Letters to the Editor
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And just to inject some reality into the man-bashing...
Because this article really does amount to man-bashing: the poor, incompetent males who are incapable of living on their own without a nursemaid, lest they fall ill from sheer neglect. Let me introduce you to my parents - a very traditional, happily married couple, who have been married for 41 years (soon to be 42).
At this point, they are pretty old; 67 and 64. Having retired from their respective careers, they run a home-based business together, sharing the workload about equally (each making more than $30,000/year). They also share the housework almost exactly equally; they both cook (though they cook different things - my father has his favorite recipes and my mother has hers), they both clean, they both grocery shop, they both do about the same amount of housework. Unlike the poor, incompetent male portrayed in those articles, my father is entirely capable of surviving on his own - he had to live apart from my mother for 3 years due to work issues, and if anything, he kept a cleaner house than my mother did.
But don't imagine that my father is some wimpy "house-husband" type; prior to his retirement, he was the VP of an engineering company. Nor is my mother a "desperate housewife" - she had her own career, and her own engineering degree. The business they're running now was originally her idea.
Really, as a "career woman" myself, I have to look at this article with amusement rather than anything else. If I ever met a man quite so helpless as all that - someone who is incapable of doing his own housework or raising his own kids, and someone who gets sick if he doesn't have round-the-clock nursemaid care - I'd run the other way.
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A Way Better Rebuttal
Until now, I'd only heard Ann Coulter parrot those sources, so I was suprised when my girlfriend's boss referred to them in Forbes. The rebuttal was worse! As if this scary, robot-loving career woman in the original piece had been made flesh, and warned you that unless you were up for constantly proving yourself to your spouse, you were bound for cuckoldry, general misery and divorce.
Really, I was glad to see the Traister piece. It hangs together much better.
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So what this Forbes article is really saying...
Seems to be that men should just cut out the middle, um, man and marry their mommies.
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Here's the actual words of the researchers Noel misquoted
From Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, who blog at www.pobronson.com/blog/:
Noer writes that a 2004 report by John J. Johnson finds that "Women's work hours consistently increase divorce." But that is not Johnson's finding.
Instead, my reading of the report is that there's a correlation between women's increased work hours and divorce – but that Johnson makes no definitive findings that those work hours cause divorce. Conversely, he provides a list of reasons to show that his work does not answer the issue of causation – such as it may be that wives who want to get divorced work more hours before divorcing, either to improve the marriage or give them the resources they need to leave.
A 2006 study, in the Journal of Family Issues, does answer the causation issue.
In that report, its authors find that women's increased hours at work does not increase the likelihood of divorce.
In fact, women's employment, over all, lowers the rate of divorce. Not only that, but the wives' employment has no real effect – positive or negative – on marital quality for either spouse. In other words, husbands do not have happier marriages just because their wives stay home, and they don't have unhappier marriages just because their wives are working. (What really matters is if the wife wants to work, or if she's doing it because she has to financially.)
Moreover, (supporting Johnson's hypothesis) the authors did find that already-unhappy wives do increase their hours at work – either as a way to find other interests outside of the marriage or get the resources to leave.
So working is not a cause of marital instability – it's a way of addressing the instability that already exists.
(And going to work may actually improve the marriage, since working lowers the divorce rate.)
Noer never mentions the fact that the vast majority of partners who are unfaithful are men.
Instead, Noer relies on a "wide-ranging review of the ... literature" to assert that "highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 more likely to have cheated than those with high school diplomas.)" and that people making more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat.
It's unclear who conducted the "wide-ranging review of the ... literature," but for those who might believe it's Noer's own - I believe it's the work of Adrian J. Blow, whom Noer mentions in the piece. But Noer doesn't include Blow's further points: Blow explains the education-element only seems to be a factor when there's a real disparity of education within the couple (which is consistent with the scholarship on how educational heterogamy can be an indicator of marital instability).
In fact, most of Blow's comments are from an accurate review of a 2001 study entitled "Understanding Infidelity."
In that underlying study, the authors explain that the education factor is essentially wiped out when divorce is taken into account. Blow, by the way, includes this explanation in his work, though Noer does not.
In other words, the tie between increased education and infidelity is only a factor for those couples who actually divorced. And as study after study shows: educated women are more likely to divorce if their husbands have had an affair.
So increased education has not yet been determined to be a general predictor of infidelity within a marriage. A point omitted by Noer, but made crystal-clear in Blow's review of the literature:
"We have heard people state that highly educated individuals are more likely to engage in infidelity. However, it appears that assertion is not a categorical truth, but rather a factor that may depend on the educational dynamics of partners in the relationship and history of divorce. Further research is needed in this regard." (emphasis added)
Noer's slanted use of the research on the relationship between income and infidelity - using the $30K threshold - also fails to show the real picture.
In "Understanding Infidelity," the authors did find that increased income did mean an increase in affairs. But they don't think that making money is necessarily the underlying reason for an affair. Instead, it may be that those making less money just can't afford to have one. Richer people can afford those secret hotel bills and the like.
Where Noer's theory falls apart is that, if he's right, then dual-earner couples should have higher rates of infidelity than couples with only one spouse at work. Because now both husbands and wives have all those new potential sex-partners, and they conceivably both have the money to check into a hotel suite.
But the researchers found that that is not the case.
Dual-earners are not the couples with the highest rates of infidelity. Instead, the highest rates of infidelity are when only one spouse is working, and the other is unemployed. (In other words, when the men are at work, and the wives are at home.)
You can read more in depth at www.pobronson.com/blog/