FINALLY! I've been waiting for the spate of lame-ass opt-out articles to ebb over at NYT. Thanks for linking to this, it's a great Op-Ed.

Seems to me like someone is looking at the world with rose colored glasses.

The study on college graduates prior to 1981 is meaningless at best. Boomer women have nothing at all to do with Gen X and Y women. They are completely different.

As to her more recent stats. They feel shaky. Time will tell.

I’m having a hard time getting excited about this Mellon study. Goldin doesn’t mention that if fifty percent of women with children took less than 6 months out of the work force, fifty percent took 3.7 to 4.2 years off, constituting 25 to 28% of their potential time. Goldin doesn’t define unemployment and employment, so we don’t know whether employed women were working part-time or reduced schedules, as many studies indicate that they are. Goldin claims that females who went to law school are still practicing law today, but she doesn’t mention that they’re not practicing law at the most-prestigious and highest-paid levels, largely because of the incompatibility of schedules at the top with the demands of their families. And Goldin pays short shrift to the reality that if women are making less and working less than their husbands, their careers will further become the subordinate ones, they’ll be more financially dependent, more vulnerable in cases of divorce, less powerful within the relationship, and even more likely to take on the majority of family responsibilities. If you’re interested, I’ve got a post on this subject at Bad Feminist (http://badfeminist.blogspot.com/2006/03/opt-out-revolution.html).