More than cultural assumptions, women face some very concrete problems as they struggle to raise children and support their families.

Before the front-page story in The New York Times, "Women Are Now Equal As Victims of Poor Economy".

Women's E-news reported that mothers are losing ground at work. Under the headline “US Employers Push Mothers Out of the Workforce" Sharon Johnson writes, “From the 1950s through the 1990s the percentage of U.S. women in the paid work force steadily increased. But that trend has begun to reverse and today 3.3 million fewer women are working than would be if the trend had continued."

Contrary to conventional analysis, women are not "opting out" because they want to stay at home, Johnson reports. Instead, women's policy groups say that the problem is a workplace that is hostile to mothers. "The real explanation, they contend, is a workplace that fails women on some basic interlocking fronts: inflexible scheduling requirements, job discrimination, lack of child care, lack of parental leave, lack of sick leave."

The Center for WorkLife Law in San Francisco found that in 13,000 cases, "mothers were 79 percent less likely to be hired and 100 percent less likely to be promoted because they are held to a higher standard than non-mothers in their companies,” Johnson reports.

The New York Times today adds more to the story. For the first time since the 1970s, median income for women has fallen over a period of several years--from $15.04 and hour in 2004 to $14.84 in 2007. After decades of steady progress, the Times reports, women across all economic and social strata are working less and earning less, and their families are making do with lower incomes as a result. While women's workforce participation kept growing even through previous recessions, the Times headline refers to the fact that today women, like men, are seeing their overall numbers at work decline as a result of low wages and the perception that staying on the job under current economic conditions is not worth it. In manufacturing, in particular, women, like men, are losing jobs. Nor are they making an easy transition to other sectors.

The upshot is that, as mothers lose ground at work, families are suffering.

The New York Times took a lot of flak a few years ago for an October 2003 Sunday magazine cover story on the "opt-out revolution," by Lisa Belkin- that portrayed latte-sipping, high-income suburban moms as choosing family over work. It turned out that the numbers did not support the "trend" asserted by that story.

In this week’s news piece, the Times notes that a lot of the variation in women's workforce participation in recent years comes from women at the other end of the economic spectrum--welfare recipients who were pushed into jobs by welfare reform legislation: "Now, as the economy weakens and employers shrink their payrolls, many of these women struggle to find work."

It is often unclear why middle-income women drop out of work, the Times reports, since "men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, [but] that is often the assumption when women pull out."

More than cultural assumptions, women face some very concrete problems as they struggle to raise children and support their families. For example, childcare for infants and toddlers can easily cost as much as $15,000 a year. Add to that the extreme difficulty of finding the kind of environment where you can actually feel good about leaving your baby all day, and then mix in shrinking wages and benefits, long commutes, inflexible employers, and a workplace that is not set up to deal with the inevitable crises of sick children and other family hassles.

The problem with the "opt-out" story line, as E.J. Graff pointed out in her excellent critique of Belkin's piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, is that women's response to all this pressure is presented as a rather pleasant, personal choice to kick back and let dad bring home the paycheck while spending more time at the gym.

The reality, as today's news story and Johnson's report for Women E-News shows, is that most families badly need women's earnings to stay afloat. The answer is not to muse about how a few affluent women manage their careers and cultural expectations, but how we, as a society, make life workable for families under extreme economic, social, and emotional stress. Men, women, and children alike badly need a more modern approach to these problems. As the current recession hits home, it's high time we did something about it.