Description
Book SynopsisTaking a career break is a conflicted and risky decision for high-achieving professional women. Yet many do so, usually planning, even as they quit, to return to work eventually. But can they? And if so, how? In Opting Back In, Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy revisit women first interviewed a decade earlier in Stone's book Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home to answer these questions. In frank and intimate accounts, women lay bare the dilemmas they face upon reentry. Most succeed but not by returning to their former high-paying, still family-inhospitable jobs. Instead, women strike out in new directions, finding personally gratifying but lower-paid jobs in the gig economy or predominantly female nonprofit sector. Opting Back In uncovers a paradox of privilege by which the very women best positioned to achieve leadership and close gender gaps use strategies to resume their careers that inadvertently reinforce gender inequality. The authors advocate gender equitable poli
Trade Review"Provides vital insights into the processes and consequences of career interruption for professional women who take time out for motherhood." * Gender and Society *
"This book is richly descriptive and analytically subtle as it illuminates the social class dynamics among the privileged women interviewed."
* American Journal of Sociology *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Great Expectations
2. The Siren Call of Privileged Domesticity
3. Putting Family First: The Slow Return
4. Career Relaunch: Heeding the Call
5. Questing and Reinvention
6. The Big Picture
7. The Paradox of Privilege and Beyond
Appendix. Study Methodology
Notes
References
Index
