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« Back to Opting Out - Mothers and the Workforce main page    Transcript for: Opting Out - Mothers and the WorkforceTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERGTTBW 1206 PBS Feed 2/19/2004 'Working Mothers in a New Time' Funding for Think Tank is provided by: At Pfizer we’re spending nearly five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. (opening animation) Ben Wattenberg: Martha Bullen, Joan Williams, welcome to Think Tank. We’re pleased to have you. Are women leaving jobs for child-rearing? Joan Williams: Many women do leave jobs for child rearing, many more cut back on work for child rearing. Ben Wattenberg: Okay, now, is this... Martha, do you agree with that proposition that that’s going on? Martha Bullen: Very much so, I co-author a book called Staying Home which is about professional women who are choosing to leave the workforce for awhile. Ben Wattenberg: Now is this primarily an elite phenomenon? Joan Williams: There are distinctive patterns, but in fact women with high school educations, mothers with high school educations are least likely to be in the labor force. Ben Wattenberg: Right, but we have some data that shows I guess both for mothers of infants and mothers of young children I guess up to 18 or something like that, that it goes up and up and up, and in just the last year or so, it’s crested and beginning to come down. Joan Williams: It’s down a little bit, 59 percent to 55 percent. Ben Wattenberg: So, is part of this women just using it as a convenient excuse, saying I want to be with my children, you only live once, they’re growing up, I mean, is there something of that in there? Joan Williams: It’s partly the pull of motherhood, but a lot of it is the way we organize work. If you have only one choice to be away 14 hours a day, or to drop out, then many women will drop out. Martha Bullen: Opting in is another way of looking at it. That a lot of these women really are, as you say, pulled to motherhood. It is something they value, particularly in those early crucial years of a child’s early development. They truly do want to be there. And the problem with our current workplace is how inflexible it is. If you have the option, say, to fade out for awhile, to come back in at part-time, to then increase your hours as your children grow it’d be fabulous, but in many companies it’s all or nothing. You either work all the time or you leave. And that’s the trouble. Ben Wattenberg: Well, but in many companies... That’s not true. In many companies they really particularly when the economy is hot and professional labor or skilled labor is hard to get they’ve bent over backwards and there’ll be press releases about they have nursery schools, you know, at the work site and split shifts and all that. Joan Williams: Only two percent of employers have on-site daycare centers. And you’re right, they’re great at press releases and many large companies and most law firms have these part-time or family friendly policies, but they send informal messages. That is, you use them, your career is over. So usage rate’s not surprising, they are very, very low. Ben Wattenberg: Did the women’s movement fail to recognize the realities of the workplace for women with children? Was there sort of a belief that just a good daycare center would solve it all? I mean was there a little naivete in that idea? Joan Williams: This was the ’70s. We were na•ve about everything. Martha Bullen: Idealistic about everything. I think so. They didn’t really know - I mean they were saying - Betty Freidan was saying that being at home is a prison, that you should go out, be in the workplace, be like a man, achieve, climb the ladder and really children were overlooked quite a bit. The idea was just to get out of the shackles of domestic life and go out and achieve, which is all very well but children still need to be cared for by somebody. Ben Wattenberg: Are we all agreed that from a child’s point of view, a child with a mother at home--that’s the best deal for the child? Joan Williams: I actually don’t think usually that’s the best deal for the child. Ben Wattenberg: You don’t think so. Joan Williams: No. I think the best deal for the child is to have two involved parents who are involved with the child and also have satisfying jobs outside the house. And I think that’s best for a couple of reasons. I think it’s best for the child to be very involved with the father as well as the mother and when the mother is at home full-time the levels of household contribution from the father typically fall off sharply. Martha Bullen: It’s not the only answer. I think having a committed, loving caregiver or two is the best thing. I think parents often more involved and loving with the child than someone you hire would be. It could be the father quite easily. The problem is mothers are still making less money so if the father makes that choice how are they going to cope on a lesser salary? Ben Wattenberg: In today’s life where you’ve got to take your kid to soccer practice and ballet and piano lessons and all that and everything’s in a different place and your two kids are in different schools because they’re at middle school, I mean it - it - it’s a huge... Joan Williams: We have a system of delivering child services as you point out through moms and cars. That’s not the best way to deliver child services. Ben Wattenberg: What’s the best way? Joan Williams: The best way is to have child services delivered in a way that doesn’t require one adult spending seven hours in the car. Ben Wattenberg: Where would that child - how would he get to soccer practice and ballet and all these things that we do with children these days? Joan Williams: Well, in a lot of cases those things are offered through after-school programs. If you think for younger children for example in France they have a neighborhood system of childcare centers and you get well-baby visits through the childcare center and all kinds of services delivered in that way. Then you don’t have to have one adult in a car. Martha Bullen: Back to inflexibility, the workplace and the schools, for working parents - full-time working parents - it’s really tough. They’re diametrically opposed. The workplace wants you on the job all the time, they even begrudge you taking a sick day if your child is really ill or taking an hour to go see your child in a school play. A lot of young women today really feel that they can achieve, they can go to top colleges, they can work, no problem. Then they have a baby and suddenly it’s a lot harder then they thought. And usually, it’s very difficult, they can continue working full time or more than full time and then child care becomes an issue, missing more time becomes an issue, or they can opt-out completely, which is the one I have written about. Or there is a middle ground that I’d love to see more of, which is part-time work in their profession with benefits. Wouldn’t that be fabulous? It’s so hard to find. Joan Williams: And with proportional advancement, so if you work part time, it’s not as if you never get promoted again, which is all too often the case now. Ben Wattenberg: Has the change of modern technology, stuff like telecommuting, everybody having a computer and the fast modems and all that kind of stuff, has that made it easier for women to do two things at once? Is that a salutary trend? Martha Bullen: Yes in many ways, I think that women can work from home much more--so could men--than they used to, however a lot of old fashioned companies won’t let them. They, they say this job has to be done on premises whether or not it really needs to be. I think technology could be taken advantage of a lot more to free parents up to work from home. Joan Williams: Technology is both very good and very bad. I mean it has a lot of potential as you point out, to allow mothers to work all over and allow father’s too. But it also has this potential to speed up everything so you that you’re always available on cell phone, you’re always available on email, and so it has a very negative potential. Ben Wattenberg: You mean that your employer or somebody can get you anywhere because you’ve made the deal with them that I’m not coming in but he can call you at 9:00 at night or 11:00 at night or 7 in the morning or whatever... Joan Williams: That’s right. There are also studies that show that men who telecommute tend to work actually more hours than before they telecommuted. They tend to be executives who use the commuting time to work a longer day. Whereas women who telecommute tend to be mom’s working at home and they tend to do so without benefits. Martha Bullen: And here’s the thing, many of those jobs were on sight originally um, and as soon take ho - and you go home with your work women are supposed to be grateful for that opportunity but then they’re supposed to give up their benefits for the privilege. Joan Williams: Mothers may choose to be home with their kids, they don’t choose to give up their benefits. That’s the core point I’m trying to make. Martha Bullen: That’s not their choice, that’s thrust on them because of their desire to stay home with their kids. Ben Wattenberg: Let me ask you a question. I read in some of the back-up material that my splendid staff gave me, that young women, in, I guess, in college today don’t quite feel the same way about working. You must work to succeed but they’re talking about, what the phrase was, a work/life balance. Is that what you’re both for? Martha Bullen: Absolutely, and now we see it more and more. They used to talk about having it all, now balance is the word. Ben Wattenberg: Yes, that was the phrase, having it all. Martha Bullen: Well balance is trumped that, I think. More and more people, men and women are really seeking that in their lives. Joan Williams: This is really a generational shift. Martha Bullen: These women are beginning to redefine success, to mean satisfaction, quality of life balance. Not necessarily to mean, how high can you climb on the corporate ladder, how much money can you make. Joan Williams: And one thing that’s important is that there are some Americans who work extremely long hours and there are some Americans who work shorter hours than they would like. Poor Americans work shorter than they would like and generally many mothers work shorter hours they would like. And the reason it they don’t have quality jobs, what we would consider usually to be part time, 30 to 35 hours a week and that’s what many mothers want. The good jobs just don’t exist often at that level. Martha Bullen: The choices for part time, there aren’t very many available. Again the company press releases will say there are a lot of choices, there aren’t really. Ben Wattenberg: Well, everybody....everybody, man or woman... I mean, the politicians will tell you that everybody should have a quality job but everybody can’t have a quality job because there are a lot of jobs that aren’t quality jobs that have to be done, be they done by men or women. so this demand we all deserve a quality job is a grand, you know, it sounds great, but I mean who is going to do the dirty work? Joan Williams: Well the real issue in the United ... Ben Wattenberg: Or the medium dirty work? Joan Williams: Well, the real issue in the United States is, are the quality jobs going to be 50 to 60 hours a week? And that’s true for blue collar often as well as white collar. If you design the quality jobs to be fifty, sixty hours a week, I’ll tell you one thing, mothers will not be in them, and women and children will be disproportionately poor. And that’s what we have in the United States. We can design quality jobs between 30 and 40 hours a week and then men as well as women would take them. Children would see more of their fathers; women would be uh, less economically vulnerable and children would be, too. Ben Wattenberg: But let’s just take a model for a moment: If somebody is working 55 hours a week and then you cut it back - you said people should work between 30 and 40 hours a week and then you cut it back to 35 hours, that person is not going to produce as much and it may be a good choice by the way, but the society will not be as prosperous as it was before. Martha Bullen: I think we’re thinking we could share those jobs rather than one person working sixty hours, we could have two people working 30 hours. Ben Wattenberg: I’ve come across some polls and they go way back and they’re still correct, that both men and women believe that men have a better deal in life. Do you think that’s so? Forget the actual numbers. Martha Bullen: Yes and no. Many men envy the fact that women do have this opt-out possibility. That there is more societal acceptance for women who say, I want be home for a few years. When a man tried to do that he’s often given a lot of grief, and asking why are you unemployed? When a woman does it, oh okay, you want to be home with your children? I think it’s harder for men in that respect if they want to take a sabbatical or break, there really is a lot of pressure against doing that. Joan Williams: I think both men and women would love to have a fulfilling family life and time for family life and time for work and women tend not to have time for work and men tend not to have time for family life. I think both of them would like more of a balance between work and family life. Ben Wattenberg: You know, I am very proud of the work I’ve done over the years. I’ve written a lot of books. I do this television stuff. I’m not known for putting my light under a bushel. On the other hand, that’s so far in second place behind having children. I have four children from two marriages. I’m now divorced. But, I mean, having children is what life, I mean again and I don’t want to criticize people who don’t want to have two children, or any children, or one child, whatever, I’m just saying that by my standard of values, having children, or adopting children for that matter, is the most important thing you do in life. Do you buy that? Joan Williams: I couldn’t agree more. On the other hand, I think that it’s better for children if they don’t have mothers who are regretful because they felt they made tremendous sacrifices, and if they don’t have fathers who they almost never see, and that’s the system very often that we have. Martha Bullen: Though I would like to say that when we surveyed 300 women for our book Staying Home, we found that most of them really choose to be there. Their goal was to be home with their children, they did consider it an extremely important thing to do in that at that stage of their life. It didn’t mean that they would be home forever, but that was something they felt, was a contribution they could make and so it doesn’t mean having made that choice means their regretful. That’s the implication I got from you. Joan Williams: Well, not all of them are regretful. It’s interesting, even the ones who aren’t regretful often assume their going to be able to pick up their careers where they left them off and unfortunately that assumption will often not prove true. Martha Bullen: I think it is unrealistic to think that you can take five, ten years off and go back where you were. But you can go back into work again. Uh you can’t recapture your child’s childhood. It may not be the same work, and one of the things we find when we surveyed these women is that having children really changes you, it’s very life transforming, and the majority did not want to go back to what they’d been doing before, not only the long hours, but they changed. They had new priorities; they were looking for new types of work. Ben Wattenberg: But when the kids grow older, they might well want to go back to work of one sort or another. Martha Bullen: Really most of them wanted to do it sooner than that, but very flexibly, part time. I’d say the problem is that there’s very little societal support for these women who are working. Ben Wattenberg: Well, what’s missing? Martha Bullen: Well, what’s missing really besides good part-time work with benefits that we discussed is in terms of childcare, it’s considered up to the woman to figure it out. There isn’t much help in terms of our government. You know, in many countries there are a lot more options in terms of leave and a universal early education. Ben Wattenberg: You would rather have the government make that choice than yourself? Martha Bullen: No I don’t say that, but I think that our support network is very thin here. And in fact when I was researching Staying Home I came across a quote I liked. A woman named Debra Fallows, in her book A Mother’s Work, said that in America having children is equivalent to a hobby; it’s considered as a fun little pastime that you may choose to do but it’s not something that anyone else needs to help you with. Well, in fact having children is contributing enormously to our society. We’re raising the next generation and I feel that parents today are really left dangling there. Ben Wattenberg: Does the legacy of the women’s movement make women feel obligated to succeed in the workforce, whatever the cost may be? Joan Williams: People have always said that about feminism but a lot of what feminism stood for was valuing women’s work, providing women and men conditions where they both could work and participate in family life. I think that’s a caricature of feminism. Martha Bullen: That message was put out there I think. You’re saying that’s not the only message? Joan Williams: I think some feminists said staying at home is dross, it’s unimportant work; go out there you can do... Ben Wattenberg: S - S-work, S-work as they called it. Joan Williams S-work. But some feminists said quite the opposite. I mean the idea that you should value women’s work and mother’s work that came straight from feminism. Ben Wattenberg: Betty Freidan’s original book... Martha Bullen: Feminine Mystique. Ben Wattenberg: The Feminine Mystique said that women who stayed at home with children were sort of trapped and ended up talking to babies and little children all day. It was a bad situation. Joan Williams: Yes. But then she wrote a second book. Martha Bullen: I was going to say that. Joan Williams: Then she wrote a second book called if I remember The Second Stage, saying staying home with children is important. The world should change so that men as well as women can participate. Martha Bullen: I think in the early years of the movement there were more single women involved, talking about women need to make great strides in the workplace, and fewer mothers. And what Mothers & More is feeling now, in fact, is that we’re on the cusp of a mother’s movement as the next stage of feminism. That the women’s movement, I think, has been extremely successful. We’re not there yet, but we’re a lot further along than we were. But a mother’s movement - mothers still disproportionately make far less money; they’re penalized when they take time out from work. But that’s what we need next. Ben Wattenberg: You say mothers make less money, I mean, they’re working very hard at, what we’ve all agreed, is very fulfilling work, raising children. Martha Bullen: If you average out you know, their years of working very hard and making a lot of money and then opting out for several years, they’re proportionately making less than they would have been. It also very much affects their social security. They will be penalized later on for having spent that time at home raising the next generation which is another inequity. Ben Wattenberg: I thought social security is your top 40 quarters or top ten years of work. Isn’t it something like that where you don’t... Martha Bullen: You’re right. But when mothers go back they tend to go back part-time. They’re not working as long. Joan Williams: And to low-paying jobs. Martha Bullen: They’re not working as long; they’re not making as much money and they suffer for that later on financially. Joan Williams: For every year you’re out of the workforce you pay a very steep price financially. Ben Wattenberg: Right. Well no, I understand. But I mean you can’t have it all. I mean but you’ve had the fulfillment of what some people would argue, and I would be if people wouldn’t yell at me, is doing the most important thing in the world, which is raising children. Martha Bullen: Yes, but - Ben Wattenberg: And it really is. What could be more important? It’s more important than doing a PBS television show. Martha Bullen: They send a lot of Hallmark cards saying 'You’re doing a wonderful job' but are we actually getting the money the benefits, the respect that we need? Ben Wattenberg: One of the problems with men is they don’t tell women that enough. Joan Williams: If raising children is so important you shouldn’t impoverish the people who are doing it which is what our current system does. Mothers and children are the poorest people in this society and that’s because they’re pushed out of work. Ben Wattenberg: Mothers and children without husbands are the poorest... Joan Williams: No just as a group. Mothers and children as a group. They’re the poorest people. Ben Wattenberg: Wait a minute. But if you count the husband’s income, I mean children don’t make any money. And if the women is staying at home to have this fulfillment of raising a child I mean, you have to count family income. Joan Williams: It may be an incorrect figure, but that’s the figure. Martha Bullen: Well and the fact is though when it comes to divorce, I think you’ve done some work on this, women’s unpaid labor of raising children is not valued whatsoever. They say she has no share of the money her husband has been making. Joan Williams: Nearly 40 percent of divorced women end up in poverty and typically they take their children with them. Again, you know, if you provide for children’s care by pushing your caregivers out of good jobs, of course they’re gonna be poor and their children will be too. Ben Wattenberg: So you are both talking about not just feminism but a structural shift in the nature of capitalism. Joan WILLIAMS: What I’m asking of capitalism is to stop training up half its workforce at great expense, and then designing jobs so that those people no longer are employed. Martha BULLEN: I think what we’re asking is that the rules change. There are people who want to contribute, they do have a lot of education and experience but they don’t want to work these supercharged full time hours, and uh, to make more opportunities available for these workers, would allow the companies and the culture to benefit from their knowledge, but it wouldn’t be burning them out, and it would mean that they still have time for their families and themselves and this is for men and women and, I think, if we can make some of these changes to make work more reasonable and to have time left over afterwards, this would be an enormous benefit to everyone Ben Wattenberg: The recent incarnation of feminism and the women’s movement, on balance, and again, let me go to you first Martha and then you Joan, have we made headway? Martha Bullen: Definitely, there’s been a great deal of improvement for women in general, but mother’s are lagging behind in terms of many indicators, in terms of financial security, in terms of opportunity. Mothers are still behind the curve. Women without children are doing quite well, but we need to work harder to make sure that mothers are as well. Joan Williams: I think we’ve made a lot of headway, and I think that in many ways the United States is the best country in the world for a woman who wants to live the life that’s traditional of a man. I think the United States is way far behind many other industrialized countries for women who want to live the life traditional to women. In other words, the life of a mother. Ben Wattenberg: Thank you very much Joan Williams and Martha Bullen. And thank you. Please remember to send us emails with your comments. We think it helps us make our show better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. (credits) We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036. Or e-mail us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS on line at www.pbs.org, and please, let us know where you watch Think Tank. Funding for this program is provided by: At Pfizer we’re spending nearly five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. This is PBS. 12 Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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