Friday, October 24, 2003
The Opt-Out Revolution
Susan just forwarded a great article by Lisa Belkin from this Sunday's Times Magazine. (I guess the Times on-line runs their magazine stories two days early.) It's about the stalled feminist revolution. Women are finishing their MBA and PhDs, but they aren't ended up with the jobs. Why?
As Joan C. Williams, director of the Program on WorkLife Law at American University, wrote in the Harvard Women's Law Journal last spring, ''Many women never get near'' that glass ceiling, because ''they are stopped long before by the maternal wall.''
Women are rejecting the workplace, writes Belkin. And women who take time off, have a very hard time getting back into it.
She ends on a positive note,
Women started this conversation about life and work -- a conversation that is slowly coming to include men. Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too -- the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men.
Susan just forwarded a great article by Lisa Belkin from this Sunday's Times Magazine. (I guess the Times on-line runs their magazine stories two days early.) It's about the stalled feminist revolution. Women are finishing their MBA and PhDs, but they aren't ended up with the jobs. Why?
As Joan C. Williams, director of the Program on WorkLife Law at American University, wrote in the Harvard Women's Law Journal last spring, ''Many women never get near'' that glass ceiling, because ''they are stopped long before by the maternal wall.''
Women are rejecting the workplace, writes Belkin. And women who take time off, have a very hard time getting back into it.
She ends on a positive note,
Women started this conversation about life and work -- a conversation that is slowly coming to include men. Sanity, balance and a new definition of success, it seems, just might be contagious. And instead of women being forced to act like men, men are being freed to act like women. Because women are willing to leave, men are more willing to leave, too -- the number of married men who are full-time caregivers to their children has increased 18 percent. Because women are willing to leave, 46 percent of the employees taking parental leave at Ernst & Young last year were men.
