Is Breast-Feeding Making Working Women Poorer?

Ah-ha! says Hanna Rosin in a recent post on Slate.com’s blog The XX Factor titled Breast-feed More, Earn Less.  She finally has proof that breast-feeding really does hold working women back: a new study from Princeton University that, she writes, shows a correlation between women who breast-feed and lower earnings a decade later.  

But there’s a problem, and an ironic one at that, for a journalist who wrote a whole article in The Atlantic criticizing the media for misrepresenting research to promote breast-feeding.  (Check out my response to the article.)  The study that Rosin links to doesn’t even claim the conclusion that she draws in her post on Slate.  In fact, here’s what the Princeton article — a text document that hasn’t been published in any peer-reviewed journals — says:

Of those working, breastfeeders…are more often in professional/managerial occupations (33% vs. 20%), and earn more income annually ($22,979 vs. $17,732) and hourly ($14 vs. $10) (both in 2000 dollars) than formula feeding working mothers…further analyses will be conducted shortly to assess how breastfeeding versus formula feeding impacts women’s wages and work characteristics over time.  (Emphasis is mine.)

So what gives?  This conclusion hardly suggests what Hanna Rosin says in her post, and she mischaracterizes the research badly.  The paper uses existing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to draw its conclusions — it does not, as Rosin writes, [survey] 2,484 women each year for 10 years before and after childbearing.  It’s true that women born between 1957 and 1964 were interviewed for the NLSY about childrearing and work, but it isn’t true that they were interviewed specifically for this study exploring the link between nursing and income.  

And it gets even more confusing.  Rosin quotes the study in her Slate post as saying:

Although, at two years before birth, both breastfeeding groups earned statistically significantly higher incomes than the formula feeders, by year 10 this advantage has disappeared—formula feeders and short-duration breastfeeders do not have significantly different incomes, and long-duration breastfeeders earn significantly less than formula feeders.

Using the link Rosin provides, I read the paper and couldn’t find anything remotely akin to this quote, or the conclusion it supports.  In fact the authors say that their research is ongoing and they hope to find out more about how breastfeeding might affect long-term income, but that was not a part of their initial review of the literature.

To be clear, I think it’s a worthy endeavor to consider the costs and benefits of breast-feeding for working mothers.  Thinking about nursing as part of a constellation of factors that might lead women to “opt out” after they have children is important, because it can help companies enact innovative policies that keep those women as part of the workforce. 

But I’m appalled at the lazy and misleading journalism that’s informing our broader understanding of these issues.  And I can’t imagine that a similar piece on another issue would make it by fact-checkers.  Maybe I’m naive to think that Slate.com has fact-checkers — do internet publications employ such outdated methods of ensuring quality?

Until journalists covering work-life issues take themselves as seriously as those covering other kinds of stories, they are doing the working families they cover a grave disservice.  How depressing that we must depend on such weak representatives to report our stories.  

Related links:

• Samantha Henig writes a weak response on Slate.com to Hanna Rosin’s post.  I don’t think Henig actually read the Princeton paper.  Rosin responds to Henig, saying that even if the research suggests only a correlation, not a causation, it will help us expand the debate.  (Personally, I’m not interested in debating spurious research.)
• Check out the reader responses to this debate at Slate’s The Fray; some are quite good.
• A hilarious post on Hanna Rosin’s breast-feeding article in The Atlantic by Greg Allen at DaddyTypes.
• Local or Express has a well-written post criticizing Hanna Rosin’s original Atlantic article.