Having it all? Explaining women's work pathways.

摘要

Prevailing paradigms generally frame women's workforce participation in two contrasting ways: professional women may "choose" whether or not to pursue a career, while working-class and minority women "need" to work at a paid job. These arguments suggest that husbands' earnings allow middle-class women to choose whether or not to participate in the workforce, while working class women are forced by financial pressures to work for pay. Yet national trends in women's workforce participation do not support these claims about choice and need. Data from the 2005 U.S. Census show that highly educated women are most likely to work. Furthermore, claims that financial needs drive women's workforce participation imply that not working is the preference of most women (and particularly working class women). These paradigms create pervasive stereotypes in which middle class women's work is understood to be voluntary (and self-indulgent) and working class women's work is necessary (and unrewarding).;To unravel this puzzle and develop a broader theoretical framework, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with a randomly selected sample of 80 women. Moving beyond this frame, I seek to explain the complex and varied paths that women pursue as social forces reshape their work-family options across classes, by asking: How and why do women form ties to the workforce, what is the nature of these ties, and what are their consequences? The women were diverse in their class backgrounds, their race and ethnicity, and in their approaches to motherhood, the workforce, and their family lives. To ensure this diversity and to gather as representative a group of women as possible, I randomly selected the participants from the NYC Voter Registration database lists of women aged 30-40. All but one had spent some time in the workforce. As a group, they all had had the opportunity to experience many of life's pivotal stages and had made critical decisions that led them along on diverse life trajectories.;Most women used a language of "family need" to account for their work decisions---a shared framework that actually allowed them to remake gendered expectations of care giving to fit divergent work paths. By using a frame that stressed obligations to their families rather than the fulfillment of their own needs or desires, both employed and non-employed women affirmed cultural expectations about selfless motherhood. Although the women traversed divergent work pathways, cultural constraints obliged them to explain their labor market participation in terms of their families' needs rather than their own.;I find, however, that "need" and "choice" masked the importance of other factors that shaped women's workforce participation, such as the degree of job satisfaction, support at home, and identification with paid employment. The personal rewards of work were not reaped nor sought solely by the middle class nor were the familial rewards of work reaped and sought solely by the working class. Instead, women from all classes and ethnicities evaluated their work-family experiences through their early work orientations, which developed from their class background, family forms and education experiences. Women's work-family experiences then either confirmed or disconfirmed these early orientations. These experiences led women to follow three different pathways: to work steadily, to pull back from the workforce, or to follow an interrupted pathway. Women from all classes weighed the cost and benefits of working versus not working, and they used a similar metric to do so. Yet social and financial resources proved more important to remaining at paid work than to leaving it.;In conclusion, it is the nature of women's workforce ties that is key to understanding the work-family axis in women's lives. By tracing women's formation of workforce ties throughout their adult lives, I provide a better framework for understanding the way women participate in paid work, how they enter, how they leave (and then re-enter the workforce), and what the consequences of these actions are.