WHY EDUCATION IS GOOD FOR THE LADIES. Forbes.com executive editor Michael Noer's execrable and poorly reported "article," "Don't Marry Career Women," has been given the thorough mocking it deserves by now, making his name and his site the laughing stock they deserve to be for years to come. Those who are yearning for some real data on what life is like for contemporary "career women" won't have to wait for Noer's ignominy to fade, though. This October, social scientist (and friend of GFR) Christine Whelan will publish Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women (Simon & Schuster), which gathers in one place all the most recent facts about men, women, education, achievement, and marriage. Whelan finds, contra the misogynistic Noer's glib and partial reading of the social science literature, that real career women -- women with graduate degrees or who are high-earners for their age group -- are just as likely to marry as their less accomplished peers, and significantly less likely to divorce. Additionally, for the first time in recorded human history, college-educated women have become more likely to marry than non-college educated ones (and they are, as I reported way back in 2002, significantly less likely to divorce than less-educated women), and, once they reach their 30s, unmarried women with graduate degrees are more likely to marry than even their college-educated sisters.
To the extent that there has been a marriage penalty for women's success, it has vanished. This is news. Today, even wealthy businessmen looking for arm candy want educated partners with their own wardrobe budget. Noer's ideal, the part-time working woman who earns less than $30,000 a year, wouldn't be able to afford the costs of entry into that most competitive sectors of the marriage market -- to whose male members, one must assume, Noer was addressing his Forbes.com piece -- let alone hold her own in conversations within it. Today, as Whelan reports, smart and successful men marry smart and successful women -- and then stay married to them.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
