The NYT is apparently on a crusade to tell people that mothers are opting out of the workforce. Three weeks ago it ran an oped by Linda Hirshman warning of the dangers of this trend. Today's paper includes a column that talks about the need for employers to accommodate the growing number of women who opt out and then return to the workforce. This article tells us that "there has been a 6 percent falloff in labor force participation among married mothers, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics []BLS]." While I see it as a positive development if the workplace becomes more accommodating of the needs of mothers, or families more generally, the basic story about mothers opting out happens not to be true. The BLS did just publish an analysis of the labor force participation of married mothers of infants. This study found a 6 percentage point drop in labor force participation among this group between the 1997 peak and 2005. However, among married mothers overall, the drop was just two percentage points, approximately the same as the decline in labor force participation among women who are not mothers and men. This topic has been closely examined by my colleague at CEPR, Heather Boushey. The data clearly show that there is nothing here -- there is no trend for mothers, or married mothers, to increasingly drop out of the workforce. Insofar as there has been a decline in labor force participation among mothers it is almost certainly attributable to weakness in the labor market, which has led to a decline in labor force participation for most demographic groups. Since there is no evidence to support this opting out myth, the question is why does it keep appearing in the pages of the New York Times and other prestigious publications?
--Dean Baker
