MB Civic

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/122006WA.shtml

From the misogyny front…

New York Times writer Lisa Belkin’s controversial October 26, 2003 article about smart, young women leaving the workforce to raise children – dubbed the “opt out revolution” – sparked a firestorm of debate centered around one dramatic question: Is the most well-educated generation of women in history – the daughters of feminism and Title IX and glass-ceiling smashing pioneers – really choosing domesticity over career?

..It turns out that Belkin’s “opt out revolution” was more like an opt out overreaction. Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. found that the drop in women’s work participation rates between 2001 and 2005 was largely due to a weak labor market, and further, men’s labor rates also dropped at this time. Joan Williams, the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings, recently reported that 86 percent of those women who did leave their jobs did so because of inflexible office policy, not Martha Stewart fantasies.

At least Anita Bryant is happy..
-MAB