Women’s choice to work for lower wages: love of a job or a decision forced by work policies?

On the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 11, NPR journalist Lisa Chow published the article “Why women (like me) choose lower-paying jobs.” The article discusses women’s choice to major in fields that are less lucrative than fields dominated by men (e.g., more women choose humanities majors versus majoring in engineering, which is male-dominated), women’s choice to pick a job with lower wages, and women’s decision to leave the workforce to raise children and tend to their family.

However, Chow argues her decision to work for lower wages is not impacted by money or raising kids. Instead, she stated: “I chose a lower-paying field before marriage or kids. I never felt excluded in a male-dominated workplace. So what’s my excuse? I love my job.” While I sincerely hope this is true for Chow, many women (and men) do not have this luxury. And their decisions, which are often inhibited by work-life policies, should not be discredited or ignored.

Earlier this year Stephanie Coontz, professor at Evergreen State College and contributing columnist for The New York Times, wrote an article entitled “Why gender equality stalled.” In this article, Coontz claims the focus needs to shift away from arguments about the hard choices women face in the workplace and instead fight to change policies so young men and women do not have to face these compromising decisions. She says: “To do that, we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders. Feminists should certainly support this campaign. But they don’t need to own it.”

Coontz explains that 50 years ago, when feminist Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the feminist movement of the 1960s began and was largely successful to due to the transformational power the book had to raise women’s consciousness about gender inequalities. Friedan and other feminists challenged women to “make the personal political.” This meant challenging the assumption that women’s role was in the house cooking, cleaning and caring for her children.

Though this change was slow, the idea took root and many women made their way out of the house and into the workforce. We all know this — this issue is mainstream today. However, in the late 1990s the percentage of women in the workforce came to a halt and the gendered segregation gap of college majors and professions stopped narrowing. This was largely due to an increase in married women, particularly those with children, leaving the workforce.

Coontz notes: “SOME people began to argue that feminism was not about furthering the equal involvement of men and women at home and work but simply about giving women the right to choose between pursuing a career and devoting themselves to full-time motherhood. A new emphasis on intensive mothering and attachment parenting helped justify the latter choice.” This is a choice and justification I often hear today, and it has a lot to with questions being asked by feminists today facing the “New Domesticity,” which I wrote about earlier this year.

Anti-feminists were relieved by this shift and welcomed the idea that Americans would stop pushing gender issues so far. And feminists were concerned this flood of women leaving the workforce was a step backward for feminism.

Regardless of which group you fall into, work-life policies for young mothers and fathers is an issue for all. Economic hardship has pushed many families to have a working mother and father, and many couples share a combined workload of more than 100 hours per week. Yet despite this increase in employment for both parents, the United States has not supported or passed any major legislation to help families balance the demands of their jobs and their lives at home.

Unfortunately, a workplace that lowers wages for women with children, cuts benefits for maternity leaves, doesn’t support paternity leave and is hard for women to re-enter, means that women will leave that workforce. Today, when couples are faced with challenge of balancing work and family life, women “opt out” faster than men, but it is not because people believe that the home is women’s place, rather, as Coontz said: “It is a reasonable response to the fact that our political and economic institutions lag way behind our personal ideals.”

This is what psychologists call a “value stretch” — when people are forced to change their beliefs to cope with an unreasonable situation. Couples make decisions like this all the time to justify their shift in values to minimize tension and inner turmoil. This is what I fear for myself and members of my generation.

We cannot allow our lives to be controlled by unfair work-life policies. If we truly want to see gender equality progress and to be able to freely make decisions about choosing careers we love — we must fight for policies that support this change.