Top Magazine Rips Women

-


Forbe reveals why working girl makes a bad wife, and a bad mother.


Article in the Forbes Magazine:

By Michael Noer, the Managing Editor of Forbes.com

"Don't Marry Career Women"

Guys, a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women, even those with a "feminist" outlook, are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

Not a happy conclusion, especially given that many men, particularly successful men, are attracted to women with similar goals and aspirations. And why not? After all, your typical career girl is well educated, ambitious, informed and engaged. All seemingly good things, right? Sure, at least until you get married. Then, to put it bluntly, the more successful she is the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you. Sound familiar?

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.

To be clear, we're not talking about a high-school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a "career girl" has a university level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than 30,000 dollars a year.

If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill (American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier (Institute for Social Research).

Why? Well, despite the fact that the link between work, women and divorce rates is complex and controversial, much of the reasoning is based on a lot of economic theory and a bit of common sense. In classic economics, a marriage is, at least in part, an exercise in labor specialization. Traditionally men have tended to do "market" or paid work outside the home and women have tended to do "non-market" or household work, including raising children. All of the work must get done by somebody, and this pairing, regardless of who is in the home and who is outside the home, accomplishes that goal. Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker argued that when the labor specialization in a marriage decreases, if, for example, both spouses have careers, the overall value of the marriage is lower for both partners because less of the total needed work is getting done, making life harder for both partners and divorce more likely. And, indeed, empirical studies have concluded just that.

In 2004, John H. Johnson examined data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and concluded that gender has a significant influence on the relationship between work hours and increases in the probability of divorce. Women's work hours consistently increase divorce, whereas increases in men's work hours often have no statistical effect. "I also find that the incidence in divorce is far higher in couples where both spouses are working than in couples where only one spouse is employed," Johnson says. A few other studies, which have focused on employment (as opposed to working hours) have concluded that working outside the home actually increases marital stability, at least when the marriage is a happy one. But even in these studies, wives' employment does correlate positively to divorce rates, when the marriage is of "low marital quality."

The other reason a career can hurt a marriage will be obvious to anyone who has seen their mate run off with a co-worker: When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they'll meet someone they like more than you. "The work environment provides a host of potential partners," researcher Adrian J. Blow reported in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, "and individuals frequently find themselves spending a great deal of time with these individuals."

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 dollars a year are more likely to cheat.

And if the cheating leads to divorce, you're really in trouble. Divorce has been positively correlated with higher rates of alcoholism, clinical depression and suicide. Other studies have associated divorce with increased rates of cancer, stroke, and sexually transmitted disease. Plus divorce is financially devastating. According to one recent study on "Marriage and Divorce's Impact on Wealth," published in The Journal of Sociology, divorced people see their overall net worth drop an average of 77 percent.

So why not just stay single? Because, academically speaking, a solid marriage has a host of benefits beyond just individual "happiness." There are broader social and health implications as well. According to a 2004 paper entitled "What Do Social Scientists Know About the Benefits of Marriage?" marriage is positively associated with "better outcomes for children under most circumstances," higher earnings for adult men, and "being married and being in a satisfying marriage are positively associated with health and negatively associated with mortality." In other words, a good marriage is associated with a higher income, a longer, healthier life and better-adjusted kids.

A word of caution, though: As with any social scientific study, it's important not to confuse correlation with causation. In other words, just because married folks are healthier than single people, it doesn't mean that marriage is causing the health gains. It could just be that healthier people are more likely to be married.

Forbes then makes the point in photographs:

In Pictures: Nine Reasons To Steer Clear Of Career Women

--

The Sunday Times

Guy talk hits career women where it hurts

THEY are picky about who they will marry, tend to have flings, put off having children to the point of infertility, keep dirty homes and are miserable to boot. So why marry a career woman? The argument that working women make lousy wives was given a new lease of life last week by Forbes, a top American business magazine, prompting a slew of furious protests from women readers. One typical response was that the article was “blood-boilingly misogynistic”.

Written by Michael Noer, a senior editor with Forbes.com, it began: “Guys, a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.”

He went on: “While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it.”

Noer’s article was a particularly brutal and highly selective way of summarising recent research, which has revived the long-tarnished concept of the “happy housewife”.

To many readers it was infuriating that a respected magazine that features female leaders of industry and finance on its covers could publish such “retro-nonsense”. Michelle Peluso, chief executive of Travelocity, America’s fifth largest travel agency, said: “This article feels like one that would have been behind the times were it published in 1950, never mind 2006.”

Gloria Steinem, the pioneering feminist who famously worked as a bunny girl to expose sexism in the 1960s, rallied anew to the cause in Salon.com, where she praised Forbes sarcastically for “saving many women the trouble of dealing with men who can’t tolerate equal partnerships, take care of their own health, clean up after themselves or have the sexual confidence to survive”.

The glamorous Steinem, however, did not marry until she was 66 and does not have children. Struggles over issues such as childlessness and fertility, the “mommy wars” between stay-at-home mothers and working women and the alleged misery of wives who try to juggle home and career have become publishing staples, squarely aimed at the women’s market.

In the tabloids the topic is equally hotly debated. If celebrity magazines are to be believed, the marriage of Hollywood stars Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt foundered partly over Aniston’s desire to pursue a film career before babies. Meanwhile, Britney Spears’s marriage to the dancer Kevin Federline is under scrutiny because she wears the trousers.

So had Noer provoked a tidal wave of anger by telling a few home truths? And was his chief crime the fact that a man was saying it? It did not help his cause that Noer had previously earned his credentials as a male chauvinist pig with an article on the “economics of prostitution” in which he posed the question, “Wife or Whore? The choice is that simple”.

Under pressure from staff and readers, Forbes showed a distinct lack of confidence in Noer’s latest thesis, which was entitled Don’t Marry a Career Woman, by removing the juiciest bits from its website.

A section headlined: In Pictures, Nine Reasons to Steer Clear, which included the warning “She is more likely to cheat on you” accompanied by a photograph of a scantily clad woman lying across a man’s lap, was speedily replaced with a riposte by Elizabeth Corcoran, a Forbes executive, wife and mother of two. It was headlined: Don’t Marry a Lazy Man.

Gone too was a photo and caption for the claim that “she’ll be unhappy if she makes more than you”, taken from a report by two sociology professors, What’s Love Got to Do with It, published this year in the journal Social Forces. Noer failed to mention that other research suggested “increases in married women’s income may indirectly lower the risk of divorce by increasing women’s marital happiness”.

The much-pilloried Noer has been forbidden by Forbes to give interviews. Yet some of his most controversial assertions, including “You are much less likely to have kids”, had already been made by women. Noer cites research by Sylvia Hewlett in her much-discussed book Baby Hunger, which claims that only 51 percent of high-achieving women earning more than 100,000 dollars a year have had children by the age of 40.

He might equally have referred to the bestselling book "The Bitch in The House", edited by Cathi Hanauer, a collection of essays by career women who write of their rage at dealing with the kids, cleaning up after working husbands and coping with do-nothing men.

There is also To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Your Inner Housewife by Caitlin Flanagan, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, which Virago is bringing out in Britain next month.

In her book Flanagan compares the so called epidemic of sexless marriages today with the “repressed and much pitied 1950s wives” who were “apparently getting a lot more action”.

“Nowadays, American parents of a certain social class seem squeaky clean, high achieving, flush with cash, relatively exhausted, obsessed with their children, and somehow, how to pinpoint this?, undersexed,” she writes.

Inevitably much of the debate comes down to personal experience. Molly Jong Fast, a 27 year old writer, surprised her friends by getting married in white three years ago and giving birth to a son. “My experience with stay-at-home moms is that they are more depressed, more lonely, more obsessed with their kids, more unhealthy, more likely to be left by their husbands and more likely to be divorced,” she said. “They are dependent on their husbands for money, and that power balance is the kiss of death. I have my own life and it makes me more desirable to my husband.”

As Noer has found, when men join in the conversation they sound horribly sexist. Yet with women now making up 48 percent of the American workforce, men are going to have to live with career women, like it or not.

The website Salon.com suggested last week that the article might just as well have been called, If You Are Really Self Loathing and Weak, Try to Find Someone Who Doesn’t Work and Will Consent to Live With You Out of Financial Desperation For the Rest of Her Life.

THE RESEARCH

SHE’LL CHEAT ON YOU

A woman is more likely to have an affair if she is better educated than her husband. Work provides chances to meet new lovers

– Adrian J Blow, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 2005

SHE’LL DESERT YOU

Marriage to a career women is more likely to end in tears. Women who work longer hours are more prone to divorce, while men’s working hours have no effect

– Dr John H Johnson of Nera Economic Consulting, 2004

SHE WON’T BEAR YOU CHILDREN

A high-flying woman is less likely to have children. Only half of women earning more than 52,000 Pounds a year have had childen by the age of 40, compared with 81 percent of comparable men

– Sylvia Hewlett, author and economist, 2002

KIDS WOULD MAKE HER UNHAPPY

Wealthier couples with children suffer a drop in marital satisfaction three times as great as their less affluent peers. Researchers believe this is because wealthier women are used to “a professional life, a fun, active, entertaining life”

Twenge, Campbell and Foster, Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003

YOUR HOUSE WILL BE DIRTY

A wife earning more than 16,000 Pounds a year does 1.9 hours less housework per week. This can be remedied if the husband picks up the vacuum cleaner

– Achen and Stafford, University of Michigan, 2005


Comment: Forbes is now telling men of the 21st century that career girls are bad news, they destroy marriages: Women who climb the ladder of success are bad mothers and bad wives. The city chicks are incapable of rational thinking. Career minded ladies have no love for their children; how can they ever love their husbands. Working women put money first and home second. Office girls who are busy in furthering their careers are not interested in settling down with a family. For working girls money and position is the prime objective far above a stable family life with a husband and his children. If feminists could actually think then they would love their kids more than money and office. Men are sure to suffer if they married a working woman who is chasing a career. Boys will now be in turmoil over finding best partner for life.

--