I don’t trust people who talk too much all the time. They don’t listen, hardly reflect, and barely seek out reality in its entirety.
There is so much weight in the follow through, so much importance in not just believing the bits that you read or hear, so much in seeking out the full truth yourself, just like so much can be heard from silence.
I finally read Forbes.com’s much talked about article “Don’t Marry Career Women” and it seems everyone has missed the point. They read the title, then the opening paragraph, but fail to ingest the rest.
Your opening sentence needs to be outrageous in some fashion—that’s how you draw people in to read further. Start flat, and the page gets turned. But I do think that what happened here was that people weren’t reading Forbes.com, they were reading Gawker.com or whoeverdotcom’s salacious bit on the article, which drew solely on the opening. Those who went on the google the piece in its entirety and then went on to bitch about the article’s horrendous sexism probably didn’t really read it in full. There are facts here, statistics gained from credible sources, and the author, Michael Noer (who I feel is getting a bad rep for doing something really good—getting people to talk about Forbes who normally wouldn’t know a thing about it) is taking this information and encouraging people to think. Yes, THINK.
I am writing a piece on the correlations between sex and power, in women, and in my research, I wanted to delve deep in this whole “Don’t Marry A Career Woman” article. While Noer’s opening statement makes me think he is furthering the fear that men have of a woman in power, my conclusion of the piece is quite different. It makes me think of how in the past, women got married young, had kids, stayed home, and raised them while dad went to work. This was the norm. Now, as women have gained more power in the workplace (and sexually of course, but I’m saving those thoughts for the New York Moves piece), the typical family structure has changed causing disruptions in traditional roles and most importantly, how to adjust to these roles in reflection of today’s societal norms. Simply put, we are not adapting well. Who’s watching the kids? Who should stay home if there’s not enough money to pay a sitter to watch the baby during the 9 to 5? Can couples even afford to have kids anymore when both incomes are needed to pay the bills? All of this contributes to having kids later, trouble in the marriage, and more.
Noer states, “women’s work hours consistently increase divorce, whereas increases in men’s work hours often have no statistical effect.” The man didn’t pull this info out of his ass; it’s from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. And it directly corresponds with the fact that we, as a generation of 20 and 30-somethings, are struggling with what we knew as tradition, the pressures from our elders to uphold those traditions, and creating a new tradition that is acceptable in both our own eyes and in society.
There are so many other gems in this piece for me to go on and on about, but instead,
here it is, so you can have your own debate once you are fully educated on the full story. Sadly, even his colleague Elizabeth Corcoran gets it wrong. While her counterpoint is, um, funny, she misses the entire point. And she almost lost me by addressing women as “Girlfriends”. I never met you Elizabeth.
I also cannot help but see some similarities about what “went wrong” with this article and the public’s perception of it to my own debacle last year due to people not seeking out the entire story. Why is it that the entire story is too often overlooked? Well that's as good a question as to why women aren't making as much as men for the same job with the same experience or to why 99.94 percent of the CEOs and 97.3 percent of the wealthiest people in America are men. Yes, we still have a long way to go...girlfriend.
Being upset about this piece is like protesting the show "Desperate Housewives" because of its title and content.
If Michael Noer is a misogynist who spreads his brand of hate speech by saying not to marry a career woman, then I am a vacant, right wing conservative.
