The well-being of women is often evaluated only through economic and political lenses. From this vantage point, women opting out of full-time employment (during years of caring for young children, for instance), counts strongly against appraisals of women’s well-being.
For example, WalletHub’s 2025 assessment of Best and Worst States for Women’s Equality has ranked Utah in last place. (WalletHub ranks each state according to the differences between men and women across a variety of metrics, such as employment rate, earnings, and math scores.) As a woman who works part-time from home, I’m adding to the statistics pulling us down.
We should be vigilant about discrimination against women. If women are working less or being paid less than men because they’re being denied opportunities or facing bias, that’s a problem we should all care about. When women are deprived of fair compensation, it hurts their dependents as well as themselves, and it implies that their contributions are less valuable — which is untrue.
But assessments like WalletHub’s, which measure female empowerment mainly by education level and earnings, give the market the final say on what’s best for women. Societal values have swung from denying women opportunities to devaluing or penalizing them if they don’t organize their lives around professional attainment. Such a narrow view of women’s well-being has left many women dissatisfied despite doing all the “right” things.
In her article “The Crushing Loneliness of the Girl Boss,” Tablet columnist Katherine Dee explores the growing movement of women who feel “so deeply unhappy in lives that seemed, on the surface, to be tolerable, or even good.” Like many American women, Dee is a grateful beneficiary of expanded educational and employment opportunities for women, but she still found herself “alone facing the silence of the day.”
Dee believes that pushing women to deprioritize marriage and family life serves corporate interests more than the interests of women: “There’s this fashionable notion that women without children or husbands are happier,” says Dee of the “girlboss” narrative.
Likewise, British journalist Mary Harrington explains that “marriage is no longer a foundation and starting point for growth … but tacitly treated as an obstacle to individual flourishing.” But according to Dee, millennial women are discovering “that the burden of a family isn’t necessarily a bad one, that a life alone is only as fun as the distractions available.”
The truth is, delaying marriage and children for career places a much heavier burden on women than men, since fertility declines for women as they age. For the first time in four decades, the number of children women want is now higher than the number of children they will actually have. While career and educational outcomes are certainly an important part of empowering women, they are not enough.
“Our world just can’t sustain the lives these values have wrought,” writes Dee. “Marriage and fertility rates continue to decline; meanwhile, the rates of deaths of despair, friendlessness, and loneliness balloon.”
WalletHub ranking Utah last for women’s equality takes the view that women are, primarily, market contributors and that government policies and social expectations should treat them that way. “In the papers that fuel policy circles … high levels of homemaking are considered a stubborn problem,” writes policy analyst Patrick T. Brown. He points out that what is not discussed is whether economic growth contributes more to society than “supporting moms who want to stay home with their children, especially in the early years of life.”
In fact, research suggests that having fewer women than men actually in the workforce reflects better the preferences of many women, because most women want to participate more directly in family life in addition to work and career. As a result, flexible and part-time arrangements are more attractive to them, even if it results in lower GDP.
A 2016 Gallup report found that if a woman were free to choose working or staying home, 54% of currently employed women with children under 18 would choose not to work outside the home. It also found that women valued flexibility higher than men in the workplace. “Many women have a holistic view of life and work and look for employers that do too,” says Gallup. “They are drawn to companies that encourage, support and empower them as people — not companies that see them as just workers.”
“In fact, for decades, a majority of mothers of young children have said they prefer part-time or no employment over full-time employment” writes Jenet Erickson for the Institute for Family Studies. “Typical of other findings, a recent IFS report found that 65% of mothers with children underage five preferred part-time or no employment compared to 35% who said working full-time was ideal.”
Research by demographer Lyman Stone recently found that as a husband’s income increases, the wife’s workforce participation decreases, even if she has advanced education, such as a graduate degree. Indeed, according to Stone, high-earning men are more likely than lower-earning men to be married to a woman with an advanced degree.
But why are these women also more likely to stay at home? According to Stone, “High-income men tend to be ambitious, and so they tend to be attracted to women with a similar mindset. But that ambition isn’t always career-focused. Some ambitious women do choose the workforce as their primary outlet for exercising agency in the world—but others choose their family, or their church, or their social community.”
Such options are also important for the rising generation, as research demonstrates the benefits of women spending more time with their children in the early years of their development. “Mothers seem to sense there is something important about the care they (and other family members) provide during the earliest period of children’s development,” says Erickson, which helps to explain why “more hours per week in center-based child care (or any nonparental care) during the early years of life predicted significantly increased risk for social-emotional challenges.”
This is a widely supported finding, including the largest longitudinal study of early child care in the United States. “Research confirms that the essential task of the first period of infancy is the co-creation of a bond of emotional communication between the infant and primary caregiver,” Erickson explains, and “the mother is also psycho-biologically primed to establish the bond through which the emotional communication between them that is essential for brain development can occur.”
What this means is that the labor market is only one of many ways women make valuable contributions and find meaning. Career and family life certainly do not have to be at odds for a woman, and there is more than one way to balance motherhood and work.
But when women choose to forgo or delay their careers to spend more time with their children, it’s unfair and unwise to reflect that choice only as a missed opportunity. I hope WalletHub’s future assessments look more at how the career status of Utah’s women reflects their choices and values, and how those choices and values contribute to their overall well-being.