As Susan Faludi detailed in Backlash, the 1980s conservative revolt against the feminist movement quickly permeated popular culture—the movies we watched, the ads we were fed—reinforcing the sorry stereotypes the women’s movement sought so hard to diffuse.
Those stereotypes—and outright misogyny—still persist, and the traditional media often is too eager to perpetuate them. One such theme recently has revolved around the “opt-ing out” trend, in which highly educated women in their thirties are said to be leaving high-profile jobs in law, business and medicine to take care of children and parents.
New evidence from scholar Heather Boushey published in the journal Feminist Economics suggests opting-out is bunk. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR):
Boushey shows that the number of women leaving jobs to take care of children has decreased dramatically over the past two decades. She points to changes in the labor market, not children, as a cause for somewhat lower rates of women in the workplace more recently.
Boushey did not find any evidence of an increase in opting out. In contrast, she finds that especially for women with a high school or college degree and for single mothers, “the estimated marginal effect of having children at home has decreased sharply over the past two decades.”
“The U.S.’s 2001 recession was exceptionally hard on women workers,” writes Boushey. “They lost more jobs than they had in prior recessions, even though they lost fewer jobs than men overall.” Boushey suggests that “the opting-out story” may be simply due to the lower employment rates for workers overall since 2000.
It’s a lot more comfortable for the chattering class to think that warm thoughts of domesticity, rather the nation’s ragged economy, are driving working women out of their jobs. Putting women back in the home helps lawmakers and the media ignore these facts:
* Only the addition of women in the workplace has maintained the nation’s standard of living that 50 years ago was fueled by only one wage earner per family.
* Women continue to be compensated far less than men: In 2006, median weekly earnings for full-time working women dipped to 80.8 percent of men’s earnings, down from a record 81.0 percent the previous year, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
* The wage gap isn’t all economic. As the Ledbetter case before the Supreme Court showed last year, gender discrimination has a lot to do with this gap in pay.
Lilly Ledbetter worked for two decades at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, where she was paid less than men doing the same work as she was. But she didn’t find out how much less until years into her career and so could not file a pay-discrimination lawsuit until 1998. A jury awarded her $3.8 million, but last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Ledbetter and tossed out the pay-discrimination verdict, saying she had waited too long to file suit. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted court testimony pointing to how the supervisor who denied Ledbetter a pay raise was “openly biased against women.” Further, Ginsberg wrote:
And two women who had previously worked as managers at the plant told the jury they had been subject to pervasive discrimination and were paid less than their male counterparts. One was paid less than the men she supervised….Ledbetter herself testified about the discriminatory animus conveyed to her by plant officials. Toward the end of her career, for instance, the plant manager told Ledbetter that the “plant did not need women, that [women] didn’t help it, [and] caused problems.”
Because why? They should be back at home, where they can’t cause any trouble. And just in case women have forgotten how to be domestic, a Texas college is offering a degree in “Homemaking” that teaches “how to be a proper housewife.”
The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is offering degrees in homemaking, a course of study that is only available to women. Studies feature cooking, cleaning, and teach a woman how to “submit herself to her husband.”
At least one presidential candidate agrees. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) has endorsed the Southern Baptist Convention stance that women should “graciously submit” to their husbands.
