Opting Back In: What Really Happens When Mothers Go Back to WorkTaking a career break is a conflicted and risky decision for high-achieving professional women. Yet many do so, usually planning, even as they quit, to return to work eventually. But can they? And if so, how? In Opting Back In, Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy revisit women first interviewed a decade earlier in Stone’s book Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home to answer these questions. In frank and intimate accounts, women lay bare the dilemmas they face upon reentry. Most succeed but not by returning to their former high-paying, still family-inhospitable jobs. Instead, women strike out in new directions, finding personally gratifying but lower-paid jobs in the gig economy or predominantly female nonprofit sector. Opting Back In uncovers a paradox of privilege by which the very women best positioned to achieve leadership and close gender gaps use strategies to resume their careers that inadvertently reinforce gender inequality. The authors advocate gender equitable policies that will allow women—and all parents—to combine the intense demands of work and family life in the twenty-first century. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Great Expectations | 25 |
The Siren Call of Privileged Domesticity | 46 |
The Slow Return | 72 |
The Paradox of Privilege and Beyond | 160 |
Appendix Study Methodology | 196 |
Notes | 205 |
References | 213 |
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Opting Back In: What Really Happens When Mothers Go Back to Work Pamela Stone,Meg Lovejoy Limited preview - 2019 |
Opting Back In: What Really Happens When Mothers Go Back to Work Pamela Stone,Meg Lovejoy Limited preview - 2019 |
Common terms and phrases
able ageism Bettina career break career relaunch caregiving Christine Thomas class privilege comeback kids consulting contingent labor continued course changers credentials Denise Hortas Diane dynamics earnings economic educational elite Elizabeth Emily Mitchell employers employment empty nest experience family-first phase female firm flexibility follow-up interview former careers former professions freelance full-time gender egalitarianism gender gap gender inequality going graduated Hewlett highly husbands intensive mothering involved Ivy League Kate Hadley labor force lawyer leadership less lives long hours male male-dominated Marketing executive ment motherhood Nan Driscoll nonprofit occupations opt-out opting back overwork paid paradox of privilege parents part-time Patricia Lambert percent prestige privileged domesticity profes professional women programs reenter reentry reinvention relaunched their careers role schedule social social capital status stay-at-home strategy tion typically volunteer women’s career work-family workers workforce workplace youngest child