(b) that intelligent women have a significantly lower chance of getting married. He not only blasts last week's NYTimes piece by Maureen Dowd, but even examines the studies being discussed, and points out that the wording leads casual readers astray -- even at the extremes, there is only about a 5% difference in marriage rates between the groups studied. Not much basis for a whirlwind of societal self-examination!
Thursday, January 20, 2005
What do men/women want?
An excellent post from Ampersand at Alas, a Blog about the popular belief that (a) men want to marry women who aren't as smart as they are, and/or (b) that intelligent women have a significantly lower chance of getting married. He not only blasts last week's NYTimes piece by Maureen Dowd, but even examines the studies being discussed, and points out that the wording leads casual readers astray -- even at the extremes, there is only about a 5% difference in marriage rates between the groups studied. Not much basis for a whirlwind of societal self-examination!
(b) that intelligent women have a significantly lower chance of getting married. He not only blasts last week's NYTimes piece by Maureen Dowd, but even examines the studies being discussed, and points out that the wording leads casual readers astray -- even at the extremes, there is only about a 5% difference in marriage rates between the groups studied. Not much basis for a whirlwind of societal self-examination!
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1 comment:
Sure, Dowd may have drawn more damning inferences from the two cited studies than someone else would. Hey, it's an Op-Ed piece; so long as she doesn't materially misrepresent the investigators' findings (and I don't think it's fair to accuse her of that), she's entitled to her opinion. In fact, I'd be more critical of Dowd for conflating social power, material success, and intelligence. As for the cited studies, even a small statistical difference represents a hell of a lot of people who may be disappointed to discover that antiquated notions of gender still inform the choices of many of their so-called peers. Maybe marriage opportunity isn't as important as career opportunity, but these studies say something about the extent to which a fair number of people subconsciously cling to the security of traditional roles in their personal lives at the same time that they reject them as social norms.
Serena
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