Why aren't more women running the world? Because the best and brightest are choosing not to - and in increasing numbers. Intelligent, high-achieving women, loaded with advanced degrees from Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, and Stanford, are choosing family concerns over those of the workplace and the feminist movement.

That is the rather startled thesis of "The Opt-Out Revolution," by Lisa Belkin, in the October 26 New York Times Magazine. It's a fascinating piece that compares the way things were supposed to be, according to feminist prophecy, with the way things are.

Fifty percent of the undergraduate class of 2003 at Yale was female, Belkin observes, and this year's graduating class at Berkeley Law School was 63 percent female. Harvard's was 46 percent and Columbia 51. Nearly 47 percent of medical students are women, as are 50 percent of undergraduate business majors, as the author notes, "recruited by top firms in all fields."

That should be good news. But according to the feminist master plan, it's not enough. Women were supposed to go on to rule the professional world but they aren't. Belkin reveals that women comprise only 16 percent of partners in law firms and 16 percent of corporate officers. Only eight companies in the Fortune 500 have female CEOs. Only 62 of 435 members of the House of Representatives are women, with 14 in the Senate. According to the feminist master plan, a woman should have been president by now and women should be ruling the roost in the business world.

Belkin finds it "explosive" that the very women who were supposed to be the professional equals of men right now are "choosing otherwise." More explosive is the concession that such women, profiled at some length in the article, are not victims of a false consciousness but indeed enjoy as much choice as men. They just exercise that choice in different ways than feminist leaders had predicted.

"I don't want to take on the mantle of all womanhood and fight a fight for some sister who isn't really my sister because I don't even know her," says Vicky Benedict, graduate of Princeton and Duke Law School. She concludes, "I like life's rhythms when I'm nurturing a child."

Explains Jeannie Tarkenton, who graduated college in 1992 and worked in publishing, "I think some of us are swinging to a place where we enjoy, and can admit we enjoy, the stereotypical role of female/mother/caregiver. I think we were born with those feelings."

A brilliant student, Katherine Brokaw earned a degree in classics at Princeton, opted for law school at Columbia, then became an associate at a major law firm before opting to stay home with her three children. "I don't want to be on the fast track leading to a partnership at a prestigious law firm," she told Belkin. "Some people define that as success. I don't."

Brokaw rejects the notion that this makes her some kind of 1950s Stepford wife, and Belkin agrees. "She is not trapped," she says. "This is a choice."

That observation, like the opinions on work and motherhood of those profiled, is a simple matter of common sense and recognition of reality. That a seasoned journalist should find this "explosive" shows how pervasive the Betty Friedan mindset has been.

Feminist dogma only works if women are supine victims who can do nothing but yield to the false consciousness of capitalist society. That is feminism's fatal stereotype. As this article shows, women have choices, and use them. Many will use the same choice to return to full-time work when their children have grown. There will be nothing explosive or revolutionary about that either.

That's how choice works and Belkin could have recognized other ways that choice carries consequences. The lifestyle choices profiled in her article are what make the comparisons of men's and women's salaries misleading or outright bogus. The same choices are what make the feminist movement and its self-appointed leaders unnecessary.

Sally Pipes is President and CEO at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.