Free to Choose: Does Our Culture of Individualism Harm Working Moms?

By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

In her jaw-dropping 2003 New York Times article, “The Opt Out Revolution,” columnist Lisa Belkin suggested that the reason women aren’t rising to leadership roles in large numbers is simply because they’re not interested. She wrote, “Why don’t women run the world? Maybe it’s because they don’t want to.”

Belkin said highly talented and educated professional women were choosing family over work, and deciding to “opt out” of the workforce all together. She placed the responsibility for “opting out” squarely on the shoulders of women themselves – and framed it as an empowered decision on their behalf. The backlash to the piece was swift – Joan Williams, Founder of the Center for Work Life Law at UC Hastings was one of the first to proclaim the “opt out revolution” a myth. She said, “When we talk about work/family conflict, we talk about professional women opting out – but often they are pushed out, because of all-or-nothing workplaces.”

In fact, the “opt-out” myth was largely debunked by a 2009 report by the U.S. Census Bureau which found that most stay-at-home mothers were part of low income families with limited educations – not exactly the high powered professionals Belkin described.

Subsequent research by The Center for Work/Life Policy also revealed that professional women who had left the workforce were less often “opting out” than being pushed out by workplaces that were inflexible and unresponsive to their needs.

In fact, the CWLP’s 2010 study “On-Ramps and Off-Ramps Revisited” [PDF] showed that, “A full 69 percent of women say they wouldn’t have off-ramped if their companies had offered flexible work options such as reduced-hour schedules, job sharing, part-time career tracks or short unpaid sabbaticals.”

It seems the biggest factor in off-ramping was environmental, rather than personal.

Yet new research out of Northwestern University‘s Kellogg School of Management shows that the “opt out” myth persists – and it keeps women from getting ahead.

Nicole M. Stephens, assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg, and co-author of the study with Cynthia S. Levine, a psychology doctoral student at Stanford University, explained, “Although we’ve made great strides toward gender equality in American society, significant obstacles still do, in fact, hold many women back from reaching the upper levels of their organizations.”

She continued, “In our research, we sought to determine how the very idea of ‘opting out,’ or making a choice to leave the workplace, may be maintaining these social and structural barriers by making it more difficult to recognize gender discrimination.”

According to the research, women who described their career breaks as the result a personal choice were less likely to identify examples of discrimination and structural barriers to advancement. Choice-focused women were blind to societal and environmental disadvantages that may have influenced their career trajectory.

What’s most concerning about the study is not that these individual women were blind to workplace bias – it’s that the majority of the women surveyed felt this way. Our culture of choice is causing us to ignore the structural inequality that is keeping women out of the corner office.

The Framework of Choice

When women leave the workforce, it’s not because they are choosing an enchanted lifestyle free from responsibility and the pressures of work. As the CWLP’s research showed, women want to stay at work, but companies are making work and family – if not impossible – extraordinarily difficult, and forcing women to choose. Ignoring these barriers, consciously or not, makes it harder to make the case for structural change.

The Kellogg study showed that women who believed more sincerely in their freedom of choice in leaving their career were happier in the short term, and this is harmful for all women. Stephens explained, “Choice has short-term personal benefits on well-being, but perhaps long-term detriments for women’s advancement in the workplace collectively.”

The environmental and societal pressures women face in the workplace are simply unfair and unnecessary. The study shows that we still operate under the assumption that choosing between career and family is empowering and personal – and, as research as shown, that’s not always true.

Stephens continued, “In general, as a society we need to raise awareness and increase attention for the gender barriers that still exist. By taking these barriers into account, the discussion about women’s workplace departure could be reframed to recognize that many women do not freely choose to leave the workplace, but instead are pushed out by persistent workplace barriers such as limited workplace flexibility, unaffordable childcare, and negative stereotypes about working mothers.”

Flip of the Coin

Perhaps looking at the issue from another angle may shed some light on our framework of choice.

Last month social science magazine Miller McCune published an article on a Yale School of Management study that revealed men with female bosses in traditionally male industries are generally perceived as “less masculine,” and in turn, suffer gender discrimination regarding future pay and promotion. Writer Tom Jacobs explained:

“So guys who work for either a) high-powered women, or b) men who are in what are perceived as ‘women’s jobs,’ are viewed as less manly, and this impacts both their social standing and earnings potential. There’s a price to be paid for being a trailblazer; for men, there’s also a price to be paid for working for one.”

A man losing out on future opportunities due to his female boss is no less disturbing than a woman facing a discriminatory workplace because of her gender. But do you really think the gentleman in question is “opting out” of a higher paycheck on purpose?

Gender stereotypes present obstacles for everyone, male and female, and they must be addressed. No one chooses to be treated unfairly because of their gender, or their boss’s gender.