Portside

Lean in, lean back, stand up, sit down – everyone has advice for women wanting to get ahead. How about: Get a job?

One tiny problem may be holding women back: They are leaving the workforce in record numbers. The number of women age 20 and older not in the labor pool, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has soared from 40 million in 2000 to nearly 49 million today; another 315,000 called it quits last month. The participation rate of women in the workplace has dropped from a high of 60.7 percent in 1999 to 58.8 percent today. By contrast, some 72.5 percent of men are either working or looking for a job.

What’s going on here? With all the focus on equal pay for equal work, and with opportunities continuing to expand for female employees, the exodus of women from our labor pool is surprising. And, possibly, a tad inconvenient for those charging that businesses still discriminate against women.

There are numerous explanations put forth to explain this trend. Most tend to identify two categories of workplace drop-outs: The first includes young mothers who are not highly educated and therefore not likely to earn enough to pay for childcare. Economically, these women are better off staying home.Economists consider the defections costly for the country; we need highly talented and trained workers. For feminists, the drop-out trend undermines their argument that women – even our most accomplished and best educated – are victims of discrimination. If the women most likely to enter the C-suite marathon  increasingly choose to hang up their running shoes, why should we expect more finishers?

A recent study by Joni Hersch, professor at Vanderbilt Law School, makes that case. She looks at female graduates of our top universities – those presumably who have the best shot at shattering the glass ceiling – and finds that once they have children, they are more likely to quit their jobs than are women who graduated from less selective schools. 

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