By Pamela Stone
2007 University of California Press
Growing numbers of women from all social and racial-ethnical groups now combine motherhood with paid employment, and fewer of them quit work for any prolonged period while their children are young (Spain& Bianchi, 1996). This has been seen as a revolutionary phenomenon, although as Hochschild pointed out, a “Stalled revolution” given little corresponding changes on culturally and social constructed gender norms and expectations for women as well as in corporate and institutional changes in structural support for these women (Hochschild 1989, 1997)
Juggling between “shifts” and within “time binds”, these women, especially working mothers find themselves shouldering tri-dimensional demands at work and home with both childcare and elder care. Although “work and life balance” has being promoted as being among key strategic corporate policies, even at the national level, this has been more a bland slogan than a realistic solution. (Hochschild 1996).
A recent Pew Research Center (2007) survey concluded
“In the span of the past decade, full-time work outside the home has lost some of its appeal to mothers. This trend holds both for mothers who have such jobs and those who don't.”
Stone was puzzled, especially by recent trends of well-educated, elite career women quitting their careers and heading home to be stay-at-home mums. These groups of high educated and high achieving women were mostly in professional and managerial positions with high degrees of autonomy; who would appear to have choices to be better “work and life balanced”. Unlike the traditionalist explanation often portrayed in the media, Stone found that these former professional women, now at home moms, quit only as a last resort for the reasons mostly of work, not of family as the paramount and deciding factors. Instead of having choices, the study revealed, they were facing a choice gap, arising from a double bind created primarily by the conditions of work in the gilded cages of elite professions.
Stone was among the first to conduct such a series of extensive in-depth interviews of 54 women in this category to gain an insightful understanding of the reasons for their quitting the workforce. The study includes documenting the nature of their lives at home, and their plans for the future in order to better understand the meaning of their actions for the women themselves and their families, the workplace and society.
The women in Stone’s study were well educated, (most hold MBA degrees), had a high status professional career and at least 10 years working experience, were married with children and left their career to be at home. Their decisions of homeward bound were partly the financial security (provided by their husband’s above average income). They averaged two children at the time of quitting. For comparative purposes, Stone divided these women into two age groups, 30 to 40 (n=25) and 41 and above (n=29).
According to Stone, 40 percent of women in this study quit work when they had only one child, while 60 percent of women (33) who did return to work after their first child, three-quarters did so on a full-time basis and the rest, part-time. Among them, 80 percent continued to work past their second child’s infancy, and half continued until their younger child was school-age, finally dropping out when their older child was between 6 and 15 years old and their second 5 to 11. Over the course of their entire work lives prior to quitting, two-thirds of the retuning working mothers worked on a part-time schedule at some point of time. Stone discovered that older women were more likely to have worked part-time than younger women. This was not however because of the preference of younger women but rather of their inability to obtain a reduced-hours schedule. Stone found that younger women had fewer options than their older, more experienced counterparts.
There were also discrepancies between formal policies (which appeared to be family friendly or promote work and life balance) and the informal practices that make up organizational culture. Many of these women found while it was easy to negotiate prolonged maternity leave, they found themselves upon their return to work in uncharted, often hostile territory, no longer able to rely on the formal policies; and were marginalized, stigmatized and negatively reinforced for trying to hold on to their careers after becoming mothers. The failure to achieve or obtain sustainable flexible work arrangement was the main reason for quitting. This finding is consistent with Hochschild (1996)’s finding that intensified global competition had forced many companies to focus on bottom lines and to become more demanding in the workplace.
Many of them also concluded that gender expectations and social norms play important roles in the mindset of top managements, a majority of whom being male with stay-at-home wives. The Patriarchal ideal family notion (Parsons 1955) in fact reinforced the women’s decisions of quitting, as demonstrated by the weak efforts of these women’s bosses in trying to keep them; most of them instead “congratulating” them for “finally” making up their mind (of quitting).
Though being a privileged elite group, these women constantly had to make double trades-offs: kids versus careers and their own careers versus their husbands’. Their apparent “choices” turn out to be “forced choices” and “illusion of choices”. Stone further suggested that the “choices” rhetoric was a status symbol reflecting their husbands’ career success, as well as a second wave of feminism (all about choices), and concluded that this is not a return to traditionalism.
It is not women who are open to nature’s calling; rather it is the workplace, stuck in an anachronistic time warp that ignores the reality of the lives of high-achieving women. What we are seeing in these women’s experience by virtue of their leaving and telling the tale - the cost of these workplace and nature of the cost, which are personal and professional, and ultimately, societal and economic.
Stone further reviewed the “half full and half empty” reality of the lives of these women after their quitting. While many of them spoke of improved quality of life, less stress, better engaged social and family lives, they also expressed loss of identity, loss of status and bonding with business associates resulting in some degree of isolation. Some lamented the devaluation process from work to home, but took it as “leap of faith”; others found renewed enthusiasm and redirected their passion to their motherhood and other community services as a second career. Though being seen as going back to the “traditional role”, these mothers by no means resembled their own mothers’ motherhood experience. Today’s intensified motherhood has pushed the mother’s work to be more instrumental and goal orientated. These mothers are involved in their children’s extracurricular activities on top of their academic and emotional development while planning and overseeing the entire domestic planning and operations. In doing this, they appeared to be realizing and transferring their professional skills and training into their new mothering and domestic spheres.
Speaking of the future, though many of them expressed plans to re-enter the workplace, these wishes were mixed with much uncertainty; with many stating that they would switch careers. Strikingly, most of the women who had a sense of which new fields they wanted to enter planned to go into teaching and education, with most of remainder were undecided. It shows that once home, these women were willing to forego the considerable investments they made in their prior career and to walk away from the considerable success they’d enjoyed in order to begin anew on careers that they felt would be more compatible with their families and their changing values. This achievement of compatibility primarily was via traditionally female-dominated professions. The burden of accommodation is borne exclusively by women themselves.
Stone’s study helps fill a void, given the lack of prior coverage and studies in this one, very interesting area of research on women and family. She insightfully uncovers the reality in women’s lives under the double whims of work and family demands. Her study shows it was rather more due to the workplace than the motherhood call that caused these high achievement women to give up their careers and head home. It is the high time that companies stop paying lip service about creating family-friendly and flexible arrangements and stop marginalizing and victimizing married women? However, without changes in the social construct, gender nurture and institutionalized family support, it remains challenging for improvements in the women’s situation to be ever achieved.
The possible limitation of Stone’s study is the lack of comparative data to understand other similarly qualified married women who continue working. There is also missing some critical statistical studies to determine a demographic picture to better understand to what extent women, particularly well-educated women, are heading home. Finally, there may be scope also to do further comparative studies delineated by countries, comparing how these women fare in Western cultures and settings vis-à-vis in Eastern cultures and settings.
REFERENCE
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1989. The second shift. New York: Viking.
-------. 1997. Time bind: When work becomes home and home becomes work. New York: Metropolitan Books.
------- 1996. The emotional geographic of work and family life in “Gender relationship in public and private” eds. Lydia Morris & E Staina Lyon. St. Martin’s Press LLC.
Parsons, Talcott, and Robert F. Bales. 1955. Family, socialization and interactions process. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Pew Research Centre .2007. “Few mother prefer to full time work”
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/536/working-womensearch Centre
Spain, D.; & Bianchi, S.M. 1996. Balancing act: Motherhood, marriage and employment among American women. New York. Russell Sage Foundation
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