Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Taking a career break is a conflicted and risky decision for high-achieving professional women. Yet many do, usually planning, even as they quit, to return to work eventually. But can they? And if so, how? In Opting Back In, Stone and Lovejoy revisit women first interviewed a decade earlier 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 which inadvertently reinforce gender inequality. The authors advocate gender equitable policies that will allow women--and all parents--to combine the intense demands of work and family life in the 21st century.