You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music.

Welcome to the Double X Gap Fest for October 8th.

This is Hannah Rosen.

I am the co-editor of Double X, and I'm here with my fellow editor, Emily Bazelon, and Margaret Talbot from the New Yorker.

Today, we are going to talk about a couple of things. We're going to start by talking about a story that was on the front page of the Washington Post last week based on some census data. It looks like there might not have been an opt-out revolution. At least that's how this story was spun. Now, just to explain, the word opt-out revolution or the term came from a

story that Lisa Belkin, who's a great writer on mothering issues, I think in 2003 in which she

wrote about women choosing not to stay at home with their children. And it looks like from the

census data that it's not the sort of well-educated kind of upper-class women opting out of the workforce, but it's lower-income women. And it's less of a choice, is how this article spun it, than something that people do because they don't have any other choice. And this is sort of pre-recession. So it turns out it's younger, less educated women. At least that's what it looks like. Now, it doesn't look that way to me. I have a lot of sort of quibbles with the way the story was spun. But anybody want to go at it? Well, I thought it was sort of an interesting, you know, corrective, the idea that a lot of the people who stay at home, and there has been a slight uptick in women with kids under 15 who stay home. Are these, for the most part, less educated and poorer women? But that doesn't mean that there isn't a phenomenon of the kind that Lisa Belkin reported on. I mean, I just anecdotally know people who fall into that category. And also, you know, there is this slightly like puritanical disapproving tone when people say, well, it really isn't about these well educated women. What's our obsession with these sort of well educated, you know, privileged women? But, you know, it really is kind of a dog bites man story. It's sort of more interesting and surprising when people who are, you know, hyper well

educated with their Ivy League degrees and law degrees and so on decide that they are not going

to work, that they're going to stay home and, you know, change diapers to put it, you know, crudely.

And, you know, that's kind of more surprising. So that's part of why it was a story, right?

This story, this Lisa Belkin story, really pushed buttons for people.

And I think part of this, the way this, you know, interesting study was spun was in response

to all of those people who were very indignant about her article.

I feel like there's this funny disconnect.

So the data now says that these women are mostly younger and less educated, which isn't

surprising. I agree with you, Margaret. But we do still have this substantial fraction of women who

are more educated who are staying home. And David Leonhardt at the New York Times wrote, I thought,

a really smart blog post this week saying that we tend to have this big fight

over these numbers. And they're really small numbers. I mean, we're talking about, you know,

a few percentage points moving in one direction or another in the last 10 or 15 years, depending

on who's measuring it. But, you know, as David pointed out, underlying this fight over these small numbers is really one that's about whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that women who've gone to college or graduate school are taking time out or deciding not to go back to work at all when they have kids.

...