Lisa Belkin's NY Times article on The Opt-out Revolution about highly-educated women "choosing" to stay home with children was a sensation. Overnight, the phrase "opting out" became synonymous with a down-to-earth, values-oriented, and simplified way of living - a noble an intelligent pursuit for rational beings. It also invited scathing commentary from Linda Hirshman in her manifesto for women, Get to Work, in which she suggested (among other things) that the women who choose to "opt out" do so 1) at their husband's expense and 2) probably never had real success in their career anyway and so weren't opting out of much.
A new study from Simmons School of Management in Boston suggests another perspective - that women are Opting In vs. Opting Out but that they are doing it on their own terms. The researchers, Mary Shapiro and Cynthia Ingols, note that women's career patterns have always been seen as deviant in the corporate world because they are judged against a normative definition of full-time, non-stop career management. After surveying 400 women they suggest that professional women today aren't opting out, they are simply rejecting a "work is primary" career model and are instead leading a paradigm shift to "career self-agency."
Their findings include:
- Most professional women don't have the option to "opt out" as they provide a significant portion of their household income.
- Women are using Flexible Work Arrangements (FWA's) to stay in the workforce rather than to "opt out"
- In contrast to the financial impact of "opting out", over time FWA's have no statistically significant financial impact on women.
This is good news for women in the workforce, and for the increasing numbers of men who aren't interesting in "extreme" careers, but are seeking a more balanced lifestyle.
Great post. More good new with respect to our efforts to "opt in". The Great Place to Work Institute, which partners with Fortune to conduct the "100 Best Companies to Work For" study each year, tells us that:
The most dramatic policy changes over the last decade among companies on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list concern improved work-family benefits:
- 72 offer job sharing programs today, compared with only 18 a decade ago.
- 79 now offer compressed work weeks on a year-round, regular basis, compared with 25 companies 10 years ago.
- 82 provide telecommuting opportunities today, compared with only 18 in 1998.
Posted by: Ann Bares | January 19, 2007 at 08:37 AM