Photo: The New York Times piece on the “opt-out generation” focused on the lives of upper-crust ladies.

If there’s one thing the wives and husbands profiled in The New York Times magazine’s opt-out generation cover story can agree on, it’s that someone needs to pick up the house and get dinner on the table.

And while two of those wives mention having hired someone to help with domestic labor, Judith Warner’s reporting shows that this work largely falls to the women themselves—the wives and moms who had made good money (one’s salary was $500,000 at her peak) at careers in corporate sales and network news production, and then left to give their full attention to their families.

It’s no surprise that the desire to have well-supported children and a clean home (if not the will to make it happen) is gender-neutral, nor should it be a shocker that people across the class continuum want the same thing.

A study released in July by the Brookings Institution found that nearly 40 percent of women who head households that have an average annual income of $14,000—households in the bottom third of U.S. income distribution—said they don’t work because they need to take care of their home or family. In fact, this was the reason poor women gave most frequently for not working, followed by a fifth of those surveyed who said they couldn’t find work. (Poor men said they weren’t employed for different reasons. Nearly a third said their job searches had been unsuccessful, followed by just over a fifth who said they were ill or disabled.)

Poor women’s concerns get a nod, albeit parenthetically, in the Times story. Of the wealthier women who are her article’s focus, Warner writes of their choice a decade ago, “They were a small demographic to be sure (another, larger, group who left the work force at that time — poor mothers who couldn’t afford child care — went without notice), but they garnered a great deal of media attention.” Of the story’s nearly 6,500 words, poor and low-income women’s lives get 21.

But poor mothers are at the center of Brookings’ 40-page report, titled “Strategies for Assisting Low-Income Families.” It found that low-income households – those in that bottom third – are disproportionately headed by people who are women, of color and under the age of 40. The researchers also explored possible ways to improve these families’ lives and zeroed in on the effects of creating more jobs, increasing minimum wage to $9 and getting high school diplomas into more people’s hands.