Why are moms giving up careers?

A growing number of high level professional women are choosing to leave their jobs to pursue a home life. Why would highly educated, successful women give up promising careers? In her new book,"Opting Out," sociology Professor Pam Stone examines American moms struggling to balance both work and family, noticing that women often aren't opting out — instead they're being shut out. Even the brightest women have fewer options around balancing work and family than society assumes. Here's an excerpt:

Introduction

Participant Observation
It was a glorious fall day on the jewel-green playing fields of my suburban hometown and a fellow soccer mom had just given an especially touching and poised tribute to our sons’ coach — the familiar end-of-season ritual accompanied by gift.

Upon being complimented for her sure delivery, Ann turned to thank us, adding self-effacingly, “I guess a law degree from Yale is good for something.” Until that moment, I knew Ann as the quintessential stay-at-home mom:  Kids, dog, husband with high-powered career, active in the community. I had no idea, despite our many chats on the sidelines, before PTA meetings, around coordinating carpools, that Ann was (or ever had been) a lawyer, much less one with a degree from one of the top law schools in the country. Now that I knew, I was — and yet wasn’t — surprised. Surprised because she had never mentioned it or her subsequent legal career; not surprised because she was, in hindsight, so obviously an Ivy League-trained lawyer. Suddenly, it all made sense to me, but the slight trace of regret with which Ann made her remark (and the wistful sense of loss it conveyed) suggested that it might not make sense to her, that she was still trying to puzzle out the incongruity of her identity as Yale Law grad and at-home soccer mom. 

Women like Ann, the choices they make and how they understand them, the lives they create, and the implications of their choices for themselves and those around them are the subject of this book. 

Gone Missing
I’ve had other friends like Ann who left their careers and became full-time moms. Frankly, I’d always wondered about how they’d come to this decision, but didn’t have the courage to probe, cautious about the sensitive nature of the subject (or any subject in which women’s “choices” are involved), aware that I had pursued a different path by working while raising kids and that my questioning might be perceived as judgmental.  But the incident with Ann piqued more than my personal curiosity. As a sociologist (as well as a soccer mom) whose research has dealt extensively with a variety of issues related to women’s labor force participation and careers, I am well-versed in the truly overwhelming body of research on working women, changing gender roles, the challenges of combining work and family, and various forms of workplace discrimination, but I wasn’t familiar with anything specifically about women like Ann, stay-at-home mothers who have left professional careers. 

Following up to find out what research had been done on women leaving careers, I was surprised to discover that there was virtually none. This particular group of women, having exited the labor force, appeared to have “gone missing.” In fact, and this is true of my own past research, most of what we know about women, work, and family is based on the experiences of women who are working (and from the outset, let me make clear that I appreciate that a great deal of unpaid work is performed in the home, but for simplicity’s sake, when I refer to work I use the term as shorthand for paid employment, typically performed outside the home).

Little research has actually explored the lives of women like Ann who leave the workforce. This research vacuum leaves many unanswered questions: Who are they?  Why do they walk away from years of training and accomplishment to take on full-time motherhood — the job that is simultaneously revered and reviled, vaunted and devalued, but never paid and with no prospect of promotion? What happens after they do? What are the implications of their leaving for the workplaces they leave behind, perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently?  What, if any, impact do their decisions have on other women, those who carry on with careers as well as younger women who are just embarking on theirs? Why are they really leaving and what are the larger lessons we can learn from them and their experiences?

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