What do women really want?

WITH journalists as well as social scientists continually on the lookout for new trends, the public is regularly treated to the discovery of social "revolutions." One of the latest concerns women and work. In October 2003, Lisa Belkin detected an "opt-out revolution" in her New York Times Magazine article about accomplished women leaving high-powered jobs to stay home with their kids. Six months later, reports on the revolution were still going strong. For example, the March 22, 2004 cover of Time showed a young child clinging to his mother's leg alongside the headline, "The Case for Staying Home: Why More Young Moms Are Opting Out of the Rat Race." But the evidence on this score is thin. Both the New York Times and Time stories are based mainly on evocative anecdotes. Princeton college graduates with law degrees from Harvard staying home to change diapers may be absorbing as a human-interest story. But as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.

The limited empirical evidence offered in support of the opt-out revolution draws upon facts such as these: 22 percent of mothers with graduate degrees are at home with their children, one in three women with an MBA does not work full time, and 26 percent of women approaching the most senior levels of management do not want to be promoted. However, with information of this sort one needs a ouija board to detect a social trend, let alone a revolution. The fact that 57 percent of mothers from the Stanford University class of 1981 stayed home with their young children for at least a year gives no indication of whether the percentage of Stanford graduates remaining at home with their children has increased, decreased, or remained the same over time.

But we know that some things have changed over time. The main difference between women in the 1970s and today is that a substantially higher percentage are currently receiving degrees in law or medicine, or obtaining graduate education in general. Between 1970 and 1997 the proportion of degrees awarded to women soared by almost 500 percent in medicine, 800 percent in law, and 1000 percent in business. Even if one-third of all the women currently receiving these degrees opt out of professional life, the remaining two-thirds amount to a significant increase in women's employment in these areas over the last three decades.

At the moment, women opting out of high-powered careers to stay home with their children are a minor element in a profound life-style trend that has extended over the last several decades--a development deftly portrayed, some might say celebrated, in the media. After a six-year run, the popular HBO series "Sex and the City" ended in 2004 with what was widely reported as a happy ending. Each of the four heroines, in their late thirties and early forties, found partners and commitment, while also pursuing gratifying careers. The series finale was a paean to love and individual fulfillment. But as for family life, these four vibrant, successful women approaching the terminus of their childbearing years ended up with only two marriages and one child between them. As a mirror of society, the media shift from kids bouncing off the walls in the "Brady Bunch" to the .25 fertility rate in "Sex and the City" several decades later clearly reflects the cultural and demographic trends over this period.

Today, a little over one in five women in their early forties are childless. That is close to double the proportion of childless women in 1976. Compared to a relatively few Ivy-League law graduates who have traded the bar for rocking the cradle, the abdication of motherhood poses an alternative and somewhat more compelling answer to the question: Who is opting out of what? Women are increasingly having fewer children and a growing proportion are choosing not to have any children at all. And those who have children are delegating their care to others. If there has been an "opt-out revolution," the dramatic increase in childlessness--from one in ten to almost one in five women--and the rise in out-of-home care for young kids would probably qualify more than the shift of a relatively small group of professional-class women from high-powered careers to childrearing activities.

The choices women make

Talk of social revolutions conveys a sense of fundamental change in people's values--a new awakening that is compelling women to substitute one type of life for another. The "opt-out revolution" implies that whatever it is women really want, they all pretty much want the same thing when it comes to career and family. It may have looked that way in earlier times. Although the question of what women want has plagued men for ages, it became a serious issue for women only in modern times in the advanced industrialized countries. Before the contraceptive revolution of the mid 1960s, biology may not have been destiny, but it certainly contributed to the childbearing fate of women who engaged in sexual activity. Most women needed men for their economic survival before the equal-opportunity movement in the 1960s, which opened access to most all careers. Moreover, the expansion of white-collar jobs and jobs for secondary earners since the 1960s has presented women with a viable range of employment alternatives to traditional domestic life. Taken together, these advances in contraceptive technology and civil rights along with labor market changes have transformed women's opportunities to control and shape their personal lives. As Catherine Hakim, a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics, has pointed out, this historic shift allows modern women to exercise work and family choices that were heretofore unknown to all but a privileged few.

And what are these preferences? Taking family size as a powerful indicator of life-style choice, we can distinguish at least four general categories that form a continuum of work-family preferences among women in the United States. At one end of the continuum are women with three or more children. Most of these women derive most of their sense of personal identify and achievement from the traditional childrearing responsibilities and from practicing the domestic arts. While all mothers tend to love their children, these women also enjoy being around kids on a daily basis. In 1976, about 59 percent of women over 40 years of age had three or more children. But as women gained control over procreation and employment opportunities opened, fewer of them took this traditional route. Today, only 29 percent of the women over 40 years of age have three or more children.

At the other end of the continuum are women who are childless--often by choice. Here personal success tends to be measured by achievements in business, political, intellectual, and artistic life rather than in the traditional realms of motherhood and childrearing. This is a highly individualistic, work-centered group engaged in what might be called the "postmodern" life style. As already noted, since 1976 the proportion of childless women over the age of 40 has almost doubled, representing 18 percent of all the women in that age cohort today.

In the middle of the life-style continuum, about 52 percent of women currently over 40 have either one or two children. These women are interested in paid work, but not so vigorously committed to a career that they would forego motherhood. Although a bare majority, this group is often seen as representative of all women--and of the women "who want it all." In balancing the demands of employment and family, women with one child normally tip the scales in favor of their careers, while the group with two children leans more toward domestic life. Thus the women clustered around the center of the continuum can be divided into two basic categories--"neo-traditional" and "modern"--that vary in degrees from the traditional and the postmodern life styles.

The neo-traditional group contains families with two children whose working mothers are physically and emotionally invested more in their home life than their jobs, which are often part-time. Since 1976 the proportion of women over age 40 with two children has increased by 75 percent and currently amounts to about 35 percent of the women in that cohort. The modern family usually involves a working mother with one child; these women are more career-oriented and devote greater time and energy to their paid employment than neo-traditional women. The proportion of women over 40 with one child has climbed by almost 90 percent since 1976, and currently amounts to 17 percent of the women in that cohort.

As general types, the traditional, neo-traditional, modern, and postmodern categories help draw attention to both the diversity of work and family choices and to how the size of these groups has shifted over the last three decades. Needless to say, in each group there are women who do not fit the ideal-type--childless women who do not work and women employed full-time with three or more children at home. Also, there are women in each group who would have preferred to have more or fewer children than they ended up with. And certainly some women who would prefer not to work and to have additional children are compelled out of economic necessity to participate in the labor force and have fewer children. However, for most people in the advanced industrial countries what is often considered economic "necessity" amounts to a preferred level of material comfort--home ownership, automobiles, vacations, cell phones, DVDs, and the like. The trade-off between higher levels of material consumption and a more traditional domestic life is largely a matter of individual choice. Health has also not played much of a role in these changing family patterns. There is no strong indication that the physical status of the U.S. population has deteriorated over the last three decades in any way that would systematically account for the increasing proportion of women with only one or two children.

Many feminists like to portray women as a monolithic group whose shared interests are dominated by the common struggle to surmount biological determinism, patriarchal socialization, financial dependence on men, and work-place discrimination. And they would like public policies to reflect this supposed reality. However, in the course of exercising preferences about how to balance the demands of work and family, the heterogeneity of women's choices has become increasingly evident. This substantial variance has great importance for social policy. For it compels us to ask which groups of women--traditional, neo-traditional, modern, and postmodern--are really best served by today's so-called family-friendly policies.

Family policy in the United States

The conventional package of "family-friendly" public policies involves benefits designed to reduce the tensions between work and family life, such as parental leave, family services, and day care. For the most part these policies address the needs of women in the neo-traditional and modern categories--those trying to balance work and family obligations. The costs of publicly subsidized day care are born by all taxpayers, but the programs offer no benefits to childless women who prefer the postmodern life style and are of little use to traditional stay-at-home mothers. Indeed, with few exceptions, childless women in full-time careers and those who remain at home to care for children are not the subjects of family-related policy deliberations.

Among the advanced industrial democracies the United States is considered a laggard in dispensing parental leave, day care, and other public subsidies to reduce the friction between raising a family and holding a job. The right to take 12 weeks of job-protected family leave was initiated in 1993. But the scope of coverage is limited to companies with 50 employees or more--and the leave is unpaid. Needless to say, unpaid leave is not a serious option for many low-income families. However, low-income families have benefited from the considerable rise in public spending for child care during the 1990s. Testifying before Congress in 2002, American Enterprise Institute scholar Douglas Besharov estimated that between 1994 and 1999 federal and state expenditures on child care programs climbed by almost 60 percent, from $8.9 billion to $14.1 billion, most of which served low-income families. About $2 billion of additional support was delivered to mainly middle- and upper-income families through the child-care tax credit. Although $16 billion in publicly subsidized care is no trivial sum, it amounts to less than $900 for each child under five years of age.

The United States has moved slowly toward expanding conventional family-friendly arrangements in part because of ideological ambivalence in this area. Public sympathy for welfare programs that pay unmarried women to stay home and care for their children evaporated as the labor-force participation of married women with children younger than six years of age multiplied threefold, from under 20 percent in 1960 to over 60 percent in 2000. The increased public spending on day care is largely related to making it possible for welfare mothers to enter the labor force. Conservatives have long argued for strengthening work requirements in welfare programs. At the same time, many conservatives also support the idea of "putting less emphasis on policies that free up parents to be better workers, and more emphasis on policies that free up workers to be better parents"--a view expressed in the Report to the Nation from the Commission on Children at Risk. Liberals have traditionally resisted demands that welfare recipients should work for their benefits. But this position softens when feminists on the Left push for universal day care and other policies that encourage all mothers to enter the paid workplace.

European family policy

In contrast to the United States, Western European countries are well known for having a powerful arsenal of day care and other family-friendly benefits. For example, over 70 percent of the children from age three years to school age in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom are in publicly financed child care. Given the general direction of U.S. policy, it may be instructive to examine how motherhood and family life have fared in light of the changing levels of family-friendly benefits available in the industrialized countries of the European Union. The question is not simply are they "family friendly," but for what kinds of families and female life styles are they friendly?

Overall, marriage and fertility rates have declined and female labor-force participation rates have increased throughout most of the European Union over the last few decades. In fact, the fertility rates are currently lower than in the United States, and the proportions of childless women aged 40 in Britain, Austria, Switzerland, and Sweden are about the same as that in the United States. Contrary to what one might expect, sociologist Gosta Esping-Andersen found that in 1992 European countries with high levels of female employment tended to have higher fertility rates than those with low levels of female employment. Based on the positive correlation from a cross-sectional analysis of 19 countries he concludes that in some contexts female careers and children can become fairly compatible. Similar moderately positive results emerge from a cross-sectional analysis of fertility rates and female employment in 12 European countries in 1997.

These positive findings, however, say more about the limits of cross-sectional analysis than the empirical relation between fertility and labor-force participation rates. The limitation becomes apparent when these rates are analyzed over time. Here a completely different picture emerges, as illustrated in Figure 1, which shows a substantial inverse relationship between the average fertility and female employment rates for these 12 countries between 1987 and 1997. Although average rates, of course, could obscure different relationship patterns in the individual countries, analyses conducted on each country separately are highly consistent with the overall pattern based on averages. Following the downward trend in fertility, the decline in marriage rates between 1987 and 1998 also shows a strong inverse correlation with labor-force participation.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

As female labor-force participation rates rose, public efforts were made in many countries to reduce the friction between work and family life. One way to estimate the effects of these efforts is to ask: How did patterns of public spending on family-friendly services such as day care, household services, and other in-kind family benefits vary with marriage and fertility rates? Although the pattern of spending on family-friendly benefits rises and falls, overall the average rates of public expenditure on these benefits as a percent of GDP increased from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. This spending had an inverse correlation with fertility rates (as shown in Figure 2) and showed a similar relation to marriage rates. Analyses conducted separately on each country show some variance from the pattern that emerges when averaging results, particularly in regard to fertility rates that had positive correlations with spending on family benefits in five (four of which were statistically significant) of the fifteen countries.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Family-friendly policies, of course, involve more than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) categories of expenditure represented by family benefits. For example, over 70 percent of the employed women in the Netherlands work in part-time jobs that have benefits similar to those of full-time employment, and Dutch children spend more days per year in school than most elementary school students in the European Union. A thorough assessment of measures that weigh into efforts to balance work and family life would include parental leave, flexible work schedules, number and length of school days, paid vacation time, and family allowances. Some of these benefits are reflected in data on total public expenditures, analyses of which reveal patterns that parallel the findings noted above. That is, rates of total public expenditure between 1987 and 1997 are inversely related to both fertility (see Figure 3) and marriage rates. Still, even when total public expenditures are considered, there are many distinctions in the variety of measures that operate in different countries--which is to say the findings that fertility and marriage rates generally declined as spending on family benefits and total public expenditure have increased can only be taken as suggestive. But what do they suggest?

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Believers, skeptics, and disbelievers

Overall, these findings lend themselves to at least three broad interpretations. Believers in the salutary effects of family-friendly policies would argue that although such policies did not appear to strengthen the formation of family life (by increasing the presence of children and marriage), in the absence of these benefits the declines would have been even sharper--that is, these benefits acted as a brake to slow things up. As evidence, they might point to the fact that in three of the countries--Denmark, Sweden, and Finland--that had significant positive correlations between fertility rates and public expenditure on family benefits, the rates of expenditure were proportionately more than twice as high as that of most of the other countries. This suggests that the decline can be diminished if significant resources are invested in family services.

Invoking the mantra "correlation is not causality," skeptics find little reason to assume that these policies are either friendly or unfriendly to families, and read the results as confirming that family-friendly policies make no palpable difference. They point out that if indeed these benefits served as a brake on declining rates of fertility and marriage, then one would expect to find the lowest marriage and fertility rates in countries that lagged behind in the family-friendly benefits, of which the United States is a prime example--except that the American rates are higher than those of the European Union. Skeptics would no doubt refer to the history of children's allowances in France which were initiated under the Family Code of 1939 with the explicit goal of increasing the birthrate. Although the French birthrate increased considerably in the decades after World War II, during the same period the United States--with no children's allowance--also experienced a dramatic rise in the birthrate, while the birthrate in Sweden declined despite its allowance system. The skeptic argues that decisions concerning marriage and family size address fundamental conditions of human existence, which do not yield readily to social policy.

Finally, disbelievers conclude that so-called family-friendly policies are not really family friendly at all. Rather, these theorists argue that although the inverse correlations between female labor-force participation and fertility and marriage rates, and between expenditures on family benefits and fertility and marriage rates, do not represent definitive explanations, they are indicative of two firm underlying realities.

The first is an unyielding tension between a life centered on family--meeting the continuous demands of marriage, child rearing, and household management--and a life centered on paid employment and meeting the continuous demands of a full-time career. As any woman who has tried it can testify, balancing paid work and family life is extraordinarily difficult. Caring for young children is immensely labor intensive and relentless.

A two-earner family with two children under five years of age hits the ground running by 6:30 a.m. The kids have to be washed, fed, dressed, and out the door in time to get to the day-care providers well before the parents are due at their jobs. At 5:00 p.m. the parents leave work and rush to pick up the kids, take them home to be fed, undressed, bathed, and put to bed. This tight daily routine can be further squeezed by jobs that require evening meetings, out-of-town travel, overtime, and take-home work. On top of the daily routine, there is weekly shopping for the household, buying children's clothes, cleaning, laundry, doctor appointments, haircuts, and coping with pink-eye, strep throat, and ear infections that strike without warning. It does not take much for things to spin out of control--a dead car battery, a broken washing machine, or a leaky roof will do it. Although many men have increased their involvement in domestic life, whether due to genetic indisposition, poor socialization, ineptitude, or some combination thereof, their participation in traditional female duties has fallen far short of a fair share. The reality is that most working mothers continue to assume the brunt of household and child-care responsibilities. And with all the working mother's efforts, at the end of each week her young children have spent the majority of their waking hours with their physical needs being met and personalities shaped by strangers.

The second reality is that the main threads of family-friendly policies are tied to and reinforce female labor-force participation--and are more aptly labeled "market friendly." These policies are largely, though not entirely, associated with publicly provided care for children and supports for periods of parental leave. To qualify for parental-leave benefits it is necessary to have a job before having children. The incentive for early attachment to the labor force is bolstered by publicly subsidized day care. Child-care services both compensate for the absence of parental child care in families with working mothers and generate an economic spur for mothers to shift their labor from the home to the market. In Sweden, for example, free day-care services are state-subsidized by as much as $11,900 per child. They are free at the point of consumption, but paid for dearly by direct and indirect taxes--in 1990, Swedish taxes absorbed the highest proportion of the gross domestic product of any OECD country. Paying in advance for the "free" day-care service tends to squeeze mothers into the labor force, since the crushing tax rates make it difficult for the average family to get by on the salary of one earner. State-sponsored welfare activities accounted for about three-quarters of the net job creation in Sweden between 1970 and 1990, with almost all of these public-service positions being filled by women. Thus much of the voluntary labor invested in care for children, disabled kin, and elderly relatives was redirected to providing social care to strangers for pay.

In sum, the disbeliever argues that a meaningful connection exists between the decline in marriage and fertility and increasing public investments in family benefits in recent decades. In the view of such critics, the quality of family life suffers when mothers with young children go to work; hence, policies that create incentives to shift informal labor invested in child care and domestic production to the realm of paid employment are not "family-friendly" in any genuine sense.

Reframing the debate

Seen in the context of women's diverse interests in work and family life, each of the interpretations outlined above frames a slice of reality. That is, the consequences of family-friendly policies vary in strength and direction for women with different life-style preferences. The skeptic is correct in the sense that these policies probably have little effect on women at the two ends of the work-family continuum--those who prefer the traditional and postmodern life styles. Just as the availability of subsidized child-care services is unlikely to redirect women who are career-centered and not inclined toward having children, it is doubtful that most women disposed toward rearing three or more children would be seriously influenced by the prospect of having their children cared for by other people on a daily basis.

Although there is a degree of elasticity within each life-style category, the largest potential for movement is among those women somewhere in the middle. On one hand, the believer in such policies probably has a point in that child care and other family benefits facilitate the objectives of women in the modern group. In the absence of family benefits, fertility and marriage rates among these women might have declined, as some of them would adopt a postmodern life style. On the other hand, the disbelievers' view that most family-friendly policies undermine the institution they are purported to support probably resonates with many women in the neo-traditional group for whom work is secondary to child care. In the absence of family benefits that create incentives to work and lend impetus to the normative devaluation of childrearing and the domestic arts, fertility rates might rise, as some of the women disposed toward a neo-traditional life style would gravitate into the traditional category.

The reality is that family policies can be friendlier to some life styles than to others. Recognizing this, we should explore alternatives to the conventional perspective on family policies designed to harmonize work and family life. The conventional approach is implicitly oriented toward helping mothers work while raising children. It is informed by male work patterns, which basically involve a seamless transition from school to the paid labor force along with a drive to rise as high as possible in a given line of work. This "male model" of an early start and a continuous work history imposes a temporal frame on policies to harmonize work and family life, and it stresses the idea of "balancing" the concurrent performance of labor-force participation and child-rearing activities. Child-care services, and even periods of parental leave, facilitate an ongoing and relatively stable work history--which is preferred by many, though clearly not all, women.

But the male model offers a narrow perspective on family and career choices. Viewing the issue from a "life-course perspective" reframes and extends the choices by including the possibility that a "balance" between motherhood and employment might be achieved by sequential as well as concurrent patterns of paid and domestic work. Such a perspective encompasses not only women who want to combine work and family life at the same time, but also those who might envision investing all their resources in child care and domestic activities for 5 to 10 years and then spending the next 25 to 30 years in paid employment.

There are good reasons why some women, particularly those in the traditional and neo-traditional categories, might prefer the trade-offs of the sequential approach to balancing motherhood and employment. The contributions of full-time homemakers to their families and to society vary according to different stages of the family life cycle. The early years of childhood are critical for social and cognitive development; some mothers want to invest more heavily in shaping this development than in advancing their employment prospects. Home care during the early childhood years is labor-intensive, which heightens the economic value of the homemaker's contribution during that period. Finally, as the span of life has lengthened, even after 10 years at home most women would still have more than 25 years to invest in paid employment. Of course, choosing to invest 5 to 10 years in child care and household management would cut off those careers that require early training, many years of preparation, or the athletic prowess of youth. And a later start lessens the likelihood of rising to the very top of the career ladder. Those are the trade-offs of pursuing two callings in life.

Various measures could be initiated to support the choice of a sequential approach to balancing family and work. For example, we have seen that the federal government already provides about $16 billion in subsidies for a variety of cash and in-kind benefits to working parents who place their children in day care. The provision of similar supports through tax credits and home-care allowances to full-time homemakers with children under five years of age would afford parents greater freedom to choose between caring for children at home and consuming state subsidized day-care benefits. To guard against home-care benefits that would end up disproportionately subsidizing wealthy families, these schemes could be progressively indexed.

In 1998, Norway initiated a policy to pay cash benefits to all families with children up to three years old as long as the child was not enrolled in a state-subsidized day-care center. Finland employs a similar policy, which was fully implemented in 1989. Between 1989 and 1995 labor-force participation of Finnish women with children under three years old declined from 68 to 55 percent.

Direct child-rearing benefits are not the only way to recognize and support those women who choose home care during the early childhood years. Several European countries provide varying amounts of pension credits toward retirement to parents who stay home to care for young children. Family-friendly policies might even award "social" credits for each year at home with young children, which could be exchanged for benefits that would assist parents in making the transition from homemaker to paid employment. Such benefits could include tuition for academic and technical training, and preferential points on federal civil-service examinations. The social-credit scheme would be somewhat akin to certain veterans' benefits, which were granted in recognition of people who sacrificed career opportunities while serving the nation. In shaping the moral and physical stock of future citizens, the homemaker's contribution to national well-being is obviously quite different from, but no less important than, that of veterans. By recognizing this contribution the family social-credit scheme would elevate the sagging status of domestic activities and child-rearing functions as well as reinforce the thinning fabric of informal social support networks.

The case for rethinking what we mean by "family-friendly" policies is put forth not to advance one pattern of motherhood and employment over another, but to give equal consideration to the diverse values that influence how women respond to the conflicting demands of work and family life. As things now stand, public policies are far from neutral on the question of whether parents should look after their children or go to work and outsource the job of caring for the kids. As seen in the growth of public child-care spending, children have become an increasing source of paid employment. There will always be a few women leaving well-paid jobs to care for their children. But as an avant garde of the opt-out revolution, this group is unlikely to draw many recruits in the face of current policies, the full thrust of which reinforce the abdication of motherhood.

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