March 22, 2007 8:30 PM

Enough with the opting out already!
Posted by Diane Danielsonat 8:30 PM

E.J. Graff's post on TPM Cafe about The Opt Out Myth needs to be read in it's entirety by any journalist who insists on writing anything more about the "opt out" trend.  Some of the highlights from her article that you won't read about elsewhere:

• Only 4% of women in the US population fit the demographics of the original "opt out" article, yet because publishers and journalists belong to this class - it's spotlighted as a trend.
• "opt-out stories invariably focus on women in one particular situation: after they have ‘opted out’ but before any of them divorce."
• "Census numbers show no increase in mothers exiting the work force, and according to Heather Boushey, the maternity leaves women do take have gotten shorter.'
• "In one experiment, Correll and her colleagues asked participants to rate a management consultant. Everyone got a profile of an equally qualified consultant—except that the consultant was variously described as a woman with children, a woman without children, a man with children, and a man without children. When the consultant was a “mother,” she was rated as less competent, less committed, less suitable for hiring, promotion, or training, and was offered a lower starting salary than the other three."
• "Here’s what feminism hasn’t yet changed: the American idea of mothering is left over from the 1950s, that odd moment in history when America’s unrivaled economic power enabled a single breadwinner to support an entire family. Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment."
• "Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?"

Read the full piece.