Career Women Beware!

The recent flurry of blogs, online magazine articles, tv and radio rants, and the rewriting of research statistics and history prompted by Forbes.com's Tuesday column originally titled "Don't Marry Career Women" has been so enthralling that Brian Reid and I both had to weigh in for today's Free For All.

Leslie:

The bad news: a smart, well-educated senior editor (Michael Noer) at a prestigious national magazine (Forbes) is so utterly out-of-touch with the 80 million moms and 63 million working women in the United States that he wrote an article titled "Don't Marry Career Women" for Forbes.com. A few choice phrases: "Guys: a word of advice...whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career. ... 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."

By the way, Noer defines "a career girl" (his term) as anyone making more than $30,000 a year and working more than 35 hours a week. He goes on to cherry-pick and rephrase findings from various studies, some credible and some not, to support his opinion that "wives' employment does correlate positively to divorce rates" and that you should not let your wife work because "when your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they'll meet someone they like more than you."

Apparently we've boomeranged back to Donna Reed's time in history.

The good news: Women (and at least a couple men) across the country howled on blogs and online magazines like Salon.com about how retro and ridiculous the article was. And Forbes heard us roar: They took down the article almost immediately, lowered the prominence of the obnoxious headline and added a woman's counterpoint. Maybe not quite enough punishment for Noer (who, in February, also wrote a lovely Forbes piece comparing wives and prostitutes as economic substitues akin to Coke and Pepsi in The Economics of Prostitution) but it's a start.

Brian:

Give Michael Noer credit: He is concise. In the span of only a few hundred words, he demonizes career women as marriage-wreckers, claims women are better suited to "specialize" in household work and leaves readers with the impression that Forbes-reading career men are retrograde clods. No one is left unscathed And that's in the watered-down version. The original piece that Forbes pulled down was even more can't-look awful.

It's almost impossible to know where to start -- I could fill the page just ranting against Noer's insulting misuse of statistics, but let me instead apologize on behalf of my gender and assure you that we don't think that way. Noer's argument rests on the assumption that guys don't actually want balance. They want to do "market work" and leave all of the "non-market work" to the ladies. But this doesn't reflect what new fathers believe anymore. If you look at any analysis of Gen X and Gen Y workers and fathers (the ones getting married and having babies nowadays), they are much more interested in getting family and work time in the right proportions. Getting that balance involves doing what Noer calls "non-market work." I call it "playground time." And don't tell Noer, but it's a blast.

So the topic for today: Are some people simply clueless? Or do you see collusion in high-profile "studies" that chastize women who step out -- in any way -- from the traditional financially-dependent-on-someone stereotype of American womanhood? How have you been impacted by men or women in various positions of power who had no idea about the problems you face in your attempts to juggle work and family? And, of course, add your comments to ours on the Forbes package.

By Stacey Garfinkle |  August 25, 2006; 6:40 AM ET  | Category:  Conflicts , Division of Labor , Free-for-All
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