<p>Female grads from prestige schools work less than other female college grads. maybe they took P mom's advice to marry well?! Esp those that maxxed out favorable odds by getting an MBA.</p>
<p>Leaning</a> In: Which Women Are Most Likely to Opt Out of the Workforce - At Work - WSJ</p>
<p>I married “well.” Hahaha. Not on purpose. Actually I had a few offers from guys from “better families.” I married for love.</p>
<p>Women do this.</p>
<p>I get to choose if I work outside the home or not. The women I live around get to make this choice as well. Some of us work outside the home and some of us do not. I’m grateful to the women who do not for all the added stuff they choose to do as “team mom” and PTO officer and whatnot. I always get them significant gifts.</p>
<p>Look, it’s nobody’s business what a woman chooses to do. This is between she and her husband. I don’t think we need a new version of the “mommy wars.”</p>
<p>It’s counterproductive.</p>
<p>Either we agree that raising kids is important or we don’t agree. If some woman down the street wants to stay out of the workforce, why would I care where she got her degree? I mean, I don’t want my kids around their house if she is shooting heroine in the afternoons or evenings, but other than that? that’s not my business, and it’s not the business of anyone else, except her husband and her family.</p>
<p>She’s ‘absolutely infuriated’ by choices other women make? Her problem. I worked 5 years, have been a non-working mom for 23 years, don’t feel I’m wasting my engineering degree (which I paid for myself). I married someone I met at work, not in college. I am happy not working as long as it is financially feasible, and have other ways to contribute to society. I have never aspired to leadership positions.</p>
<p>I really, really hope this thread dies immediately. I, for one, am sick of the mommy wars, the value of what people do being judged by whether and how much they get paid to do it, and on and on.</p>
<p>After graduating from Harvard undergrad, a HS friend of ours immediately became a full time stay-at-home Mom. We could not believe it. This was 30 yrs ago. We tried to imagine what her Mother thought since that Mother had been an advocate for separate gifted education and constant complainer at PTA that her daughter wasn’t being challenged enough. We thought ~ what a waste of an education. Anyway, at the time it gave us great hope. We began thinking - maybe we just need to out-last our other “sisters” in the workforce. Maybe that’s all it takes.</p>
<p>I completely wouldn’t have expected the results of that study, though – that women with elite educations are less likely to be working. That completely isn’t true of the women with whom I went through elite education. They tend to be president of this and executive director of that. In many/most cases, they have had more professional success than their spouses, even when the spouse was similarly educated.</p>
<p>I can only think of two women I knew in college who spent less than 30 years in the workforce. One was a Harvard MBA whose husband was sent to head up his firm’s offices in two different countries, in a context where having a wife/social-secretary was practically a job requirement, and the compensation sensational enough to justify that kind of sacrifice. She never went back to work full time, but she does chair her local school board now. The other came down with Huntington’s Disease at 40; she had been working full time as a rabbi before that.</p>
<p>I know TONS of women with fabulous educations who have opted out of the workforce, in addition to a few men. I met most of them in support groups for parents of children with non-verbal autism/severe or profound MR. I suspect that there are others whose children have milder disabilities as well. I expect that there will be more in the future, as social safety nets (including options for residential placement) disintegrate.</p>
<p>I really do love working, and my D tells me that I was a good role model for her as she was growing up. (S has said nothing on the subject.) Because I had some flexibility (a few years leave, several years working half days) I was still able to be a Girl Scout leader, classroom volunteer, team mom, go to all their school events, etc. Now that I am getting older and S will be done with college in a couple of years, I may cut back to half time again, or retire. Every woman (and man) needs to do what is best for her/himself and the family.</p>
<p>JHS, it doesn’t surprise me at all. These are also women who may have earned a lot in their working years, and married someone with similar or greater earning potential, so they have choices about working – and can still maintain very nice lifestyles – that women in the “tier 4” schools referenced in the study don’t have. I’m meeting some friends over the next few weeks who fit this description - one was Smith undergrad / Harvard MBA, another was Yale undergrad / Harvard MBA, and a third was Duke undergrad / WashU MBA.</p>
<p>Perhaps male graduates of top schools also work less? I assume ‘owning a baseball team’ or such is not classified as a full-time job.</p>
<p>My town is now FULL of younger, highly educated, wealthy SAHM’s-all married to highly paid men they met in college who moved to SV over the past 15 years.
This article does not surprise me one bit.
Any woman under the age of 40, in this part of town, who IS working is the exception, not the rule.</p>
<p>@frazzled
Yes, that is a lot like me. I left a tenured faculty position at a research university to have more time to teach my deaf child language. I feel fortunate that my husband (who I met in undergrad) had a good paying job and very lucky I got to spend about 10 years raising my kids before going back to school to change careers and heading back into the work force. Very lucky to have had that choice to to have had the time to spend with my kids. And I feel that being a mom is a career equal in stature to my two other careers. (Today, I can’t imagine not working. What would I do all day now that the kids are in high school and college? )</p>
<p>@menolparkmom – I’m in a town on the east coast just like you describe. It’s the exception not the norm. But approaching 50, a lot of those moms are back working.</p>
<p>This doesn’t always seem to follow thanks to an increasing acceptance for SAHDs…though this may vary depending on area and families. </p>
<p>For the NE party state college grad cousin married to his Princeton undergrad/HYSM MBA wife, he’s stays home with the three kids while she’s the breadwinner. She prefers the hustle and bustle of the corporate office to staying home while her husband is willing to support her by being a SAHD until all the kids are in later elementary school.</p>
<p>What Pizzagirl said. High-achieving women often marry/partner with high-achieving men who allow the women to choose whether to work later. It can go the other way, but because women are the child-bearers it often goes that way. </p>
<p>I work very little now because I can. My husband and I met in med school and his is the more lucrative specialty. If it were reversed, and one of us wanted to semi-retire, it would be him. I’m glad I just happened to be married to a high-producer physician, though don’t think we haven’t discussed vehemently the mismatch between his field and my low-producing specialty!</p>
<p>Why do these women leave the workforce? Because they CAN. (While still maintaining a comfortable standard of living. The main thing they have in common is high-earning husbands.) No brainer.
BTW, the article is talking about married mothers–not all women.
H is an ivy grad. Perhaps this is just his class or people he knows, but it strikes me that a very high percentage of his female classmates never married/never had kids. So I wouldn’t assume that so many ivy educations are “going to waste.”
H married down (BA from an original “public ivy”/MA 4th tier state school). It seems that most of my college classmates did marry and have kids. And the women are probably more likely to work because their husbands aren’t making huge $.
fwiw, I don’t consider women who stay home with kids as “having left the work force”–they are still working hard at a very important and necessary job. They’ve joined the slave-labor force.
I do know some female medical doctors who do not practice medicine and stay home to raise their kids. I have mixed feelings about docs who don’t practice at all, and who went to public (state supported) medical schools. Of course they are free to do as they please, but I wonder if the state’s “getting less service” from female physicians (same could be said of older med students who have shorter careers), could be used to discriminate in admissions?<br>
Other factors that influence women’s decisions: taxes (if the husband makes a lot, the wife may feel she is losing a huge percentage of what she makes to taxes, which makes a second income hardly seem worth it when you consider the hassle of childcare, commuting, and other expenses like wardrobe, parking, lunches, etc. And if the husband has a very demanding job, as many high earners do, it is almost impossible to add another high-powered career to the mix while raising kids–unless you have live-in help. Something’s got to give. And most mothers do want to raise their own children rather than have someone else raise them.
I still have kids in elementary school, and things have changed–in my area I see many more stay at home dads than I did with my oldest kids 15-20 years ago. If the wife makes more, and they want one parent home with the kids (the working parent often has a job that requires travel), then the dad stays home.<br>
My father in law was a stay at home dad from the late 60’s on. He stayed home to care for a handicapped child–he had been a teacher and his wife had a better paying job.</p>
<p>No choice. My H is bad with money. I couldn’t have raised kids without my salary.</p>
<p>I grumble when I get up in the morning, but for the most part having to work has been a blessing in that it has kept me quite involved with life outside my box. Most people can probably do this without duress, but I doubt I would for various health reasons that lead me to want to cocoon.</p>
<p>I have no investment whatsoever in what other women do, and congratulations if your husband is more solvent than mine. Enjoy!</p>
<p>I have known women with elite educations drop out of the workforce if their careers were so demanding that they were incompatible with family life, though this certainly hasn’t been the rule.</p>
<p>I know quite a few men supported by wives. One case I
Involves two physicians. The woman’s practice does considerably better than her husband’s.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I wonder how many of these families also look at the economics of that second income. In high tax places like NYC, that second income is being taxed at a 50% clip. Add on the “costs” of working (commute, wardrobe, child care, etc.). and the marginal increase in take home pay may just not be worth it.</p>
<p>RE: taxes
yep–what I said #15 (about 2/3 thru of wall o’ text). (For the kind of money I could make, I can’t afford to work.)</p>
<p>Perhaps some of these highly intelligent, well-educated women consider those who outsource the raising of their children to be the ones who are “wasting” their top-teir educations?</p>
<p>It’s not all-or-nothing. I know a lot of educated women who work a couple of days of week, sometimes from home. I think medicine is a popular career for women because you can set your hours.</p>