Mothers struggling to opt back into the workforce

About a decade ago, The New York Times spotted what it thought was a trend: highly educated, well-paid professional women leaving their positions of power and esteem to stay home and raise their children.

At the time, journalist Lisa Belkin, who wrote the Times article, coined it “The Opt Out Revolution.”

The women featured in Belkin’s profile were the first to take advantage of the gains a previous generation had made in the workplace, and advance their careers to high levels.

“It was an interesting cohort to look at in the first place, because they’re not the first group of women to choose between their life and work to make these sort of compromises, but they are the first group of women who never thought they’d have to make those choices, Belkin said.

But a lot has happened since then — the Great Recession hit, once stable careers became more scarce and less secure and ideas about motherhood shifted.

In a recent follow up story titled “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In,” author Judith Warner caught up with the women from the original piece to see what’s changed ten years on.

She found a majority of the women went back to work for one reason or another. Some out of necessity. A divorce, for example would require the woman to return to the work force. The weakened economy also caused some women to return to work to pick up the slack.

Others went back simply out of boredom or to increase their self-esteem.

Unfortunately for most women returning to the workforce after years as mothers and volunteers, the available jobs were nothing like their old positions. Some took pay cuts of up to 80 percent. Others struggled to find anything. 

The great “fall” from high-powered business jobs, to independent life or a lower wage illustrates the phenomenon, but is also representative of the struggle facing all women, Belkin said.

“I really think the lesson is that if you took any group of women of that age over that period of time they’re going to have all of the problems that this group of women had, whether or not they kept working or opted out,” she said.

The friction between family life and a successful career affects most women and may be a contributing factor to the inequality that still exists in the most high-profile American careers.

“These are the women who should be running the world, who when we look around and say ‘Why aren’t there more women in positions of power?’, here’s our answer: because these women decided not to be there,” Belkin said. “And the fact that they’re not in positions of power means that they’re not there to change the workplace for other women of all levels coming up behind them.”