Few articles have prompted as much discussion and ire from so many of you (not to mention feminists and media critics) as the front page piece that ran last fall in The New York Times, entitled, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood.” That’s why we thought you’d be interested in this follow– up, as reported in Inside Higher Education (and helpfully brought to our attention by one of our members)…
   
First, a reminder about what inflamed so many of you:

Last fall, just as our own focus was on some of the nation’s highest ranking “executive” moms, The New York Times ran a front page story claiming that “many women at the nation’s most elite colleges have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children.”

The basis for this broad conclusion was a finding by the author that, of the female students she interviewed at Yale, 60% of them (about 85 women) said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. (The author was actually a recent Yale graduate herself, who had just moved up at the Times from the position of intern).
 
   
Fortunately, a new study– from Yale– rebuts these findings…

According to a study fielded by the Yale University’s Women’s Center:

• Just 4.1% of Yale women plan to stop work entirely after having children, compared to 0.7% of men
• Moreover, a vast majority of women – 71.8% – reported they would take less than one year off work after their children were born

As the survey’s orchestrators’ note, these results suggest that men and women equally value career, contrary to the implication of the Times article.

While there may have been some underlying merit to the premise that more young women are considering different kind of work scenarios when they become mothers, we have to agree with noted columnist Katha Pollitt’s take on the original article, which is that it “represents a tendency by the Times [and other major media outlets] to write about women dropping out of the workplace without sufficient data to support it.” As such, we’ll take heart in this new data from the Yale campus. (It’s just too bad that this survey did not make the front page)…

Read more about these findings at insidehighered.com
 
   
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