Opting Out?: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home

Pamela Stone's examination of the issues and complexities of making the decision to leave a career, or at least to take a multi year career break, is spot on. I was on maternity leave with my first child when my company collapsed, so I knew I wasn't returning to that job. But I did have to decide whether to start looking for another full time job. My husband and I weren't getting any younger and we wanted to have more kids so I ended up working in limited part time jobs for a few years and then took a complete career break when my fourth child was born. It was tough to watch my peers advance in their careers while mine was at a standstill. Ultimately I returned to work, first in a demanding full time job at an investment firm and then as the author of a book on career reentry and founder of a company focusing on career reentry programming. But it was a long journey and I could relate directly to experiences of the women profiled in Stone's book. Her voice is a critical one in the "opt out/opt in" discussion.

Beautifully written,this book tells compelling stories of real lives, while exposing the often hidden factors that force women to make tough choices between caring for their families and continuing in their chosen professions. Lack of flexibility on the job, luck of the draw in finding sympathetic bosses, ridiculous social norms of working as if no employee had a personal life, lack of mentoring, low continuity in corporate relationships and networks, stigma of part-time work, pressure on single-earner spouses to spend more and more time on the job--all these constrain our ability to find the optimal balance of work and life. The women in this book speak to all of us, men, women, stay-at-home moms and working moms, with or without children, seeking to find true productivity and happiness. This book is thought-provoking! Enjoy it!

What I particularly liked about this book: Stone's interviews and discussions with actual women who decided to opt out of working (even though many of them could have made big bucks) as well as her solid research. Readers should be aware that the author, by her own admission (p. 15 of the book), focused on white married women with children and that these women had previously worked as managers or professionals. If you don't fall into that group, this book may not appeal to you. These women, for the most part, also had husbands who could support their decision to stay home.In short, these women often had expensive college degrees and were high achievers. Stone also points out that women who tend to "opt out" are the exception, not the rule, citing studies that indicate that 70 percent of the women who are married mothers of preschoolers still continue to work. Turn this figure around and the reality is that one out of every four women DOES decide to stay home. This book is an exploration of these particular women and it is written in what I found to be a very nonjudgmental and open style. The author was also able to get some company heads to admit their mixed feelings about mothers in the workplace, their fears about them being less committed to their jobs or more likely to quit. Other areas covered in this book include: Most women quit only as a last resort (p. 18) Each woman's story was unique, often complex and with many factors. There was often ambivalence and a shifting of roles within the home Their decision did NOT signal a return to traditionalism (p. 19). Their former workplaces often made it difficult, if not impossible, for them to continue balancing family and work, rejecting their attempts to create innovations while maintaining productivity. If you'd like to know what is featured in each Chapter, here's a quick rundown: Chapter 1 - Looks at various women (the former Ivy League sports star, the CPA, the Consultant, an editor, a stock trader, etc) and their various experiences at work. Chapter 2- 3- Looks at the families, children and husbands. Chapter 4- Focuses on work, problems and challenges and factors that lead to a decision to opt out. Chapters 6-8 - Life at home, coping techniques, finding new identities. Chapter 9- Explores possible ways that women could continue to work (if they chose) and minimizing the obstacles that make staying home a necessity, not a choice.

"Opting Out?" provides a clear-eyed look at the lives of stay-at-home mothers. Sociologist Pamela Stone conducted extensive interviews with 54 women to trace their life-career paths. This research is just what was needed to shine a fresh light on this often-divisive topic. Through interviews and her own analysis, Stone creates a coherent narrative that explores the joys, challenges, and social context of the opt-out phenomenon. Her results are more nuanced than the "did we jump or were we pushed out?" sound bites you'll hear so often, even used to summarize this book. "Opting Out?" covers the private joys and difficulties of this path, the workforce pushes and family pulls, and the larger societal changes that need to happen to accommodate the needs of working parents. By telling the stories of women who have experienced the trade-offs of career off-ramping, "Opting Out?" presents a full picture with empathy and without blaming, shaming or sentimentalizing the mothers who participated in the study. Stone presents a brilliant analysis that deconstructs the idea of "choice" while acknowledging that women want to be agents in their own lives. In other words, she understands the limitations of "choice," since women are choosing within a constrained social framework, but she also understands why women want to stand by the interpretation that they have individually chosen their life paths, even as they are reacting to a larger social system. I had many a-ha moments in reading "Opting Out?" and Stone's findings have made a difference in my own thinking. Finally, here is an illuminating book that is grounded in solid research and avoids the sting of the culture wars.

Brava to Pamela Stone! Women -- and workplaces -- need this book. Instead of focusing reductively on women's "choices" (who has choices when alternatives are limited?), Stone charts the institutional obstacles and cultural pressures that leave even the most advantaged women feeling pushed out. Stone writes as a sociologist, a scholar of women's careers, and a mother. Instead of blaming women, imploring us to "get back to work" (a la Linda Hirschman) or warning us (Leslie Bennetts-style) that we're all making a dastardly mistake, her message is one that, as a Gen Xer staring into the crosshairs of burgeoning career and potential motherhood, is far more palatable to hear. Stone lets her subjects -- mothers in their 30s and 40s who "time out" from professional careers -- describe their trajectories in unstructured interviews, giving voice to a group we have heard much about but have not heard. She lambasts the media for sensationalizing our so-called mass exodus -- which, in truth, is not so massive and reflects neither a sea-change in values among feminism's daughters nor the modernization of the feminine mystique. Opting Out? fills a void -- virtually no real research has been done before on women leaving careers -- and it's the question mark in the title that propels the book. Loaded with facts and real data, the introduction alone is worth the price.