Why women quit

In late March of this year, several newspapers, magazines, and talk shows have run features on women in the work force. Many report that of those women who can afford to make the choice to stay home, more are choosing to do so.

Barbara Walters did an interview on 20/20 in early April with Ann Huss. She was an aide to President Bush and quit her prestigious, high profile job to stay at home with her children. She said during her chat with Walters that she taught her 15-year-old son to drive. If she had continued to work, she wouldn’t have had the chance to do that.

According to the 2003 Catalyst Census of Women Board Directors in Canada, there are half the number of women heading publicly traded companies as compared to numbers reported in 2002. Catalyst also reports that only three publicly traded companies are chaired by women. Crown corporations lead the percent of board seats held by women with 23.7% whereas co-operative companies (companies owned by a collection of individuals) are a distant second with 15.3%.

What’s going on? Are women thumbing their noses at feminism and staying home to cook and clean? I highly doubt it. I think that women want the choice to stay at home and raise their family or work and follow their chosen career, or both. Once the world understood that women wanted the choice, and through a lot of yelling and lobbying and bra burning (or so I’ve heard), women have come to realize that “Supermom” cannot exist. Women see that they can have it all, just not all at once. Something has to give. It seems that from all the research and hype many women are choosing to focus on the thing closest to their heart: their family.

I spoke to a couple of my friends to get their views on this subject. One, a family physician who is also on call in the delivery room one weekend a month, told me that she questions her decision to go to work every day. She is too tired at the end of her day to deal with her three boys. “Some days it just isn’t worth it,” she says. Another friend of mine who has a career in the pharmaceutical industry feels like she isn’t giving 100% to either her career or her family. She travels two weeks out of every month and her husband, who also works full time, is left to pick up a lot of the slack at home. However, she isn’t willing to give up the many perks her salary provides them.

Who can afford the choice? And who decides what afford really means? Some families are willing to give up their second car while some will go to a rented cottage rather than fly south for March Break. Maybe public school rather than private is the way to go. Some parents take their kids to the public library and the park rather than the mall. “All my friends are going” is hard to hear when you can’t afford summer camp for $5000 every single year.

My mother read Dr. Spock for her parenting advice back in the 1970s. Shortly before he died a few years ago, Spock wrote a second parenting book. In it he hypothesized that school-aged kids were forming gangs and generally getting into more trouble than they did in previous generations because women had gone into the work force. He wrote that kids have no one to be accountable towards from the time school ends until around dinner time, or later, when a parent arrives home. Plus, with divorce on the rise and more women needing to work to support themselves, the incidence of both parents not being around after school increases.

The question here is whether or not it is worth it to me and my family to work. I hope my kids remember coming home to me every day rather than an annual trip to Florida or shopping at The Gap. When they come home they are full of news about their day. By the time we sit down together for dinner as a family, most of what they’ve told me is forgotten or has become less important in their seven-and 11-year-old minds. I hope that they are going to remember my volunteer work in their classrooms once a week and knowing all of their friend’s names rather than being driven around in a fabulous Mercedes. I know what is important to me and what I hope will be important to them. Only time will tell.

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