Experiences of Brazilian Women in Light of the ‘Opt Out’ Phenomenon

This paper aims to understand the reasons that led women with consolidated careers to interrupt their professional lives due to the work-family conflict. In order to reach the objective, in-depth interviews were carried out with fifteen married professionals, who are mothers, and have higher education some of which are post-graduated.The interviewees' nar-ratives were analyzed using content analysis. The results suggest that such a decision, far from being the expression of free choice, is the result of a set of pressures from the work environ-ment, the dominant social construction of gender, and constraints associated with social origin. Also, although many interviewees resent this decision, their discourse endorses its character of “choice” as they do not recognize the structural constraints that condition it.