Opting out of rat race can have consequences

I used to get so irritated by a magazine that was always telling women to get off the corporate treadmill and follow their bliss to open up their own small businesses. The women were happier with their new work, of course, but they lost their pensions and health insurance and nice salaries -- I always thought it was sort of irresponsible to write these articles that gullible women might read and chuck in their careers. Now I read a story that the New York Times did something similar six years ago and have published a follow up about how dire the situation is for some of the women who did that but now they need to work because of the recession:

Six years ago, The New York Times gushed about well-off women who quit work to stay home—without examining the economic risks. Only now is the paper setting the record straight.

Guess what The New York Times has just discovered? Women who quit their careers to stay home can face financial challenges if a recession hits and their husbands lose their jobs! And—gasp!—when these women try to re-enter the labor force after a timeout, it’s hard for them to find work, and they earn far less than they did when they left!

For the major media that romanticized opting out as the soothing solution to the stress of juggling work and family, the devastation that choice has left in its wake represents merely another story. But for the women who got sold a bill of goods and gambled their futures without understanding the risks they were taking, losing that bet turned out to be the biggest mistake of their lives.

In this case, however, the paper of record bears an unusual responsibility for setting the record straight—something it has taken an extraordinarily long time to do. Six years ago the Times published a Sunday magazine cover story that discovered what it deemed a happy new trend among affluent women and coined a catchy phrase—the Opt-Out Revolution—to describe the cushy lives of women who quit their careers to become full-time mothers. In what seemed an astonishing oversight, nowhere in that 2003 cover story did the Times investigate the economic challenges that the privileged Princeton graduates it portrayed might face should they ever lose their husbands—or their husbands lose their incomes.