More bad news for the Dowd hypothesis* -- even the few facts it does deign to include are flagrantly wrong:
Sociologist Valerie Oppenheimer of University of California, Berkeleyreports that today men are choosing as mates women who have completedtheir education. The more education a woman has, the more likely she isto marry. Unlike the single University of California, Los Angelesstudy, this finding comes from an analysis of 80 peer-reviewed studies.
As for Dowd's repeated invocation of the famous study showing the higher a woman's IQ, the less likely her eventual marriage, well:
Neither Dowd nor the Atlantic bothered to mention--apparently theydid not know--that the data were gathered from men and women born in1921; the women are all now in their 80s.
Should a study of octogenarian women be taken as a guide for today's young people? No.[...]
From 36 to 40, high achievers are more likely to be married and havekids than other female workers, but they marry later than other women.Boushey found that women between the ages of 28 and 35 who work fulltime and earn more than $55,000 a year or have a graduate orprofessional degree are just as likely to be successfully married asother working women.
And it doesn't stop there, Dowd cherrypicked statistics, used bad data, and ignored reams of contrary evidence. In other words, her opus was the dating equivalent of the Iraq War -- an embarassing disaster sold on the basis of manipulated data and ignored evidence. She's the Judy Miller of cultural reporting, the only question is how long it'll be before Keller offers yet another mea culpa.
*For those who've forgot, the Dowd Hypothesis is Maureen Dowd's oft-stated belief that she and her friends are unmarried because their beauty, glamour, accomplishments, poise, wit, interests, intellectual acuity, and overwhelming beauty scare men.
