Stretched to limit, women stall march to work

[atommom]

I have some problems with this article ... not least of which is that it admits, near the end, that the economy is the main reason for women's reduced participation in the workplace. I've been noticed a barrage of "women don't want to work" articles for several years. While it is a real dilemma, and many women do finally choose to stay home for awhile (as I did), I think I detect some media "spin" here. What do you all think?

For four decades, the number of women entering the workplace grew at a blistering pace, fostering a powerful cultural and economic transformation of American society. But since the mid-1990's, the growth in the percentage of adult women working outside the home has stalled, even slipping somewhat in the last five years and leaving it at a rate well below that of men.

While the change has been under way for a while, it was initially viewed by many experts as simply a pause in the longer-term movement of women into the work force. But now, social scientists are engaged in a heated debate over whether the gender revolution at work may be over.

Maybe, but many researchers are coming to a different conclusion: women are not choosing to stay out of the labor force because of a change in attitudes, they say. Rather, the broad reconfiguration of women's lives that allowed most of them to pursue jobs outside the home appears to be hitting some serious limits.

Instead, mothers with children at home gained the time for outside work by taking it from other parts of their day. They also worked more over all. Professor Bianchi found that employed mothers, on average, worked at home and on the job a total of 15 hours more a week and slept 3.6 fewer hours than those who were not employed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/business/02work.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

[BOHICA06]

1. Spin maybe ...

... but how do explain the change without some spin?

Is it good?
Is it bad?

Women receive more BA/BS & MA/MS - so the opportunity is there or theirs - it may be that the additional choice of staying home looks better than our ever "increase the production" world of work.

[atommom]

2. I called it spin because the author admitted that economic forces

are mostly to blame. But I don't deny that it's a tough dilemma for many women. Most mothers have to spend quite a bit of time on childcare and housekeeping, whether they work outside the home or not, and sometimes that adds up to too much stress. I've been there ... I know it is a real issue.

I suspect, though, that if there were a way to correct for the economic factors mentioned in the article, this wouldn't be a very strong "trend" at all (because many mothers do want and/or need to work outside the home). I'm wondering why the media is so fond of this story. I've seen it several times over the past few years, with few changes.