Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment. (Jean Baudrillard)
There are lies, damned lies and statistics (Mark Twain)
Every week there’s a new study damning smart women to a life of singledom, followed by another refuting it. Frankly, I’m tired of watching the see-saw.
A new study out of Monash University finds that in Australia
61 percent of women aged 30 to 34 with degrees or higher married by 2006, compared with 53 percent of women in the same age group with no post-school qualifications.
Researcher Genevieve Heard summed up the study.
“It’s long been assumed that more educated women are less traditional and more financially independent and are therefore less likely to need to or want to marry. And indeed, this assumption has been borne out in the data for a long time…
“But now, in the 2006 data, we can see that in fact the pattern has reversed so that women with post-school qualifications, especially those with degrees, are now in fact more likely to be married than their counterparts with less education.”
This study confirms Christine Whelan’s findings presented in Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women. Educated women are getting married; they’re just doing it later. If I remember correctly, she also found that women with advanced degrees are more likely to marry than those that don’t have them.
On the flipslide, last week Caitlin Weaver blogged about a new Washington & Lee University study, which shows that female MBAs divorce at twice the rate as male MBAs. But lets take a moment to consider some of the other findings.
women with law or medical degrees divorce less often than those with only bachelor’s degrees, but are still more likely to divorce or separate than their male counterparts (10% of women with law degrees and 9% of women with medical degrees, compared with 7% of male lawyers and 5.1% of male doctors).
Aren’t those findings a bit misleading? Women with graduate degrees divorce less than those with just bachelor’s degrees (underlining is my emphasis, not the journalist’s). So what that they’re slightly more likely to divorce than their male counterparts, they’re finding men they think they can make a life with!
Prof. Wilson also found that female professionals abstain from marriage at double and sometimes nearly triple the rate of men.
Hardly shocking news: since these professional women are so smart, they don’t want to be saddled with the extra 7 hours of house work per week that marriage brings (while men incidentally get an hour of their life back after marriage). (You can find several equally contradictory statistics in the domestic chore study summation).
These studies are undertaken to overanalyze relationships shaped by a variety of untractable outside factors. In the end, they just plant the seeds of doubt in the minds of single women looking for love to balance out their work week.
It’s like the advertising we see every day that tells us we’re not good enough or we’ll be better if we buy a certain product. Professional women are some how doomed to perpetually single or divorced life because we didn’t go to college for our M.R.S.
We are good enough, and we deserve the attention of the men that have come to the same conclusion. Studies, for what they’re worth, suggest we find those men, a bit later in life. It’s not our fault men are slow to come to that realization in their own dating lives.
Stepping off my soapbox now
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