Kathie Lingle's Work-Life Blog

The Great Opt-In

June 8, 2007 - The Ideas-Books  column in the June 4 issue of BusinessWeek entitled The Working-Mom Quandary reviews four of the most recent books about the purported “Opt Out”  phenomenon among working mothers.  Lisa Belkin’s  cover story on this topic, in The New York Times Magazine one Sunday in 2003, obviously hit such a powerful nerve that its synapses perpetually re-engage in rapid firing at every new suggestion that women might be leaving the workplace in droves.

One book left out of this overview of related literature is The Opt-Out Revolt: Why People Are Leaving Companies to Create Kaleidoscope Careers, by Lisa Mainiero  and Sherry Sullivan.  I suspect it was overlooked because it advances the thesis that it is not only women who are finding the corporate environment to be difficult to navigate if you want a life outside of work; thus the word people in the subtitle. So this book is as useful a read for men as women.

The most useful part of this book in my opinion is the concept of the “kaleidoscope career,” a term apparently first coined by the business guru Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who also happened to write the first book on work and family in 1977. The kaleidoscope metaphor refers to the continually changing views of one’s life and career provided by the overlay of three “mirrors” to the soul: authenticity, balance and challenge. The authors provide a self-quiz  that provides a snapshot in time of your relative weighting among these three major life tasks, which they contend will change over time, as your priorities inevitably shift with regard to what’s most important in the face of new and ever more challenging life events.

However, there is one nagging problem with the core assumption made in all of this literature. There is no scientific evidence for an opt-out revolution, revolt, or even a trend line.  The “stunning movement quietly sweeping across corporate America” (Mainiero & Sullivan), or the “stopping out phenomenon”  proposed in the BusinessWeek  column may well be a figment of collective imagination. That’s not to say that achieving work-life effectiveness  isn’t a tremendously difficult endeavor, and that large numbers of people don’t leave the rat race in any given time period, and that corporate cultures everywhere don’t need major overhauls to attract, motivate and retain the talent they need to be successful.  What I am encouraging you to do is examine the evidence carefully, to separate hype from the actionable tools, research and best practices contained in the well-meaning but possibly misguided opt-out debate.

I say this because yesterday I heard for the third or fourth time yet another expert debunk the theory.  Heather Boushey, Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, spoke about labor trends for families at the Corporate Voices for Working Families annual meeting I described in my previous blog.  She opened her remarks by explaining how much the “opt-out  buzz” annoys her.  She reviewed the economic facts based on labor data over the past generation, which has been characterized by a huge shift in who’s working, given the enormous influx of women into the paid labor force.  She explained that there is no evidence of any noticeable reversal; women are not running for the exits in numbers large enough to be detected as a discernible trend.  Most women take time off with the arrival of children, but not any more so today than before. In fact, she explained that she has looked closely for the impact of children on women’s work patterns and finds that there is no evidence for any.  In the aggregate, “women are not living their lives because of kids.” Furthermore, she voiced my own concern that the continual re-invention of this story that refuses to die gives employers more room to discriminate against women than they already do. So, whatever you choose to believe, I caution all of us not to dismiss our collective responsibility to ensure that workplaces become more equitable and healthier places to spend our valuable time.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of WorldatWork and its affiliate, Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP).