‘I see the fleetingness of life’: Why a growing number of women are opting out of the workforce (mostly) on their own terms

Yesterday, beloved Breakfast Television host Dina Pugliese announced that she’s leaving the show after more than16 years. “Nonna can take a rest,” she joked on Feb. 15 when she tearfully explained her decision to step back from a job she described as a passion and a blessing. “The hours never got easier, and I find more and more, it has taken a mental and physical toll. We’ve got to listen to ourselves … and I’m taking that to heart.”

Pugliese’s next steps involve time with family, travel, building her beauty brand, The Care Principle, and throwing out her alarm clock set for 2.30 a.m.

Pugliese isn’t the only woman in the public eye who has recently bade farewell to a high-prestige job.

Last summer, Sheryl Sandberg of “Lean In” fame left her job as COO of Meta to focus on charity work. In January, Jacinda Ardern resigned as the prime minister of New Zealand saying, “I am human … We give all that we can for as long as we can. And then it’s time.” In a more minor chord, organization guru Marie Kondo (of “does it spark joy?” fame) recently revealed that she’s “given up” on tidying now that she’s got three kids. (A testament to the power of tiny, sharp pieces of Lego on the floor to break even the strongest woman eventually.)

What’s fascinating about these recent announcements is the way they’re being framed — and received: Not as burnout, as capitulations to pressure, or as attempts to save face as the women are being pushed out against their will, but as demonstrations of agency. These women have seen something better on the horizon, and they’re choosing it, even when they’re in positions they’ve worked their entire careers to achieve. Call it “step-back culture”: stepping back to move forward.

About a month ago, Fortnight Lingerie founder Christina Remenyi announced that she was putting her popular Toronto-based lingerie and swimwear brand “on pause, indefinitely,” in order to focus on her young family. After building her company for 13 years — fighting to keep production in Canada, navigating a pandemic, doing it all without business partners — she was profoundly tired. “I’m doing this to preserve my brand more than anything else,” says Remenyi. “I’ve seen what fatigue does. I have a very small company, and little mistakes cause massive ripples.”

Remenyi is leaving her options open for the future. “We’re all so used to this idea that you always have to be bigger and better, and every year there has to be progress,” she says. “I fully appreciate and honour how lucky I am to be able to do this.” Remenyi’s husband is a film producer whose salary enables them to have a single income household, and the privilege entailed in this made her feel hesitant to share her decision on social media.

“It doesn’t seem very powerful to say, I don’t want to be a career woman anymore, and I want to ‘just’ run our family now,” says Remenyi. “But I’ve had someone very close to me pass away in the last couple years. I see the fleetingness of life. If I can take hold of slowing things down, and enjoying life, I’d like to be able to see what that looks like.”

The reaction to Remenyi’s announcement was overwhelmingly supportive. “I was really touched by how much it resonated with other female business owners, and I hope it can inspire other people too,” she says. “You don’t have to be growing all the time. Success can just be … control.”

Selena Rezvani, a workplace culture consultant and author, says there is often much less agency involved in a woman’s decision to step back from her career. “Women aren’t opting out so much as they’re being pushed out of the workplace,” she says. “Since the pandemic began, more women than men have been the default care providers for their families. That’s despite the fact that having a job and income isn’t optional for many women.”

As Rezvani characterizes it, the decision to walk away is a radical act that bucks the ethos “that productivity is at the core of our value” as people. But there are some signs that opting out is slowly being normalized, like a new LinkedIn feature that allows you to list the reasons for any career breaks in your resumé.

“People are realizing that uninterrupted employment is not the primary or only marker of a fulfilling, well-rounded life. Plenty of times, that’s found in the moments represented by career off-ramps, roundabouts or entrepreneurial moves,” says Rezvani, whose latest book, “Quick Confidence,” is about how to make “bold bets” on yourself. “When it comes to taking a break or reset, remember, the best return on investment you’ll ever get is the one you make in yourself.”

There’s a clear path to the decision to opt out, says Finnish researcher Ingrid Biese, author of “Opting Out and In.”

First, people experience a “lack of coherence,” the growing realization that what they’re doing right now isn’t working for them. This can go on for months or years. Next, a “crisis” point forces you into action — a health scare, a death, a moment at work that acts the final straw. For one woman Biese interviewed, this moment was almost striking her child; she realized the stress she was experiencing was turning her into the kind of mother she’d never want to be.

Finally, there’s the leap into the unknown, which Biese describes as an “ongoing” experience, not a one-off break: “It’s a new state of mind.”

Biese points out that “opting out” — or “The Great Breakup,” in trendspotter-ese — isn’t a new phenomenon. She wrote her first book on the topic in 2017, after she herself opted out of the corporate world to pursue a PhD. She’d first seen it reported in a 2003 New York Times article as an “opt out revolution,” in which women with high-powered jobs were quitting to focus on parenthood. “They said they had a good job, but it didn’t give them a good life,” Biese recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, this opting out thing is bigger than just women. I was convinced it was a societal thing.”

She had a hunch that this shift extended beyond women who “opted out” to become stay-at-home moms, leaving the workforce for good. Biese’s research supported this hypothesis: there was no statistical evidence that “career women” who leave their careers actually stop working and become ladies of leisure.

Saying you’re leaving a high-profile position to “spend more time with your kids” is a socially acceptable way to exit a toxic situation that’s making you miserable. “Nobody will argue with that. People will say, ‘Oh, you’re such a good mom,’ and you get applauded for it,” Biese says. But, Biese says, it does contribute to a “skewed narrative” of why women leave careers.

By the way: Men opt out too. In fact, they’re leaving the workforce in record numbers. At the time that she published her second book, Men Opting Out, Biese was pretty much alone in exploring this. In fact, she struggled to get funding for the research until she rejigged her focus to how the workforce as a whole was changing. What she found that while men have been socialized to express it differently, the reasons men and women choose to opt out are essentially the same. Even among people from different countries — Biese interviewed included women from Finland, one of the most gender-equal societies in the world, and American women who can only dream of the social support their Scandi counterparts receive — the narrative was strikingly similar.

“The commonality is that they put themselves in a situation where they have more control,” says Biese. “This also provides a feeling of authenticity, like you’re finally doing what you’re supposed to be doing. That sense of, ‘I’m finally where I’m supposed to be.’”

That’s why Biese redefined the concept of “opting out” to include “opting in” as well: “It’s about creating your own definition of success.”