Career woman controversy

Seems to me that this warning, written by Michael Noer, [and commented upon here by Rebecca Traister, ] is aimed squarely at all the emotionally (and otherwise insecure) lazy men in the world, who want to be able to remain lazy and cowardly during their marriages - and get away with it. Same old song, played again. We who love strong women reject this argument.

Opinion
Careers And Marriage
Forbes.com Forbes.com published a story Aug. 22 by editor Michael Noer on two-career relationships that provoked a heated response from both outside and inside our building. Elizabeth Corcoran, a member of our Silicon Valley bureau and principal author of the magazine's current cover story on robots, sent in this rebuttal. Here's a link for reader discussion.

Point: Don't Marry Career Women By Michael Noer How do women, careers and marriage mix? Not well, say social scientists. 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 and 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 nonworking 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 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 "nonmarket" 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 his or her mate run off with a co-worker: When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase that he or she will meet someone more likable 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 extramarital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 times 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. 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%. 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 titled "What Do Social Scientists Know About the Benefits of Marriage?," marriage is positively associated with "better outcomes for children under most circumstances" and 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.

Counterpoint: Don't Marry A Lazy Man By Elizabeth Corcoran Studies aside, modern marriage is a two-way street. Men should own up to their responsibilities, too. Girlfriends: a word of advice. Ask your man the following question: When was the last time you learned something useful, either at home or work? If the last new skill your guy learned was how to tie his shoes in the second grade, dump him. If he can pick up new ideas faster than your puppy, you've got a winner. I'm not usually a fan of dipstick tests, particularly when it comes to marriage and relationships. But a downright frightening story written by my colleague, Michael Noer, on our Web site today drove me to it. According to the experts cited by Michael, marrying a "career girl" seems to lead to a fate worse than tangling with a hungry cougar. OK, call me a cougar. I've been working since the day I graduated from college 20-odd years ago. I have two grade-school-aged children. Work definitely takes up more than 35 hours a week for me. Thankfully, I do seem to make more than $30,000. All of which, according to Michael, should make me a wretched wife. In spite of those dangerous statistics, my husband and I are about to celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary. You'll see us snuggling at a mountain-winery concert this month, enjoying the occasion. I don't think I'm all that unusual--so it seemed like a good time to test Michael's grim assertions. The experts cited in his story think that professional women are more likely to get divorced, to cheat and to be grumpy about either having kids or not having them. But rather than rush to blame the woman, let's not overlook the other key variable: What is the guy doing? Take, for instance, the claim that professional women are more likely to get divorced because they're more likely to meet someone in the workforce who will be "more attractive" than that old squashed-couch hubby at home. Women have faced this kind of competition squarely for years. Say you marry your college heartthrob. Ten years later, he's working with some good-looking gals--nymphets just out of college, or the more sophisticated types who spent two years building houses in Africa before they went to Stanford Business School. What do you do? A: Stay home, whine and eat chocolate. B: Take up rock climbing, read interesting books and continue to develop that interesting personality he fell in love with in the first place. Note to guys: Start by going to the gym. Then try some new music. Or a book. Or a movie. Keep connected to the rest of the world. You'll win--and so will your marriage. There is, of course, the continual dilemma of who does the work around the house. But if both spouses are working, guess what? They've got enough income to hire someone else to fold laundry, mop floors, etc. Money is a problem? Honestly, the times money has been the biggest problem for us have been when we were short of it--not when one of us is earning more than the other. When we have enough to pay the bills, have some fun and save a bit, seems like the rules of preschool should take over: Play nice, be fair and take turns. In two-career couples, Michael frets, there's less specialization in the marriage, so supposedly the union becomes less useful to either party. Look more closely, Mike! Any long-running marriage is packed full of carefully developed--and charmingly offsetting--areas of expertise. For us, the list starts with taxes, vacation planning and investment management. My husband likes that stuff, and it leaves me yawning. Bless him for doing it. Give me the wireless Internet system, the garden or just about any routine home repairs, and I'm suddenly the savant. Tear us apart, and we'd both be pitiful idiots trying to learn unfamiliar routines. Michael is right that longer work hours force two-career couples to try harder to clear out blocks of family time. When we do, though, we get to enjoy a lot more. We understand each other's career jokes and frustrations. We're better sounding boards on what to do next. And at dinner parties, we actually like to be seated at the same table. The essence of a good marriage, it seems to me, is that both people have to learn to change and keep on adapting. Children bring tons of change. Mothers encounter it first during the nine months of pregnancy, starting with changing body dimensions. But fathers have to learn to adapt, too, by learning to help care for children, to take charge of new aspects of a household, to adapt as the mothers change. So, guys, if you're game for an exciting life, go ahead and marry a professional gal.

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Unhappily ever after

An article in Forbes says that marrying a woman who makes over $30,000 a year will ensure a life of illness, filth and cuckolding. How did we get here again?

By Rebecca Traister

Aug. 24, 2006 | "Don't Marry Career Women" is what the headline of the Aug. 22 Forbes.com story read. Just like that. "Don't Marry Career Women." It was easy to blink, shake your head like you were seeing things. Surely it was a joke, something out of the Onion. A provocative headline on a more nuanced story. But then came the text, by Michael Noer, an executive editor and writer for Forbes.com.

He conceded that his flashy suggestion might come as a buzz kill for many guys, "particularly successful men" who might be "attracted to women with similar goals and aspirations." And why shouldn't they be, he continued. "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?"

Yeah, it did sound familiar. Familiar like a figment from the 1950s, the bad old days that today's young women know about only from their mothers and from kitschy retro-magnets. But it was 2006 and here was a genuine dinosaur of unenlightened gender incivility, published not in some righty rag but in a supposedly mainstream business publication -- in which Bono recently invested! -- a magazine that ostensibly has female readers and that covers female business people and that has for several years published an annual list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. That publication was telling its readers that working women make bad wives!

Well, for 48 hours at least. Sometime around 5:30 on Wednesday, Aug. 23, two days after its publication, "Don't Marry Career Women" disappeared from the Forbes.com Web site, along with an earlier story by Noer, titled "The Economics of Prostitution,"* in which he compared "wives" to "whores" and wrote that "the implication remains that wives and whores are -- if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi -- something akin to champagne and beer. The same sort of thing." Both stories had been linked on many Web sites that almost uniformly derided them and their author. (*this other story - about wives vs prostitutes - follows this present story and is included below)

But about three hours after the story's sudden absence from the Web, a visitor to the Forbes.com site found "Careers and Marriage," a debate. Editors had reframed Noer's story as one half of a "point-counterpoint" discussion, lightening its heft as an institutional statement by pairing it with a rebuttal by married female columnist Elizabeth Corcoran. "Don't Marry a Lazy Man" was the title of Corcoran's take, which flaccidly asserted that "Studies aside, modern marriage is a two way street. Men should own up to their responsibilities, too." Corcoran's retort rested on the fact that despite being the kind of woman Noer thinks would make a bad wife, she and her husband have been married for 18 years and that this month they plan to engage in some "snuggling at a mountain-winery concert." As of this writing, Noer's "Economics of Prostitution" story was still unavailable online.

"The story about careers was taken down so we could put up a new, enhanced package which includes Michael's original story," said a Forbes.com spokeswoman in an e-mail late Wednesday. She said that she did not know when or if the "wife or whore" story would go back up. On Tuesday, the same spokeswoman had e-mailed Salon to say that "the piece and its sourcing speaks [sic] for itself. Forbes is known for its provocative opinion and Forbes.com's readership -- both male and female -- expects nothing less." Noer was out of the office this week -- it has been reported elsewhere that he was ironically attending a wedding -- and Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment was also on vacation.

The furor over "Don't Marry Career Women" is a testament to the speed of an angry blogosphere, but also to the anachronistic and wholly outrageous tone of the article. It was easy to wonder how we had traveled through space and time to a moment at which it was OK to publish this kind of thing. Was it a result of the recent press success of Caitlin Flanagan, who urged women to stay at home and service their spouses? Was it the repeated chirruping of David Brooks and John Tierney about how educated women will end up lonely spinsters? Had our sense of what passes for enlightened thought eroded so steadily that at last some twerp at Forbes was able to just explode it without any of his bosses even noticing for a while? A while being since February, in the case of the "Economics of Prostitution" piece.

In "Don't Marry Career Women" Noer earnestly cataloged the deficiencies of an employed wife, cheekily dropping phrases like "career girls" and "folks," and putting "feminist" in scare quotes as if he were a wannabe Rat-Packer, his hair slick with Bryl-Cream.

Much of the data on which Noer drew came from conservative think tanks or dubious-sounding publications. The National Marriage Project. "What's Love Got to Do With It," a 2006 study that even Noer admitted is "controversial." Sylvia Ann Hewlett. (He also cited more mainstream sources, like USA Today.) But the traditionalist, reactionary bent of many of his footnoted sources only amplified his police siren of a thesis.

An accompanying slide show listed the "Nine Reasons to Steer Clear of Career Women," starting with the news that a professionally successful woman won't want to marry you -- "you" being Noer's male reader; he didn't bother to pretend that he might have any female eyes skimming his work -- because high-achieving women "search less intensively for a match," and "have higher standards for an acceptable match than women who work less and earn less."

If your working girl should unwisely deign to hitch her wagon to your star, according to Noer, it won't be long before she's cheating on you, a quagmire illustrated by a photo of a hussy lounging in red lingerie, barely concealing her adulterous assets. According to Noer, working women stray when a wife ventures outside the home, because a job increases the chances that "[she'll] meet someone [she] likes more than you." That surely doesn't sound like a stretch in this case.

Noer's list went on. Rosie, your riveting bride, will be less likely to bear you children. If she does, she'll be unhappy because wealthier women are "used to 'a professional life, a fun, active, entertaining life,'" and will therefore be dismayed at the un-fun and un-entertaining responsibilities of child-rearing. If you marry one of these witches, "Your house will be dirtier," since studies show that a woman who makes more than $15 an hour "will do 1.9 hours less housework a week." Perhaps the saddest result of your careerist heterosexual union is that "You're more likely to fall ill." That because according to research he's unearthed, wives who work more than 40 hours a week "do not have adequate time to monitor their husband's [sic] health and healthy behavior, to manage their husband's [sic] emotional well-being or buffer his workplace stress."

These daggers of poetic injustice were accompanied by photos of a virile bearded man looking glum, a creamy white shag carpet dusted with a squalid layer of cheez-kurls, unvacuumed thanks to those 1.9 hours of undone housework, and a working mother so tormented by her lot that a solitary, glycerine tear slurked down her cheek.

The piece was so utterly ludicrous that for some, it was hard to do much but laugh. "I'm deeply grateful to Forbes Magazine 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, other than a double standard of sexual behavior," wrote Gloria Steinem in an e-mail. "Since a disproportionate number of such unconfident and boring guys apparently read Forbes, the magazine has performed a real service."

Steinem wasn't the only reader to raise her eyebrows and emit a pitying chuckle. Linda Hirshman, who has recently urged women to stay in the workforce and make their families work by limiting the number of children they have, "marrying down," and negotiating for truly equitable divisions of domestic work, is essentially Michael Noer's worst nightmare. Her response to the story was to drily note that "women are not natural slaves, as so many sociobiologists would like us to believe. Ergo, they get harder to bargain with as they get more resources. This is actually good news. If men want doormats, they will have to marry dummies and anticipate dependents. There's a price to acquiring someone willing to take a bad bargain."

And while many of the successful women that Forbes covers were unavailable for comment in this third week of August (on vacation, undoubtedly engaging in the kind of "fun, active, entertaining life" that makes them sulky about domestic drudgery), some were in their offices … and pissed. "It's incredibly disappointing to see them publish a piece that makes such gross generalizations about working women," said Travelocity president and CEO Michelle Peluso, who has been featured in Forbes and who said she planned to approach the magazine directly about the piece. "Especially considering how hard women have worked to balance being great wives, mothers, managers, employees and individuals. This article feels like one that would have been behind the times were it published in 1950, nevermind 2006."

If the whole debacle feels pre-historicized, there's a reason for it, said Hirshman by phone. In part, its anachronistic feel comes from the fact that it is based on backward-looking data rather than anything that might account for or anticipate changing social and sexual attitudes. In this, it resembles the famous Newsweek piece claiming that women over 35 had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married, a story that was recently recanted 20 years too late.

"Even assuming [Noer] was relying on good data, all it is is information from the past, which is that women's expectations rose while husbands' behaviors did not change," said Hirshman. "If you have to choose between acting like a jerk and marrying a bimbo on one hand and acting like a mensch and marrying a Harvard grad on the other, then I think men may change their behavior." A piece like Noer's, which assumed that men are not capable of changing, not capable, say, of taking on more "non-market" domestic work or being otherwise equal partners who enjoy robust relationships, is, Hirshman argued, "very misanthropic and anti-male."

She's right. But what's also right is that this piece -- that, yes, treated men like limp, pasty, hideous creatures who can only be happy if they feel dominant and unthreatened -- was actually dressed up as purely anti-female.

And not just dressed up -- tailored to his ideological specifications. At one point, while making his point that high-earning women aren't as motivated to marry, Noer admitted that the same statistics he was relying on showed that for black women, the opposite was true. This serious disqualifier -- that the assertion does not seem to be true for a large chunk of the female population -- did not deter him. For his purposes, black women did not seem to count. Neither did not-rich ones. As he so poetically put it, "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 a year."

At another point in his story, Noer also conceded that some of the studies cited "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.'" To translate this into a completely common-sense observation: Women who work tend to have a better ability to get out of rotten marriages than women who do not work and have no means to support themselves. Guess what? This is great news.

But look at what all this hemming and hawing and all the misandry of Noer's argument got boiled down to. After all, it was not headlined "Don't Marry White Career Girls" or "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."

No. Just "Don't Marry Career Women." It's a dinosaur. And what's scary is that it has walked the earth again.

-- By Rebecca Traister

Money
The Economics Of Prostitution
Michael Noer, 02.14.06, 12:00 PM ET

Wife or whore?

The choice is that simple. At least according to economists Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn, it is.

The two well-respected economists created a minor stir in academic circles a few years back when they published "A Theory of Prostitution" in the Journal of Political Economy. The paper was remarkable not only for being accepted by a major journal but also because it considered wives and whores as economic "goods" that can be substituted for each other. Men buy, women sell.

Economists have been equating money and marriage ever since Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker published his seminal paper "A Theory of Marriage" in two parts in 1973 and 1974--also, not coincidentally, in the Journal of Political Economy.

Becker used market analysis to tackle the questions of whom, when and why we marry. His conclusions? Mate selection is a market, and marriages occur only if they are profitable for both parties involved.

Becker allowed nonmonetary elements, like romantic love and companionship, to be entered into courtship's profit and loss statement. And children, in particular, were important. "Sexual gratification, cleaning, feeding and other services can be purchased, but not children: Both the man and the woman are required to produce their own children and perhaps to raise them," he wrote.

But back to whores: Edlund and Korn admit that spouses and streetwalkers aren't exactly alike. Wives, in truth, are superior to whores in the economist's sense of being a good whose consumption increases as income rises--like fine wine. This may explain why prostitution is less common in wealthier countries. But the implication remains that wives and whores are--if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi--something akin to champagne and beer. The same sort of thing.

As with Becker, a key differentiator in Edlund and Korn's model is reproductive sex. Wives can offer it, whores can not.

To be fair, Edlund and Korn were merely building an admittedly grossly simplified model of human behavior in an attempt to answer a nagging question: Why do hookers make so much money? Prostitution is, seemingly, a low-skill but high-pay profession with few upfront costs, micro-miniskirts and stiletto heels aside.

Yet according to data assembled from a wide variety of times and places, ranging from mid-15th-century France to Malaysia of the late 1990s, prostitutes make more money--in some cases, a lot more money--than do working girls who, well, work for a living. This held true even for places where prostitution is legal and relatively safe. In short, streetwalkers aren't necessarily being paid more for their increased risk of going to jail or the hospital.

Notwithstanding Jerry Hall's quip when she was married to Mick Jagger, about being "a maid in the living room and a whore in the bedroom," one normally cannot be both a wife and a whore. "Combine this with the fact that marriage can be an important source of income for women, and it follows that prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of forgone-marriage market earnings," Edlund and Korn conclude.

Ouch.

Another zinger: "This begs the question of why married men go to prostitutes (rather than buying from their wives, who presumably will be low-cost providers, considering that they can sell nonreproductive sex without compromising their marriage)." Guys, nothing says "Happy Valentine's Day" more than "low-cost provider."

Of course, it's easy to pour cold water on some of the assumptions made in Edlund and Korn's mathematical model. But these so-called "stylized facts" are supposed to predict human behavior; they don't necessarily pretend to mirror it.

In particular, the assumption that there is no "third way" between wife and whore is problematic, if not outright offensive: "The third alternative, working in a regular job but not marrying, can be ruled out, since we assume that the only downside of marriage for a woman is the forgone opportunity for prostitution."

Be sure to let all your married friends know what they're missing.

Also, the emphasis on the utility of children is puzzling. In most Western democracies, fertility rates have plummeted as wealth has increased. Empirically, men not only buy fewer whores as they get richer, but they have fewer children.

Still, the economic analysis of marriage explains one age-old phenomenon: gold digging.

"In particular, does our analysis justify the popular belief that more beautiful, charming and talented women tend to marry wealthier and more successful men?" wrote Becker. His answer: "A positive sorting of nonmarket traits with nonhuman wealth always, and with earnings power, usually, maximizes commodity output over all marriages."

In other words, yes, supermodels do prefer aging billionaires. And Gary Becker proved it mathematically decades before The Donald married Melania.