Recycled stereotyping
Another crop of editors in Manhattan must have become fathers recently. How else to explain the fresh round of stale stereotypes about working mothers on the covers of the nation's newsweeklies?
It was only last fall that The New York Times Magazine explored the breathless, and dubious, proposition that the strain of balancing job and family is driving droves of stressed-out moms off the fast track and into the nursery. "The Opt-Out Revolution," The Times called the purported exodus of MBAs from the boardroom to the playroom. Now, Time magazine follows suit with "The Case for Staying Home: Why More Young Moms Are Opting Out of the Rat Race."
Save your money. You have read it all before.
Time acknowledges that "72 percent of mothers with children under 18 are in the workforce, up 47 percent since 1975 and unchanged since 1997." But Time is not interested in just any working moms; it is interested in well-heeled, well-educated white ones, women that Time decrees "seemed destined to blast through the glass ceiling."
So, it wasn't anything as pernicious as discrimination, inadequate child care options, or family-aversive workplace policies that kept that glass from shattering. It was a mass outbreak of maternal instinct. As The New York Times' headline put it: "Q: Why Don't More Women Get to The Top? A: They Choose Not To."
That answer, no doubt true for many women and men, is not true for all women. A Simmons School of Management survey found that 45 percent of 571 businesswomen polled said they aimed to reach the highest level of leadership in their companies. For women under 34, the number was 56 percent. "This kind of reporting reinforces the stereotype that women don't have the same commitment to work that men have," Deborah Merrill-Sands, associate dean at Simmons, says of the Time story. "It takes the pressure off the institutions to ask tough questions about the structural biases that keep women from making it to the top."
The Simmons survey also found that 70 percent of women polled think they do not have the same opportunities for advancement as their male counterparts and that 82 percent think they would have to adjust their style to succeed in their companies. Is it any wonder then that, if they have the option, some women decide to go home?
No one disputes the challenge of balancing work and children at any income level. Parenthood is demanding, exhilarating, exhausting, and rewarding, in not always equal parts. Many women choose happily to stay at home. But why, in 2004, do we persist in ignoring the cultural and financial realities that might make it more practical for mommy than daddy to drop out of the workplace?
These largely anecdotal accounts are filled with the usual qualifiers -- "the dimensions of the exodus are hard to measure" -- and contrary opinions -- "other experts say the drop-out rate isn't climbing but is merely more visible now that so many women are in high positions" -- but, then, rigorous statistical analysis has never been a hallmark of this type of trend story.
Working women have been reading for years about their self-inflicted misery, everything from cardiac arrest ("Women Discovering They're at Risk for Heart Attacks," Gannett News Service 1991) to emotional collapse ("Pressed for Success, Women Careerists Are Cheating Themselves,"
The story line gets recycled every few years when an editor notices that a lot of the women in his upper-income neighborhood are not catching the train with him every morning. That doesn't mean it's news. What it might mean is that editors ought to get out of their neighborhoods more often.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
