The Op-Out Myth

I stumbled across the Columbia Journalism Review yesterday, and there's a lot of good stuff in the latest issue. An article titled The Op-Out Myth discusses the real trend of articles covering the faux trend of professional women turning their backs on the working world to become stay-at-home moms. The author makes a point that always seemed obvious to me when I read these "mommy war" articles: the women profiled are always upper-middle-class women with money in the bank and a well-paid spouse. How many moms does that actual describe?

The moms-go-home story keeps coming back, in part, because it’s based on some kernels of truth. Women do feel forced to choose between work and family. Women do face a sharp conflict between cultural expectations and economic realities. The workplace is still demonstrably more hostile to mothers than to fathers. Faced with the “choice” of feeling that they’ve failed to be either good mothers or good workers, many women wish they could—or worry that they should—abandon the struggle and stay home with the kids.

The problem is that the moms-go-home storyline presents all those issues as personal rather than public—and does so in misleading ways. The stories’ statistics are selective, their anecdotes about upper-echelon white women are misleading, and their “counterintuitive” narrative line parrots conventional ideas about gender roles. Thus they erase most American families’ real experiences and the resulting social policy needs from view.

Here’s why that matters: if journalism repeatedly frames the wrong problem, then the folks who make public policy may very well deliver the wrong solution. If women are happily choosing to stay home with their babies, that’s a private decision. But it’s a public policy issue if most women (and men) need to work to support their families, and if the economy needs women’s skills to remain competitive. It’s a public policy issue if schools, jobs, and other American institutions are structured in ways that make it frustratingly difficult, and sometimes impossible, for parents to manage both their jobs and family responsibilities.

The article goes on for four more pages, which I admit I haven't read, but the above paragraphs sum up the important parts for me. A classic case of news media framing an issue as episodic rather than systemic.