Fortunately, I'm not looking for a husband.

[rymenhild]

Linked by silveraspen:

Forbes Magazine recommends its readers not to marry career women.
(Link goes to silveraspen's journal, where the articles are recopied, as the Forbes website is an utter mess.)

Career women, apparently, are more likely to divorce their husbands, more likely to cheat on their husbands, less likely to produce offspring, more likely to be unhappy in their marriages, will probably do less cleaning, and are more likely to make their husbands sick (!) than non-career women.

Excuse me while I douse the smoke rising from my brain.

Complaints may be sent to

William Baldwin, editor (or Michael Noer, author of the article)
Forbes Magazine
60 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10011.

ETA: As the half of my friendslist that has been enraged over this already knows, Forbes took the article down and put it back up alongside a response titled Don't Marry a Lazy Man. The counterpoint article seems to be written by a female Forbes writer who was just as furious as the rest of us.

Comments

[morganlf.livejournal.com]

holy crap.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

That's about my reaction, yes.

[prosewitch.livejournal.com]

WOMEN ACTING LIKE MEN: ITS THE END OF THE WORLD!!!1!

Uh, sorry, couldn't restrain sarcastic bile. *wipes off computer screen*

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

OH NO!

[deborah-judge.livejournal.com]

Good advice. i think I won't marry a career man. Or maybe I'll force my husband to give up his career and stay home with the babies.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

You should. I hear househusbands are much more likely to be happy in their marriage and keep their homes clean than career men.

[meep.livejournal.com]

Well, my husband certainly does. And does more cooking and childcare. And he has handy home skills I never learned, like running wires and changing oil. And he can lift much heavier items than I could.

I think it's pretty good advice that a career-minded person should hook up with a home-minded person. It seems reasonable to me (as that's what we're doing.)

[meep.livejournal.com]

And getting annoyed by what the stats =actually=show= is somewhat stupid. The interpretation of said stats, sure, that can be bitched about, but if it so happens that men with wives who work more than 40 hours a week are sicker, then that just happens to be the case in the aggregate.

It's like getting mad over men being taller than women, in the aggregate.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

The interpretation is the real problem here, yes. I don't mind the numbers, I mind the translation to, "Don't marry a career girl."

[ladybird97.livejournal.com]

SMITE.

Well, even if they weren't under the apparent assumption that women don't read Forbes (unless they're advising their female readers not to marry career women either), this pretty much guarantees that they'll lose what female readership they had.

SMITE.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

And lo, Forbes was righteously smitten.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, I'm not actually nearly as offended by (most of) this as I feel like I ought to be. All things being equal, most women I know would probably have reservations about dating a jet-setting, ladder-climbing businessman for many of the same reasons. (And Forbes does at least point out that there's no reason the husband couldn't do the cleaning himself.) The children issue is also a real and major problem in certain spheres of career-ness; over the course of law school it's been the major factor in all discussions of career plans from a woman's perspective. If you want to be a partner in a firm, you usually have to follow a strict timetable that requires having your children either before you go to law school or in your late thirties, which limits the number. (Even if the husband stays home and provides all the childcare, it's still unavoidably the woman that's pregnant.) If a man knows he wants a lot of children and he doesn't plan on ditching his wife mid-life for a trophy wife, then it's his problem too. The fact that something shouldn't be a problem doesn't mean that in reality it isn't.

As for the likelihood of getting ill, though: aside from the methodology of the study, about which I know nothing -- is the average woman (or man) who works more than 40 hours a week more likely driven by ambition, or economic necessity? Really...

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Freely granted re: general reservations, but Mr. Noer does not define professionals in those terms:

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.

I wonder how he'd define "career woman," then. Oh, wait, was that a cheap shot? But even that definition is strange to me, since he's confusing responsibility with any number of other issues.

In my two "career girl"-qualifying positions, there's no such thing as paid overtime. That's largely a function of hourly retail jobs and union jobs. You do the work till it's done, and if there's a substantial problem with deadlines, you try to negotiate something saner with your manager. At the current job, where I'm woefully underpaid (relative to my tasks) by a state-funded educational institution, what happens is that the deadlines give way. In the other job, ten years ago at a large corporation, I spent my birthday working nine a.m. till midnight because we had a major deadline. My birthday fell on a Saturday that year....

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Oh, wait, was that a cheap shot?

Yes, but in this case, a fair one. "Career girl" isn't really a meaningful category there. The article isn't trying to take any kind of care in defining its terms.

p.s.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Now that I'm not as het up by the Forbes piece (having spent some time trying to crochet embroidery floss, in fact), I realize that my comments on time were tangential to yours and that I wound up sounding quite unnecessarily aggressive in that paragraph. Sorry!

Re: p.s.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

No problem. It's all about the ideas.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

All things being equal, most women I know would probably have reservations about dating a jet-setting, ladder-climbing businessman for many of the same reasons.

True, and you're right, but the article doesn't say that. It doesn't seem interested in reasons why the men who are presumably Forbes' usual target audience make poor marriage material.

We tend to discuss pregnancy as a factor for women in academia, too. I have friends who've had to arrange their children's birth around the tenure clock. Yes, juggling careers and parenthood is a real problem, especially when a woman has a career with a timetable as strict as law or academia. I don't see this as a reason not to marry an academic or a lawyer, though.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

It doesn't seem interested in reasons why the men who are presumably Forbes' usual target audience make poor marriage material.

Yes, but what women's magazine would tell its readers about their own failings when it could talk about men's?

Yes, juggling careers and parenthood is a real problem, especially when a woman has a career with a timetable as strict as law or academia. I don't see this as a reason not to marry an academic or a lawyer, though.

It would be a pretty weird reason not to marry someone you're already in love with, but if you're on the lookout for a spouse and have always deeply wanted thirteen kids, then it seems reasonable to try to find someone who at least possibly could and would have them. You might find someone who makes you decide to change your priorities in that respect, but it's a factor to keep in mind.

Again, there's no reverse equivalent for childbirth itself, but if you're a career-driven woman who wants her children to have one parent who will be home most of the time, you're going to prefer men who aren't on the same sort of track that you are. You might fall in love with one anyway, but that aspect of your life will be easier if you don't. And you would certainly have to think at least twice about someone who doesn't want kids at all.

[jandersoncoats.livejournal.com]

I wonder how many "career women" would even want to marry a man who would read Forbes, much less take advice from it.

'Cause gods forbid men put dishes in the dishwasher or clean a toilet.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I actually think my father's business may have a Forbes subscription, and my father has done household laundry for thirty years. Maybe some of the readers don't take advice from it when it's obviously wrong?

[the-paper-nun.livejournal.com]

Well you know men who read Forbes are out to get rich quick, so marrying a career women who they can piggy-back off of certainly seems like a good option for them. Perhaps the author is saving career women the hassle of dealing with delinquent Forbes readers.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that doing a postgrad degree teaches you to be adulterous!

It reminds me of the stats "proving" that arranged marriages are happier because they have a lower divorce rate, which couldn't possibly be because cultures that prescribe arranged marriage usually strongly stigmatise divorce and expect couples to put up with bad marriages instead of getting out of them.

[nigita.livejournal.com]

Hee hee!

Well, they are right that career women do a hell of lot less cleaning. But I suppose then that they hire out.

I started falling in love with the man I eventually married back when I was gunning for an ueber-academic medicine career, when he said he'd enjoy staying home with kids. I suppose that makes me sexist, but it was the way I *felt* and I couldn't help it. It was so sweet!

Well, I gave birth twice and now I'm home taking care of the resulting offspring, (life most certainly did not go the way I'd planned but I am very happy) and he's off working the crazy hours and climbing the corporate ladder. I still don't clean more than absolutely necessary, but, then again, luckily my man hires out.

[navelofwine.livejournal.com]

I started falling in love with the man I eventually married back when I was gunning for an ueber-academic medicine career, when he said he'd enjoy staying home with kids. I suppose that makes me sexist, but it was the way I *felt* and I couldn't help it.

That's okay. I realized that my now-husband was good marriage material when I learned that he cooked. The same might have happened if I were the dude and he were the chick, but I probably wouldn't admit it to so many people ;-)

[nigita.livejournal.com]

*g*

Yes, exactly.

I suppose part of it was also an attraction to someone willing to flout gender role stereotypes (for a young guy, it's kind of sticking your neck out to admit you want to take care of babies...)
The women I've found attractive (now that I'm married, I'm NEVER attracted to anyone other than my wonderful mate, of course! *g*) were flouters, too.