Opting Back In

What Really Happens When Mothers Go Back to Work

Pamela Stone, Meg Lovejoy

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520964792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Taking 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.

ONE

Great Expectations

EXEMPLARY LIVES

The Marketing Executive

Kate Hadley, thirty-nine and the mother of three when we first interviewed her nine years earlier, had been a coxswain. Not just a coxswain, but captain of the women’s crew team and the first woman to be elected president of her Ivy League university’s rowing club, which included the men’s and women’s teams. “The coxswain,” she told me, “is the person who literally sits in the boat and bosses people around and gives commands, calls strategy, motivates them.” Perhaps thinking that she was sounding a little boastful, Kate self-deprecatingly added that she was “the unathletic one.” The coxswain is the brain, not the brawn of the team—the strategist: “You’re smart, you can think on your feet, and you don’t weigh too much because they’re pulling you, you’re dead weight.” As dead weight, Kate explained, coxswains were not regarded as captain material, and she seemed prouder of having been elected captain as a coxswain than club president as a woman. Both were unprecedented achievements.¹

As we talked in the family room of her suburban Chicago home at that first interview, it was easy to envision Kate as a collegiate athlete. Tanned and trim, wearing a T-shirt, cotton skirt, and fashionable but functional sandals, she was articulate and reflective as she talked about her life growing up, a life she recognized was privileged and accomplished. The daughter of an international businessman, Kate described her mother as “a classic example of a corporate wife.” Kate was accepted early decision and graduated from her Ivy League college in the late 1980s. With the benefit of several summer internships, she established herself quickly at a leading research and consulting firm. After about two years there, she was expected to get her MBA, but Kate was not yet ready for that. Instead, she launched a job search in Europe, landing a marketing job with a major brand-name company. Two years into this job, Kate felt the time was right for the MBA, “because I wouldn’t want to be turned down for a job ever because I didn’t have it and someone else did.” Accepted by several leading schools, she decided to attend her father’s alma mater, Wharton, one of the premier business schools in the country.

After earning her MBA, Kate switched firms, taking a job at another major consumer brands company that offered her the possibility of returning home to the US. Clearly identified as a high flyer, Kate moved steadily upward, at one point easily sidestepping a transfer to another part of the country in order to stay at headquarters and closer to Nick, her soon-to-be husband, and quickly becoming the marketing manager of the company’s leading brand—the “mother brand,” as she called it in her marketing lingo. When she was newly married and wanted to move to Latin America in order to pursue a career opportunity for her husband, Kate was able to leverage her expertise and transfer laterally overseas, ultimately getting a promotion to marketing director just before having her first baby.

Kate continued to work after her baby was born but cut back to 80 percent time, reasoning that this “would be a good way to still be in the game and in the fast track and keep up my networks and reputation, but that it would also afford me a slice of normality or a little bit of balance.” While her boss granted this request, she noted that he found it “astonishing.” Given the long distances entailed in traveling in Latin America, Kate estimated that she was on the road two to three weeks a month. Despite the grueling schedule, Kate had a second child eighteen months after the first. Passed over for a promotion in favor of someone junior to her, Kate “suspected it had something to do with me having my second baby and they thought I wanted to go slower and blah, blah, blah.” Shortly thereafter, prompted by her husband’s decision to return to the States for his career, the family moved back. Failing to line up a new job, and with family pressures mounting, including a third pregnancy, Kate quit. Looking back on her decision, she took satisfaction from how long she had been able to juggle career and family, musing, “I probably in some ways lasted longer than maybe some people thought I would in terms of working until my second child was one.”

At our first interview, Kate had been home for three years. During that time, she’d been surprised and flattered to find that she was receiving offers to consult—offers she turned down, “distracted” by everything going on at home with three children and two dogs, plus a husband who’d taken on a demanding new job with constant international travel. As the crew coxswain, Kate had been the only person in the boat looking forward, but doing so now filled her with uncertainty. Back then, as Kate thought about her future, she wasn’t sure she wanted to return to work “so I can become vice president of marketing by the time I’m fifty”—an aspiration in keeping with her elite MBA pedigree. Rather, Kate sought meaningful engagement, “to set a good example for my daughters.” Still, she wanted to return to the corporate world, which she liked (unlike many others) because “there’s a lot of security” and recognition, “where people knew the name of the company.” She struggled, however, with a “lack of confidence because I’ve been out so long [only three years].” And she worried that a corporate job wouldn’t give her the flexibility she needed, noting that she’d been reading about “just how tough it is for corporations to be flexible.” Kate planned to return at some point, emphatically declaring, “I don’t consider myself part of the opt-out revolution.” When and how she’d return were open questions; Kate felt pressures to return soon but “hadn’t done anything on it.” This uncharacteristic indecision was “a sign,” she thought, that she wasn’t ready.

The CPA

The daughter of a police officer and a mother who had “never worked,” Diane Childs was forty-one and the mother of two children when we first talked with her eleven years before. She was slender with short-cropped brown hair and a crisp, no-nonsense demeanor that was reflected in the immaculate uncluttered setting of her living room, where we shared a cup of tea. Diane had grown up in the big northeastern city where she still lived, and had stayed close to home for college, choosing a local university that was affordable and accessible, and a major (accounting) that was practical. She “mulled around in liberal arts for maybe a year or so” before going into the business program, a move prompted by the realization that “I’m going to have to find a job when I get out, pay off school loans, things like that.” Graduating in the early 1980s, a time, she recalled, when “there was a big push for women,” Diane jumped at the opportunities opening up in her field. Recruited right out of college, she went to work for a major accounting firm. Although she recognized that this job gave her invaluable experience, Diane “didn’t love it.” She recalled that the partners “made good salaries, but all looked like they were fifteen years older than they really were.” Taking them as negative role models, and now a CPA, Diane decided not to pursue the traditional accountant’s career path to partner and after three years moved instead to a job at a national real estate investment company. Here she learned the ropes of the real estate and construction industries and found a work environment more in keeping with her style and values. After three years, Diane transitioned seamlessly to a job where she was responsible for pulling together financing for a company that developed affordable housing. She worked long hours and liked it, despite her realization that relative to the for-profit world, the nonprofit side was stretched thin—short-staffed and underresourced, with salaries that were “not pretty.” The fast pace of dealmaking and doing good appealed to her, and she derived great satisfaction and “fun” from what she was doing. Five years into this job, Diane had her first child, followed three years later by another. She switched to a part-time schedule—but it wasn’t the solution she’d hoped for. She was asked to take on more work without additional pay and with no prospects for promotion. After twelve years in the position (seven of them working part-time with children), Diane quit and had been home one year at our initial interview.

Diane also planned to resume working, but since she had already eschewed the corporate world for the nonprofit sector, the former held no appeal. She was clear that she wanted to work on a freelance or self-employed basis, using her accounting skills, and, like many women, she timed her reentry to her children’s milestones. Her youngest had just entered kindergarten. At our first interview, she projected going back to work when he was in middle school, about seven years away. In the meantime, Diane hoped to do something “to remain employable” but hadn’t “really figured it out.”

The Consultant

Blonde and fit, Elizabeth Brand met us at the door of her imposing suburban house for our first meeting. For the next two hours, with a quiet intensity Elizabeth detailed her remarkable career and the reasons why she had ultimately left it. Age forty when we first talked, she had one child with another on the way. Growing up in the South, with an engineer father and older brothers who also pursued scientific and technical careers, Elizabeth followed in their footsteps, not in her stay-at-home mother’s. Liking math and science, she “tended to gravitate where guys did,” one of only three women in the engineering program at the prestigious university from which she graduated. Quickly finding work in her field, she took a job with a multinational energy company, doing everything “from designing parts of pipelines to developing pipe specifications for a new plant that was going be built.” Elizabeth’s talents were soon recognized, and after only a year and a half she was offered “a really terrific opportunity” to work at a factory “that had a lot of issues.” Located in a remote part of Idaho, a region of the country she had never even visited, this job gave her “nuts and bolts experience” at a very young age. Elizabeth was not only young, she was female, and she described the situation facing her as she started her new job: “I used to kid that I was the only professional woman in the whole town of twenty thousand people. Because anyone who ended up doing that left that town or the state.” Despite trepidation from the plant’s workers, who had heard that “there is a woman coming from California, and she’s going to tell us how to run our plant,” Elizabeth was able to win them over, and looked back on the job fondly: “It was a great learning experience. I learned a whole lot from the operators and the maintenance people. . . . So, on a personal level and a professional level, it was a tremendous growth experience.”

Although she loved her job and the athletic, outdoorsy lifestyle of the Rocky Mountains, Elizabeth decided to apply to business school. Recognizing that her engineering background and unusual work experience would distinguish her, Elizabeth recalled (realistically, not boastfully), “Because I had a unique application, it was really easy to get in. I applied to, I think, MIT, Wharton, and Harvard, and got into all three, and decided to go to MIT because I thought it just seemed to be the right fit.” Elizabeth once again found herself in a male-dominated world, one with “a lot of very conservative, particularly economically conservative, individuals.” She took a lot of finance and technology classes and landed a summer internship with a leading management consulting firm, eventually joining them upon getting her MBA. In what she characterized as the “up or out” world of consulting, Elizabeth quickly moved up, from consultant to vice president in only seven years. Throughout her career, she worked on a variety of projects, many of them international in scope, in a range of industries, and made partner at age thirty-four. In the billable-hour world of consulting, fifty-plus-hour weeks and heavy travel were the norm. Two years after making partner, Elizabeth had her first child. Concerned that her extended periods of international travel and long hours would affect her ability to bond with her son, she took maternity leave and never returned. She had been home two years at the time of our first interview and, after undergoing a series of fertility treatments, was pregnant with her second child.

At our first interview, Elizabeth’s plans to work again were distant and vague, but she was sure they wouldn’t entail consulting. She wondered aloud whether, instead of quitting, she could have “found a halfway point . . . and maybe gone into a different job?” For the time being, she envisioned going back to work in “six, eight, ten years,” when her children were “fully in school,” and hoped to do something “more academic, maybe more on the philanthropic side of things.” She knew that great opportunities would not arise “without doing a tremendous amount of legwork,” something for which she had no time.

The Editor

Nan Driscoll, forty-six at our initial meeting and the mother of three, had grown up in suburban New Jersey and, now living in an affluent suburb of New York City, styled herself “a second-generation suburbanite.” She had short curly brown hair and large horn-rimmed glasses that gave her an appropriately bookish look. Having majored in English literature at a small Jesuit college in upstate New York, she was “uncertain of what I wanted to do. I knew I didn’t want to teach, but I knew that I wanted to live in New York City.” Narrowing her options to publishing and social work, she surveyed job ads to conclude she could earn a little more in an entry-level job in publishing—enough to “feasibly support myself and get a studio apartment.” Her first job came easily, though disappointment quickly ensued: her boss “explained my entire job [sorting invoices] to me in eight or nine minutes.”

Nan hung in, and “after about six months, I talked to the head of the business department and told him what I really wanted to do, the editorial side of things,” in case something came up. Something did, and Nan soon found herself a managing editor, working more on the administrative side, which she described as “a fabulous learning experience.” From here, wanting to “really edit,” she became an associate editor, then senior editor before leaving the company after six years for a larger, more prestigious publishing house. In her five years with this firm, she continued to rise through the ranks, finally becoming editor-in-chief of the children’s book division. Company priorities changed, however, moving away from children’s books. “Feeling as though I wasn’t getting anywhere,” Nan jumped ship to a small firm that specialized in book packaging, putting together children and juvenile book series for the imprint of well-known publishers. Nan loved the job, finding unexpected enjoyment in the business side, and was quickly promoted to editor-in-chief—“an opportunity I felt as though I could not pass up”—but a challenge now that she was married and trying to get pregnant.

Even in an industry she described as “filled with women,” she was the first at her company to have a child, “so I worked out my own little maternity situation.” Her boss was supportive of her efforts to craft a baby-friendly flexible schedule, but Nan had reservations, feeling that “it was much harder to be as effective as I had been.” When the company, like...