Opting Out or Pushed Out?: Women’s Decisions to Leave Work and Career

• In Event: 256 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 17. Work and Family

Abstract

Recent qualitative scholarship has highlighted the importance of negative workplace relationships and structural inequalities in predicting highly-educated mothers’ departures from top managerial and executive jobs, a phenomenon known as “Opting-out.” This quantitative research examines whether perceptions of sex discrimination at work affect mothers’ “opting-out” behavior using data from the National Longitudinal Study Young Women Cohort (1968-2003). We find that while women who perceive discrimination actually experience fewer weeks out of the labor force, the effects of discrimination perceptions operate differently for white and non-white women. Non-white women who perceive discrimination experience more time out of the labor force than their white counterparts. Other factors, such as marital status and number of children, do have a positive effect on women’s absence from the workforce.

Authors

• Laureen K. O'Brien, University of Arizona

• Amanda M. Lubold, University of Arizona