The Boss of You

On October 26, 2003 — hard to believe it’s been that long — The New York Times published an article by Lisa Belkin that caused a commotion. “The Opt-Out Revolution” painted a picture of successful career women dropping out to have kids, and creating a neo-1950s nuclear family lifestyle.

The blogosphere reacted strongly, and with typically diverse opinions. (One ex-journalist even started an Opting Out blog on the topic of juggling kids and career; check out her first post to get a taste.)

But recently a couple of new reports out of the U.S. have shown Belkin’s thesis to be superficial at best. (To be fair, Belkin’s article was very limited in scope: she was profiling a small group of highly-educated, heterosexual, married women whose husbands were earning sizeable salaries.)

First up: The Center for Economic and Policy Research, who published a study called “Are Women Opting Out? Debunking the Myth” (press release; full report), which shows that “mothers are actually less likely to leave the labor market today because of their children than even a few years ago”.

Then, the WorkLife Law Center at UC Hastings published a report called “‘Opt Out’ or Pushed Out?: How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict (PDF)”, which shows that “inflexible schedules and inflexible workplaces” are more often to blame for women’s exodus from corporate America than any kind of maternal homing instinct. Amen to that!

(You can read interesting summaries and commentaries on the above reports at Feministing and The Christian Science Monitor.)

Most recently, the Simmons School of Management (which, by the way, I only just learned about — how cool is it that there is a women’s business college?!) published a study that shows that rather than “opting out”, women are negotiating flexible work arrangements “as a way to remain in the workplace, while continuing to see their incomes grow”:

“Overwhelmingly, the women in our study say they must work, both to support themselves and to provide a significant percentage of their household income,” she said. “But they have been smart and creative: they have negotiated flexible work arrangements as a strategic and powerful way to remain in the workforce, to bring balance to their lives, and to still enjoy financial success.

“Women are at the leading edge of shifting the career paradigm for everyone. They’re no longer acting as agents of their employers, but as career ‘self agents,’ using flexible work arrangements and setting their own terms of employment as a way to make ‘work work.’”

(This last study makes the welcome point that men also want and need their work lives to accommodate their family priorities. They & Touche Women's Initiative Blog talks about men and work-life balance">may not be ready to admit it yet, but I think that once we get a vocal group of men advocating for change, it could really shift the debate.)

I’m particularly interested in how these questions play out in the entrepreneurial field. I know a lot of women for whom starting their own business was a path to finding the balance between career and family commitments they had long sought. That’s not to say that entrepreneurship is necessarily a path to fabulous so-called “work-life balance” (I dislike that phrase because it implies that work is somehow separate from life); we all know that entrepreneurs typically work long hours, and we’re also not eligible for maternity leave or company-sponsored childcare, unless our companies earn enough to pay for those benefits.

And with Canada constantly battling a birth-rate decline, I’d really like to know why the heck our government isn’t pushing hard for a decent national childcare program — and some kind of parental-leave system that self-employed people can take advantage of. After all, we constitute a growing percentage of the workforce. I wouldn’t expect Harper’s Conservatives to set this up, but maybe if we can oust ’em we can get moving on something substantial (and I’m not talking about popcorn and beer money — don’t get me started on that pathetic excuse for a childcare policy). Surely this is a win-win proposition if ever there was one.