Am I on a summer break? A career break? Am I retired? Am I in period of reinvention? What am I doing now that school is back in session and our son is tackling another year of middle school academics. Getting our kids to and from school has always been a task in my column because I worked a part-time schedule. Now that I’m free of a work schedule, at least temporarily, I will continue to do so, though ironically, he’s in a fall sport that extends his school day and would have allowed me two extra hours of work.

I’m thinking back on a great summer. I’m not a travel blogger but really need to write a post about our family road trip to the Canadian Rocky Mountains, specifically the lovely and stunning Banff National Park and Yoho National Park. They are worth the trip, and you should at the very least check out my Instagram feed.

I’m also working on a stack of library books that I selected to research motherhood and careers. This topic is near and dear to me because I’ve always wanted both family and a career, and many (most?) women will agree that having both is not easy to do.

The first one I will share with you is Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home by sociologist Pamela Stone. I will refer to it as Opting Out? for the remainder of this post. You may find it at your local library, or you can order it here:

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Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home

Opting Out? is a very interesting read. Though I didn’t expect to, I loved it. I will even go as far as suggesting that every man and woman should be required to read this prior to graduating from college and launching their career. Not just two people about to walk down the wedding aisle. Every adult entering the work force, because many of them were raised by stay-at-home moms (or dads) or might be married to one someday. Even those who plan to remain single can benefit by understanding the demographics of their future coworkers.

Finding solutions for the ongoing struggle between careers and parenthood is THAT IMPORTANT for the career paths and fulfillment of all of our daughters and sons. They are, after all, tomorrow’s moms and dads who will otherwise be fighting through many of the same work-life balance issues that we face now. They will be fighting for career advancement and successful marriages and family life, and we need to apply, not waste, the lessons that we have learned.

The Dream Team

Ms. Stone conducted in-depth interviews with 54 highly accomplished women from selective universities and studied their stories in depth. They were high achievers who, as Ms. Stone writes, “dwelled squarely in the world of sixty-hour workweeks and 24/7 accountability.” More than half of her study participants earned advanced degrees, including MBAs, JDs, and MDs, and more than half went on to work in historically male-dominated, high-prestige professions.

She picked her “Dream Team” because each seemed to “have it all” and would be in an “especially favored position to combine work and motherhood,” yet each decided to opt out of her career to stay at home with her children. The high achievers don’t represent “everywoman”, but the idea is that if these high achieving, possibly even privileged, women can’t successfully manage both work and motherhood will all the resources available to them, what does that mean for the rest of working moms?

I can identify with some aspects of Ms. Stone’s interviewees. I graduated from a highly respected engineering school and launched a career that enabled me to be economically independent with or without a spouse. I worked hard for that degree and embraced the title of “engineer”.

I’m also like the women in her study because I married a husband whose career profile started at staff level, like mine, but he went on to become the higher-earning spouse. I left the workforce for awhile (twice!) and, like some of the moms in the study, it wasn’t when the kids were newborns. Finally, I also grew up in a traditional household with a breadwinner dad and a stay-at-home mom, which aligns with 75 percent of her pool of interviewees.

Issues that Working Moms Face

The book covers many topics that working moms will be familiar with and appreciate reading about:

• having a professional identity
• the pull of family vs. the push from the workplace
• the demographic of the ideal worker
• typical employer constraints
• the common choice of deferring to the husband’s career
• the supportive “if that’s what you want” husband vs. the “let’s make it work for both of our careers” husband
• loss of professional identity
• cultural devaluing of stay-at-home moms
• the question: “What do you do?”
• increased sense of valuing motherhood
• reinventing yourself when the career is gone
• volunteering

Ms. Stone admits she had some skepticism about women truly choosing to give up a career for motherhood. Those who knew all along that they’d quit once kids were added, she refers to as new traditionalists.

She really wanted to investigate if the other women had truly chosen to return home or if their husbands and/or employers forced the decision somehow, and this is what she thoroughly explores in Opting Out?

I think figuring out how to manage career and family is one of the big conundrums of our time. Obviously, we mothers adore our kids! They are birthed as helpless little newborns and we are front row to their fascinating development in to future adults. Concurrent to our kids’ childhood, we are still trying to take care of ourselves and succeed as adults. Ms. Stone seems genuinely interested in figuring out if the trend that her interviewees represent indicates a cultural return to a traditional family model or if they felt forced to give up the fight.

On a related note, I received kind and appreciative comments and emails, but my post about being married to Mr. Successful was not a huge success in quantitative blogger terms. The number of views was in the low hundreds and only three people shared it via Twitter. Perhaps the title scared people off and women perceive me to be “a poster child for anti-feminism,” as Ms. Stone notes sometimes happens to stay-at-home moms in the culture wars. If so, it’s ok. You can only write about so much in each blog post. I’m all about women having a career, staying at home, or figuring out any combination in between. Both roles add value to our world.

The purpose of that post was two-fold:

• to offer blogger transparency about my own household. He’s the primary breadwinner. His income frees me to work part-time (or not at all) and have more time with our kids (which I wanted), and my downsized career has allowed him to put more time into his career. We both like how it’s worked out FOR US.
• to give credit where credit is due. He works hard to support his family.

Another possibility is that people feared I was suggesting young women just need to find a successful man to marry. Not the intended conclusion. I’ve loved having a career and I also love being a wife and mother. However, I will grant you the validity of economic concerns and also refer you to this post.

Interestingly, one of Ms. Stone’s most interesting observations about it is hidden in the Notes section, specifically Note 2 for Chapter 6. Half-full, Half-empty.

Ms. Stone noted, “For all their regrets about the loss of rewards and affirmation tied to work, women were strangely silent about the accompanying loss of economic independence, autonomy, and the ability to contribute to family welfare that quitting their jobs had also entailed. …. Women’s failure to mention this downside is puzzling, perhaps a reflection of their optimism about the viability of their marriages despite relatively high levels of divorce. Whatever the reason, overlooking their vulnerability is consistent with other aspects of their understanding of their situation (as described in chapter 5), in which they viewed themselves as active agents, not victims, their quitting a privilege, not a potential peril.”

Choosing Freely and Deliberately to Opt Out?

Her search to fully understand the sincerity of women saying they CHOSE to quit is partly what makes the book so interesting. Her skepticism of the husbands’ support kind of annoyed me at first, but she does a good job showing how the decision can play out for some couples and how it’s more complex than it may seem. Though a spouse should want to be supportive (“If that’s what you want!”), it’s important to acknowledge and discuss the career advantages/disadvantages experienced by each when one spouse chooses to opt out of the work force to manage family and home life.

The book also provides multiple examples of how some employers essentially (or bluntly) force women out by denying requests for work flexibility, job sharing, or part-time schedules, by promoting younger men who aren’t on the “mommy track,” or by requiring business travel at an unmanageable or undesirable frequency. This is another reason why Opting Out? is worth reading. Men and women need to understand how to better support working parents of either gender because both are valuable contributors in the workforce.

The first time I resigned a job to be a stay-at-home mom was indeed my genuine, preferred choice to have more time with my kids. I was job-sharing with another young mother. We both had a 20 hours per week schedule with interesting and rewarding work, and I was supported by a conveniently located and affordable childcare center. I did that for approximately five years. There was no real reason to abandon that job, other than our daughter would soon be starting kindergarten, which would add another stop on my commute across the city, but it certainly wasn’t a show stopper.

Then our toddler son fell and suffered a deep cut on his upper lip, requiring stitches. We received doctor’s order to keep him out of daycare for 10 days. With no relatives around and because my work was much less jobsite- and meeting-intensive than my husband’s, I volunteered to take a temporary 10-day leave and stay home with our son (this was before the ease of working remotely was in place). And I was hooked. I discovered the peaceful flow of our daily routine when only one parent had to work, and I got a lot more time with our preschoolers, who were at a very fun age. A month later, we paid off a car loan with my husband’s end-of-year bonus, and I resigned a few weeks after that. I chose the traditional role and I loved it.

Little did I know that years later, Ms. Stone would report that leave policies are a common work-flex accommodation and are often generous in times of critical need, but they do provide women with “a window into a world at home that they had never experienced nor imagined, an experience which…..actually prompted some of them…..to quit.”

More recently, when I quit last spring, the reasons were threefold and included employer constraints to further career advancement.  While the job did provide some great benefits, primarily a part-time schedule, it was time to move on.

Employers Need to Up Their Game to Reduce “Forced” Opting Out

In chapter eight, Ms. Stone points out that her “Dream Team” women’s lives had emphasized individual achievement and accomplishment since their teen years. After marrying and having kids, their focus shifted to supporting the family as a team. After being home for awhile, “about 40 percent developed strong feelings and beliefs about the importance of full-time parenting…. that increased in intensity from the time of their initial decision to quit.” (page 184). Many of the interviewees were thankful to have that added time with their kids.

It’s not about household chores or being called a housewife (her interviewees were unanimous on that point). It’s about the kids, yet career fulfillment is appealing, too, and the call to have a career doesn’t always go away once a woman heads home.

For many in society, staying home is not an economic option. Moms on all rungs of the corporate ladder need flexibility to accommodate work and family.

So I was glad to see in chapter nine, Dreams and Visions: Getting There, that Ms. Stone focuses her suggestions on changes for employers and the workplace. Not all working moms are married. The flexible work policies needed most must come from employers.

I caught myself repeatedly saying, “Yes!” as I read many of her suggestions for improving family human-friendly work-life policies. Employer-based changes will benefit a larger number of employees, both moms and dads, across all income levels. I especially liked the following suggestions:

• the need to level out the unrealistic expectations of current time norms. Why is any salaried professional accommodating extreme amounts of unrelenting unpaid overtime?
• the need for stay policies. That is, what can we as an employer implement to retain our talented staff?
• the need for more part-time positions and the ability to end your workday at the same time the school day ends. (Hello, this post!)
• the need to encourage men to take advantage of family-friendly flexibility options so it becomes something that is done without stigmatization.
• the example of Deloitte & Touche’s off-ramp program that engages with former employees. Sounds like there is a non-compete clause in play, BUT Deloitte offers continued annual training, assistance with maintaining professional certifications, and professional networking events for five years in hopes those employees will return to the career progression they were experiencing before taking a break.

Ms. Stone offers plenty of additional ideas, but I don’t want to steal her thunder. Instead, I want you to read her book and then work to get family-friendly policies implemented at your place of employment. And remember, if you are the spouse of a stay-at-home parent, I think you have a special responsibility to pay it forward by advocating for working parents who are still in the grind.

Again, you may find Opting Out? at your local library or you can order it here:

Featured image: Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash

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