I'm not usually one for Times-bashing, but since Slate's Jack Shafer deftly kicked off a discussion of Louise Story's mysteriously placed page-1 New York Times piece in which she discovered -- shock! -- that women often know in advance that they intend to reduce work hours or stop working temporarily while their babies are still in need of babying, and Kevin Drum moved the ball down the field, let me now carry it into the end zone. Drum, citing Story, writes:
Let's run the tape. Story bases her piece on an email she sent to 138 freshman and senior females at Yale (more details on that here). Here's what she found:
The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely.
Shafer correctly notes that the results of a casual e-mail survey are essentially meaningless, but leave that aside for the moment. Here's what Story tells us14 paragraphs later:
According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994 ... . among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40's, only 56 percent of the women still worked.
... . A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30's and 40's.
Why yes, 56% and 62% are indeed "strikingly similar" to 60%. In other words, nothing whatsoever has changed in the past 25 years.
Flip those numbers around and include the part-timers as working women, rather than dropouts (as all economists do), and all Story has discovered, it turns out, is that women who attended one Ivy League college have the exact same labor-force participation rates as all women in America, and that young women have an accurate sense of typical female career trajectories. The labor-force participation rate for American women over age 16 was 59 percent in 2005, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- and that's full-time and part-time workers combined. The labor-force participation rate for Yale alumni that Story cites is 56 percent. Given that Ivy League women, like all high-achieving women, have children later than average, and that women with small children routinely cycle out of the paid labor force for a couple of years, it's likely that the age sample Story points to contains an unusually high percentage of temporarily nonworking moms. Students of women's labor-force participation even have a name for this phenomenon: “the M curve,” in which women's labor-force participation dips during the childbearing years, then makes a partial recovery.
In the Yale survey, what was the labor-force participation rate for women over age 45? Or for women under, say, 31? How did the Yalies' labor-force participation rate vary over time, and with childbearing? And how do such figures compare with those of women educated at less elite schools, or who didn't go to college at all? Story's breathless piece provides no insight.
Story finds 60 percent of her sample expecting to live lives on the M curve. “About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half want to stop work for at least a few years,” she writes. That's not evidence that Generation Y women “have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.” That's evidence they plan to continue doing what women are already doing.
All other data I've seen -- and I wrote about this topic in detail in 2002, when a similarly bogus piece of work hit bookstores -- suggests that well-educated women are, in fact, more likely to work and more likely to return to work after having children than are their less-educated peers. This may seem counterintuitive; remarks on blog comment threads suggest a widespread belief that the ability to leave the labor force is a perk of wealth unavailable to lower-income women, who must uniformly work to survive, and that this whole discussion is about the privileges of the coddled elite.
The problem is that, as with so many "logical" assumptions about women, this intuition is entirely false. The labor-force participation rate for college-educated women, according to the Department of Labor, is 72 percent; for those with less than a high-school education, it's only 33 percent. That's a pretty big gap, and it reflects the major incentive that an interesting, well-paying job provides to women workers to stay in the labor force. Better-educated women have far lower unemployment rates than less-educated women, as well, and the wives of high-income men are more, not less, likely to work long hours than the wives of lower earners, according to the EmploymentPolicy Foundation.
Story makes the common error of comparing well-educated and high-achieving women to their male peers, bemoaning that they “still greatly lag [behind] their male counterparts,” rather than comparing her Ivy League cohorts to women in other educational or social classes, or to women historically. Yet no woman, despite the many options available to her in American life, has the option of having been born a man. She can only decide to be more or less successful as a woman, to pursue a rigorous education or not, and to seek out the best life possible for her as a woman during this still rather unsettled moment in the history of gender roles. That visions of the good life vary is not news.
Similarly, Story cites data showing that Harvard Business School graduates had a 69-percent labor-force participation rate. But she fails to mention that this is higher than the national rate for women, despite the fact that her Harvard data set also seems skewed to women in the dip years of the M curve. And I wouldn't discount contract or part-time work as meaningful and well-paying for the Harvard Business School grads, either. A lot of well-to-do people arrange their lives so that they get paid on a contract rather than a salaried basis -- they're called “consultants” -- so they can take off weeks at a time to spend tooling about the south of France with their families or engaging in other upper-income activities.
Nor is the fact that many women work part time unique to America, which, perhaps because of its less generous social-welfare policies, has a higher female labor-force participation rate than most European nations. A 2002 U.K. study found that 48 percent of women in that nation work part time, and that two-thirds had worked part time at some point in their lives. But few women worked part time on a permanent basis; part-time work is a career stage, not an end goal. In the United States, part-time work for women is less common -- only 26 percent of female workers work part time -- but generally plays a maintenance role in the female career. It is the alternative to leaving the labor force while children are small, not a way of opting out.
If, as Story's imperfect data sets suggest, there's a small bias toward part-time work for some Ivy League-educated women, one could interpret this in any number of ways. Story pursues the “My god, they're wasting their educations” angle. But it's entirely possible that well-educated, professional women who work part time have successfully leveraged their educations into lives that make good use of their training and income-generating potential at the same time as they contain generous time with their families. A doctor or lawyer who works 30 to 40 hours a week (which is considered part time in those professions) can still earn a considerable sum of money, especially in her mid-30s to mid-40s. Maybe she'll take in $80,000 a year, instead of $175,000. But few other part-time positions would pay her as much while allowing her time with her kids. Indeed, well-educated, part-time women workers could very well be choosing to work part time because their chosen professions are so well-paying, not because they are increasingly reliant on their husbands to support them. But that's just a theory -- not a story.
Shafer is absolutely right: Whoever edited Story's story needs to spend a month in the journalistic stockades. It's a symptom of the persistent sexism in American life and the American media that, when the topic of women comes up, editorial and social-science standards so frequently go out the window as long as there's a stereotype to be confirmed. In this case, the stereotype is that women don't take their careers as seriously as do men. This is an idea that harms all women, especially mothers, and actively contributes to the very well-documented discrimination against them.In fact, I think I read about it in the Times.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.
