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 I had to state my disbelief after reading Michael Noer's article "Don't Marry Career Women" at Forbes.com. He writes about a recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, that found that "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." I found these to be pretty heavy acccusations against marriage! While Noer acknowledges that men, particularly successful men, prefer to date women with similar interests and aspirations,. this is good only up until marriage because -- "the more successful she is the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you." The problems with these conclusions can be found in the Social Forces journal Noer cites. First of all, the study uses a very wide criteria for their definition of a "career woman" -- "[She] has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year." Secondly, the marital problems associated with women who work outside of the home are concluded to be due to their lack of attention to women's traditional in-home jobs. Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker is cited as stating that the "labor specialization" in a marriage decreases when both spouses have careers. Consequently, less of the total needed household work gets done, making life harder for both partners. So the overall value of the marriage is lower and divorce therefore becomes more likely.
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Call me a snobby New Yorker, but the career women I know make three to ten times that amount, and are much more likely to outsource or delegate their household duties. They do so in order to make sure that chores as mundane as laundry and vacuuming don't get in the way of their ability to continue making money AND having a happy and satisfying marriage. It's not until the end of the article that Noer acknowledges that happy and healthy marriages can and actually do exist. He cites research indicating that ". . . a good marriage is associated with a higher income, a longer, healthier life and better-adjusted kids." He even speculates that a happy marriage may be due to the good initial mental health of the partners, regardless of the professional aspirations of the wife. Interestingly, this article came to my attention at the same time that I've been reading the post-humous publication of a novel by Wendy Wasserstein entitled, "Elements of Style." In one passage, two socialites were talking about the phenomenon of career women leaving their jobs after marrying. One says to the other, "Honey, the better nursery schools in New York are chock-full of mothers who graduated Columbia and Stanford Business, and even Yale Law School. . . . These girls can't wait to give up their work . . . . and then those nursery schools have the best-run bake sales in the country." So I say to men -- marry those career women you're dating! Your life will only be better for it.
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