The Myth of the Opt-Out Revolution

I've been meaning to blog about an important scholarly paper that was recently published in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, which concerns trends in women's labor force participation. The paper is not publicly available online, but you can find a press release about it here.

The main findings of the study, which is by a sociology graduate student at Princeton named Christine Percheski, is that the notion that increasing numbers of women are opting out of the work force is a myth. Using government data from the Census and the American Community Survey, she shows that the labor force participation of professional women has continued to increase. Moreover, these women are working longer hours, and the employment rates of women with children and women in male-dominated professions continue to climb. In addition, the fertility rates of professional women have remained steady, and college-educated women have the highest marriage rates of all educational groups.

Now, there is nothing new about these findings. As I wrote last summer when I was guest blogging for Ezra, all the recent empirical studies done by economists like Cornell's Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, Harvard's Claudia Goldin, and Heather Boushey of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, who all, like Percheski, used large datasets and rigorous methodologies, showed the same thing: no opt-out revolution. No decline in labor force participation among women in general, or mothers in particular, or even among professional class mothers or the mothers of very young children.

Yet, in spite of these strong and consistent findings, the myth of the "opt-out revolution" persists. Perhaps the most interesting part of Percheski's paper is the section that explores why this is so. First, she says, for women, having children does continue to be associated with lower levels of employment, and even though more professional women are working than ever before, many of them still don't work full-time, year-round.

Related to this, since there are more professional working women than ever before, "there are more women available to exit." Writes Percheski:

The average person is thus more likely to personally know a professional woman who has left the labor force. A woman who does not work full-time and long hours may now seem anomalous and be more noticeable than the thousands of professional women who are working full-time in demanding jobs while raising young children. Additionally, although the percentage of women with advanced degrees who are not working is declining across cohorts, the percentage of non-working women who have an advanced degree is growing because the whole population is becoming more educated.