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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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On September 20, the New York Times ran a front-page feature article entitled “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” focusing on undergraduate women who intend to stay home with their children rather than work outside the home full time. The author, Louise Story, is a 2003 Yale College graduate currently studying at the School of Management. In 2004, as a journalism student at Columbia, Story sent a questionnaire to women in two of Yale’s residential colleges. The results and followup interviews formed the basis for the article, which raised a furor among Yale graduates and in the media. On this page, the Yale Alumni Magazine provides excerpts from alumnae commentary in the media debate and, below, an essay by political economist Frances Rosenbluth on the larger societal context of women, children, and careers. Louise Story’s New York Times feature stirred up much excitement over the idea that women are retreating from the career trenches. Yet, if anything, Story’s article showed the opposite: 70 percent of the women in her sample stated a preference for staying in the labor market, at least part-time. This is no massive rush for the door by a new generation disenchanted by the failures of the supermom. What the article does underscore is the less than startling conclusion that change is slow and incomplete. Put Story’s survey results into the context of long-term trends in the U.S. economy, and then compare those with trends in other countries, and you have a more accurate picture of what our society calls “gender relations”: our evolving division of labor in the family. Female labor force participation in this country has risen steadily in the past 50 years, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. It currently stands at about 75 percent; most of the recent increases took place among mothers. In 2000, more than half of the mothers of small children were employed outside the home, at least on a part-time basis. New mothers are, however, more likely than other women to leave their jobs—and little wonder. Federal law (under the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act) requires employers only to give new mothers 12 weeks' leave, without pay. Leaving a three-month-old baby in the care of others for a full day on the job is no one’s idea of an ideal situation. By three months, the baby and mother may be in the full swing of a nursing relationship, the baby may not be sleeping through the night—leaving the mother as tired in the morning as when she went to bed—and the dad may or may not be helping with the night shift. As Yale professor Laura Wexler pointed out in an interview with Story, women have gained access to an ever-greater range of professional opportunities without a commensurate increase in social support for balancing family and career. In Sweden, by contrast, employers pay a percentage of workers' salaries for an 18-month parental leave. (Some of that leave is take-it-or-leave-it for dads only.) Employers must also guarantee the possibility of part-time hours until the youngest child is 8 years old. Hardly surprising, then, that female labor force employment is even higher in Sweden than in the United States. It is remarkable, in fact, that the U.S. rate is as high as it is. But there are several reasons why the percentage remains substantial in the face of miserly government and employer support for parental leave. One is the high degree of intra-gender wage inequality in the United States, which allows women with high incomes to hire lower-income women to care for their children. Another reason is the fact that labor markets here are fluid for both men and women—unlike in the welfare states of Europe, where firms are given strong statutory encouragement to employ their workers for life. Ironically, the European welfare state (and the Japanese and Korean lifetime employment system) deals women an inadvertent blow. For firms that invest in lifetime employees, career interruptions of any kind are costly. As investments in human capital, therefore, women are expensive. The firms respond by trying to avoid hiring women and promoting women, and the result is that female labor force participation rates are substantially lower in those countries: 58 percent for Japan, 62 percent for Germany, and 43.1 percent for Italy, for example. Even in Scandinavia, the percentage of women in private-sector jobs is substantially lower than that in the United States—though Scandinavian countries get around the problem by absorbing women into their large public sectors. Some, no doubt, will wonder what all the fuss is about. If a woman wants to take time out from her career to be with her young children, or if she wants to stay at home permanently, should she have to defend her choice? No: but she should know the consequences. Young women should be aware that a decision to specialize in family work may restrict their options on down the road. All else being equal, one’s value on the market increases with experience. As the gap between the husband’s and wife’s labor market value increases, the potential loss of livelihood in the event of marital breakup grows larger for the wife, giving her a bigger stake in keeping the relationship going and leading to a loss of her bargaining stature at home. This is, of course, a crass way of characterizing the marriage commitment. But it is prudent for women to grasp the future range of possibilities, particularly in a society in which half of all marriages end in divorce. Perhaps for these reasons, or perhaps because women find fulfillment in the workplace, or perhaps because one-career incomes are insufficient for many families, all indications are that U.S. women are in the labor market to stay. Only when men are equally likely to be seen with banana puree on their suit lapels will we know we have arrived. But until then, women are keeping their eyes on their careers. |
Motherhood in the Media I At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates. There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want. Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. … Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children. While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year. The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years. |
Motherhood in the Media II After a while, reality intrudes. Sometimes it gets so big, even Yale graduates can’t ignore it. In a stunning New York Times expose, reporter Louise Story reveals that 60 percent of the 138 Yale coeds she talked to expect to cut back on work or stay at home once they have children. Sixty percent is a popular number. Turns out that is about the same proportion (61 percent) of female Harvard Business School graduates who said that 10 to 20 years after graduation they were either not working or working part-time. It is also about the proportion of Yale women who said their mothers had stayed home either full- or part-time. … On the Yale listserv I get, discussion flew hot and heavy: why did women have to be the mothers? I tried to bring up two important reasons: a) mothers like their babies, and b) women don’t like supporting unemployed men. On the first point, University of Virginia professor Steven Rhoads (Taking Sex Differences Seriously) found in a recent study of academics that women scholars who are mothers simply report they get more pleasure from baby care tasks than do male scholars who are fathers. At this point, Dave Steinberg ['90], an old friend and fellow Yalie who writes screenplays for a living, wrote in “to offer some recent data on the subject, namely my own expectations vs. reality on raising a child (who is now 13 weeks old). … The connection between mother and baby is one you don’t want to mess with. So, while we planned a certain twenty-first-century liberal approach to division of labor and child-rearing, we found that primarily biology and secondarily economics quickly brought us back to the 1950s. And oddly, we’re both OK with it.” |
Motherhood in the Media III Who says you can’t have a career and be a good mom? For most of history, men did. Now, Ivy League coeds are saying it for them. Some of the most brilliant women at the most brilliant colleges are declaring that they will end, or at least curtail, their careers once they have children. So says an article that ran on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times. “My mother always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time,” said one Yale sophomore, declaring she expects to be a stay-at-home mom by the time she is 30. … I challenge you to sit in a room with 20 children and tell me which ones stayed home with grandma, which ones went to day care and which ones had mom at home full time. Neither working nor stay-at-home motherhood has a lock on perfection. What most stay-at-home moms do have a lock on is this: wealthy husbands. So, whether the bright young things aiming for uninterrupted motherhood admit it or not, they are aiming for a good catch, too, a la 1952. I suspect they did not put this on their Why I Want to Go to Yale applications. Of course, 10 or 20 years after they’ve been at home and are ready to reenter the job market, they may be shocked to learn that a yellowing diploma does not open doors, no matter how smart its owner. On that day, summoning all their education, leadership, and credentials, these mild-mannered moms may just take up where their feminist foremothers left off: leading a revolution, this time on behalf of returning women stonewalled by the working world. |
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