Opting Out?: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home
by
Pamela Stone
Description: Opting Out?: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home examines the reasons behind some women's decisions to leave demanding careers, focusing on the conflicts between professional responsibilities and family life. The book analyzes institutional and cultural factors influencing these choices
ISBN: 0520244354
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And it's not really a new one: the "women do more/less of X because they want to have a family" argument is written about all the time. It vies with "inherent biological differences" and "discrimination" for the most-frequently-suggested explanation for gender differences in any field. You can get dozens of entire books on it.
It's also somewhat at odds with the (admittedly spotty) research that's been done in the area. For example, one in-depth series of case studies found that a large proportion of women who opted out of work to raise a family did so largely because they wanted out of the work, rather than because they wanted to raise a family and weren't able to do the work at the same time: quitting to raise a family was the plan B that they turned to when plan A (have a career) turned out to suck for various reasons: http://www.amazon.com/Opting-Out-Women-Really-Careers/dp/052...
On the other hand, it's perfectly fine for people to write personal blog posts about their own experiences. I think I'm mostly objecting to the attempt to generalize it based on one example; a "why I quit my startup to raise a family" post would've been fine.