosher, Wendy Jay Hilburn, Linda Jenkins, Celeste Gentry Sharp, and Laura Meyer Wellman), Sara Cousins, Jeff Stone, Janet Giele, and Jean O’Barr. Her family has always been her biggest booster. For putting her priorities in front for the last couple of years, Stone will always be grateful to her husband, Bruce Schearer. Not just moral support, Bruce took on so much more to enable her to write. Her sons, Alex and Nick Schearer, also pitched in, with both creative and technical support. Stone feels fortunate to have such loving, talented, generous, and caring men in her life, and her sons give her hope for the future about the very issues this book addresses.

Lovejoy would like to thank her mother, her earliest role model of what can be accomplished when women challenge the status quo. Both parents, one an artist and the other a scientist, helped grow her sociological imagination with their love of learning and their desire for a better world. Lovejoy is grateful to her sociological colleagues and graduate school mentors Karen Hansen and Gail Dines for helping to deepen her understanding of and commitment to feminism and the intersectional politics of class and gender. Thanks also to her (now former) colleagues at the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, especially Jessica Santos, who often inspired her with their commitment to systemic, root cause inquiry and to moving beyond analysis to solutions. She also benefited from helpful feedback from colleagues on preliminary findings presented at various sociological conferences and seminars over the years.

Lovejoy thanks her friends, especially Maria Carrig, for their endless patience and support during the long journey that was this book. But the biggest debt of gratitude goes to Jonathan Martin, Lovejoy’s longtime partner (and sociologist in his own right), for his unerring encouragement, deep political acuity, and helpful feedback over the years, and for helping her believe that men too can be feminists.

Finally, we would both like to acknowledge past and present feminist scholars and activists (too numerous to be named), who have inspired our critique of the way things are and our vision of the way things could be.

Introduction

MINDING THE GAP

It was another day in paradise in Silicon Valley—the perfect cloudless blue-sky weather matching the perfectly manicured Mediterranean landscaping of the upscale office park. But inside, there was no mistaking the sense of unease in the air, equal parts anticipation and anxiety. Dozens of women, most forty-somethings, some a bit younger, a few older, filled the large windowless meeting hall. They were here to attend a panel about resources for career returners, the organizers’ label for women like them who had stepped away or pulled back from careers and now wanted to return to the workforce. The event was exclusive: many women in attendance were graduates of top-tier graduate and professional schools such as Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, or Cornell. This wasn’t their only similarity. Residents of the affluent communities nearby, most were white, with a sprinkling of Asian American women and Latinas, all dressed in a style that combined business casual with soccer mom.

An impressive and confident-looking bunch, they nonetheless had about them a kind of first day of school demeanor—eager, but with a trace of tentativeness and tempered expectations. They chatted as they waited for the program to begin, exchanging alma maters, and sharing why they were here and where they were in their thinking about returning to work. They were open about their insecurities and about the challenges facing them (I have to figure out what I want to do), and welcomed the chance to compare notes with other women similarly situated.

Once the program began, women listened attentively and actively with many knowing nods of recognition as panelists offered advice and shared their own personal stories about returning to work or helping other women to do so. While speakers set an upbeat tone of support and encouragement, they were also cautionary. They warned, for example, of the very real specter of ageism, especially in the Bay Area, where, as one expert noted, only half-jokingly, it starts not at forty or fifty, but over twenty-five. The program was well received, but worries surfaced in the Q&A. One of the first questions from the floor, the one that had women sitting up straighter and leaning forward to hear the answer, was also the one that gave panelists their only pause: What do I do about the gap in my résumé?

RÉSUMÉ GAPS AND RESEARCH GAPS

This is a question to which there are no easy or ready answers. Historically, women have long taken time out from work, particularly during the childbearing years, but they didn’t have MBAs from the best schools or sterling prequit résumés chronicling their employment at the best firms. The problem these women are grappling with is of relatively recent vintage, born of the so-called opt-out revolution, identified and provocatively named by journalist Lisa Belkin in the early 2000s.¹ Belkin depicted this phenomenon as reflecting the emergence of a new traditionalism by which women chose domesticity out of preference, not constraint. This interpretation was challenged, by our own and others’ research.² However, there is no question that in identifying a group of highly qualified and credentialed women who had walked away from successful professional careers, she was on to something new and different and resonant. Like the women at the seminar, some seek to find their way back—not just back to work or a job, as was the case for earlier generations of women, but to professions, occupations defined by continuity and commitment, against which résumé gaps are a glaring red flag.

Organizations like the one that sponsored this program are springing up to assist career returners, who’ve also caught the attention of the popular press,³ but most are in start-up mode themselves and, however well-meaning, have a shallow reservoir of experience on which to base their advice. Nor is there much research on the subject, either to provide how-to guidance to women as they navigate reentry or to address larger questions: What proportion of women who’ve opted out seek to return to work?⁴ What motivates them to do so? What are they looking for? What’s the process of returning to work like? What kind of a reception will they receive from prospective employers? Will they be able to reenter and relaunch their career? Which strategies work, and which ones don’t work?

In opting out (typically defined as a career break of at least six months, during which women are out of the paid labor force and primarily engaged in taking care of home and family), women knowingly risk their prospects for returning to the workforce, let alone their former jobs. Recent trends show that in any given year only about 20 percent of college-educated married moms with children younger than eighteen have opted out and are at home full-time. While a recent fine-grained analysis found that women graduates of elite schools were slightly more likely than those from less elite schools to opt out, both groups showed high rates of labor force participation—68 and 76 percent, respectively. However, mothers cycle in and out of work over the course of their childbearing years. Taking this into account, the fraction ever taking a sustained break is much larger than the cross-sectional statistics imply. Studies of women graduates of highly selective schools, comparable to the women we study, who are especially well positioned for successful careers, show that on the order of 30 to 40 percent report ever having taken time out from them. A recent study of Harvard Business School alumnae, who one can safely assume are as ambitious and career focused as they come, revealed similarly that while 10 percent of those with kids were currently at home, 30 percent of mothers had at some time been home full-time.⁵

Taking a break or work hiatus is risky enough, and one of the reasons, no doubt, that the opting-out phenomenon has garnered so much attention, but for professionals the potential downsides of doing so are especially high given the lucrative and prestigious nature of their work. We can only gauge and fully appreciate the extent of that risk and the associated costs—whether they can find work at all and how far they might fall from the high-flying jobs they left—when we know what happens when they seek to opt in by returning to work. Their efforts, and the success or failure of these efforts, lay bare the potential riskiness of the opt-out strategy, as well as highlight the brave new world in which these women are pioneers or perhaps guinea pigs.

Has their gamble paid off? Can professional women return to work after time out for motherhood? Under what terms and with what consequences? Do they even want to return to the kinds of jobs from which they walked away and (as our earlier research showed) from which they often felt shut out? Does returning to work offer them a chance to rebound, if perhaps not catch up entirely with the men (and women) who’ve worked continuously? What losses, if any, do they incur in their restarted careers—and what possible gains?

We find that women successfully return to work, but they don’t resume their former careers. Instead their reentry requires a protracted period of questing and career reinvention. With a premium placed on their roles as caregivers and status keepers in upper-middle-class families, women value flexibility and meaning and turn their backs on their former careers in order to fashion new solutions to the work-family bind: freelancing and radical redirection to jobs in female-dominated fields that they formerly eschewed. While these women, unlike most, are able and willing to bear the costs of these significant accommodations—notably, retraining, lower earnings, and loss of pathways to leadership—we show that they in fact have limited options in returning to professional workplaces little changed from those they left behind. As a result, the very women who are best positioned (and indeed expected) to surmount barriers and close gender gaps instead pursue career-family strategies that work for them individually, but that ultimately exacerbate and increase gender inequality overall. This is the Catch-22 of opting out and opting back in. Women going it alone can’t break this cycle. We advocate policies to change this dynamic and to support women’s retention and reentry—policies that will help not only privileged professional women like the ones we study but all women (and men) trying to combine work and family.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Our understanding of these issues requires that we take a long view on women’s lives—a movie rather than a snapshot. In our earlier research on career interruption among highly qualified and experienced professional women (most of whom, like the women in Silicon Valley, were graduates of elite, highly selective schools), we challenged the prevailing understanding of opting out.⁶ Not only was it not as widespread as suggested by the popular media’s hyperbolic headlines, but also it was not entirely optional or—as often depicted—about a return to traditional gender roles and values. For the vast majority of women who quit professional careers and were now stay-at-home mothers, the decision to leave their careers and head home was highly conflicted and constrained. It was a function less of choice or preference than of a long-hour work culture and husbands who were largely absent on the home front; this combination created a high-intensity double bind that made it impossible for women to work and parent. This same work culture stigmatized flexible work options that would enable women—especially women who could entertain the option to quit—to continue to do both.

Our previous research, in addition to revealing the real reasons women exchanged careers for motherhood (at least for some sustained period), also shed light on their current lives at home and on their future plans. The large majority of these stay-at-home moms intended to return to work. A critical question, which our earlier study could not address, is whether these women—and highly qualified and credentialed women like them who opt out—are able to realize their intentions and transition back to work. By virtue of their human capital (e.g., credentials, work experience) and social capital (e.g., class privilege, good networks), some observers are optimistic about opt-out women’s prospects for reentry.⁷ Others are less sanguine. Citing the rapid skill obsolescence inherent in high-knowledge professional fields as well as potential ageism, they predict that women will be disadvantaged by their time out of the labor force, their prior history in and of itself a possible red flag signaling shaky work commitment.⁸ That this fear is well founded is borne out by the results of a recent study of employers’ evaluations of the résumés of prospective job applicants. Otherwise well- and equally qualified applicants for a professional job who had opted out of the labor force to take care of family fared significantly worse in their hiring prospects than did applicants whose employment break was occasioned by job loss or those who were continuously employed. Employers took opting out as a violation of ideal-worker norms and prima facie evidence of lower work commitment, deservingness, and reliability.⁹

The limited research on professional women’s reentry finds that the majority want to resume careers (as we found), but, consistent with the second hypothesis, they have trouble doing so and often settle for jobs far below their qualifications and capabilities.¹⁰ These studies also find that women undergo a substantial shift in their work orientation after a break, often redirecting away from former employers and professions.¹¹ Together, these results suggest that reentry is a time of considerable and protracted turbulence and flux. Yet while past research begins to shed light on basic outcomes associated with reentry, it is silent about the process. So, too, is our previous study, which looked primarily backward to explore the anatomy of women’s decision-making around exiting careers. The study on which this book is based picks up where the last one left off, following the same group of women through the overlapping peak career and family-building years, taking them from their thirties and forties into their forties and fifties. This long-term longitudinal approach allows us to unspool women’s lives from the fateful decision to opt out to understand not only its antecedents but the process and motivations underlying the challenging and complex decision to resume working (or not), which is often accompanied by the equally complicated and little-understood decision to change fields. Only by understanding the entire process—and its consequences—can we evaluate fully the privileges and perils of opting out.

WHY IT MATTERS

The women in that auditorium in Silicon Valley probably never thought they’d be there. Certainly, the women we studied never thought they’d be full-time, at-home moms. Their lives—up until the time they quit—were ones of achievement: they either had broken the glass ceiling or were poised to do so. Women like them, women of accomplishment and privilege, are supposed to be doing what their elite alma maters prepared them for—be leaders in their chosen fields.¹² Fifty years after the feminist revolution, we know how that’s going for women, and the answer is not well. Women face a leadership gap and a more quantifiable earnings gap. It’s increasingly clear that highly gendered and costly strategies to accommodate career and motherhood—such as the euphemistically dubbed opting out—which disproportionately penalize women play a central role in creating and maintaining pernicious and persistent gender gaps. Opting out is