Aug

24

What’s Wrong With Marrying Career Women?

August 24, 2006 |

I missed yesterday’s outrage about a Forbes article by Michael Noer on career women and divorce that was temporarily pulled from the web after heavy criticism from the blogosphere. For those who have not seen the outrage, check here, here and here. And here is a short snippet which is pretty representative of the article:

Many factors contribute to a stable marriage, including the marital status of your spouse’s parents (folks with divorced parents are significantly more likely to get divorced themselves), age at first marriage, race, religious beliefs and socio-economic status. And, of course, many working women are indeed happily and fruitfully married–it’s just that they are less likely to be so than non-working women. And that, statistically speaking, is the rub.

So the article is about statistics and a man’s chance of divorce (and let’s not forget, the woman probably wanted a stable marriage as well on her wedding day, so she is getting divorced as well!) if he marries a woman with a career of her own. All I can say is: suck it up. Every time I try to talk to my student about statistics I get the same knee-jerk reaction I see in the blogosphere. “Oh, but my parents are happily married.” “Oh, but I know a woman in my neighborhood who runs a company.” It’s statistics. It’s an average. It doesn’t mean every career woman is going to get divorced (or married to a guy who can’t handle it). Maybe the truth isn’t what we wanted it to be, maybe we need more truthiness in statistics, but come on, the article’s statistics are pretty solid. It’s simple economic theory. It’s an academic exercise.

What about this part:

There’s more: According to a wide-ranging review of the published literature, highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 more likely to have cheated than those with high school diplomas.) Additionally, individuals who earn more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat.

Great news if you are a Ph.D married to a Ph.D. Oh, and what about this:

Divorce has been positively correlated with higher rates of alcoholism, clinical depression and suicide.

How are we going to argue about this? What does this have to do with feminism? I wonder if the same people would also be outraged about this paper, which claims that easy access to porn for adults and teenagers has led to the number of incidents of rape going down… Oh well - end of rant - back to work.

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1 Comment so far

  1. Blitzgal on August 24, 2006 1:01 pm

    The statistics are incidental to the outrage that I’ve read concerning this article. The author of this opnion piece have taken statistics that were basically non-gendered and spun them in a particular way to purposely put women in a negative light. No matter that he could’ve just as easily pointed out that career men have similar flaws when it comes to sustaining long term relationships. No, he chose to put it into terms that suggest the best–no, the ONLY–woman worth marrying is the barefoot and pregnant kind. That’s the outrage, and THAT’S what it has to do with feminism.

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