Asymmetrical Information

I do not understand what is happening here

12 Passengers Arrested After Flight to India Returns to Amsterdam

Ah, I see the Fox News spammer has hit here now.

(If you don't know what I'm referring to, see any of the references here.)

Then there's Tupperware.

No, seriously.

One of the great unknown things about those women who have those innocent little Tuppperware parties is that many of the ladies end up using it as a way to get out of a crappy home life for good, or as a way to insulate themselves from some of the bad effects of a third-rate husband.

Ditto for Avon and the rest, of course.

I'll take a career woman who's more likely to divorce me over the apparent alternative in my town, a 30-year-old high school graduate with a couple of years of college working some dead-end job and tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

They are not "schmoes" getting dumped, they are families being torn apart.

Women go into marriage with eyes wide open and the same ability to judge other people's character as a man. If they get dissatisfied it is equally possible they deluded themselve as it is the man misrepresented himself and turned out to be something she could never forsee.

The cause of divorce I bet has equal fault for individuals of either sex. It is not good woman/schmoe.

It is not good news for the women. Every mariage broken up is very hard on both parties. It is not a bunch of "poor women" being duped by evil men - both sides have expectations that the other side resents nowadays. If women are at all adults, they have to be as responsible for their actions, particularly as important an action as getting married to someone.

Oh, and this got my attention:

"They can better afford to get out of an unhappy marriage than their sisters"

Since no marriage is binary (totally good or totally bad) obviously the more money the woman makes the less "fall short of perfect" she has to accept. Of course guys have a similar thing - she watched sports and went to the gym when we dated but after marriage everything changed. Guys always have a severe economic price to be paid to get out of a marriage. Maybe there should be no economic incentives towards maintaining less than perfect marriages on either party?

Buy, do we want to encourage families? We have economic incentives to purchasing homes, why is it wrong to have economic incentives to form and maintain families?

Reminds me of the following response to an article by Maureen Dowd: The Elephant in Maureen's Living Room . If there are no children, why stick around when a higher value mate presents him/herself?

Articles like this always surprise me by their ignorance of what attracts men and women - and the 'asymmetrical' nature of men and women in what attracts them.

Probably the most important aspect is that men go for good-looks (a combination of youthful and healthy looks), and women go for status (usually money, but it could be prestige in a poorly paid but socially-valued activity - such as poetry). This leads to problems mainly for older women (whatever their status), and for low status men (whatever their looks).

It is the problems of older but high status women that will probably come to dominate the media - even more than they already do - women with a successful career who do not marry and/ or do not have children, even though they would ideally want to do both.

This is leading to some very interesting, and rather worrying, trends, which I discuss in an essay entitled - The loneliness of the highly-educated, high-status career woman in the 21st century :-

http://modernizationimperative.blogspot.com/

The kernel of Shafer's rejoinder is contained in the article itself:

A few other studies, which have focused on employment (as opposed to working hours) have concluded that working outside the home actually increases marital stability, at least when the marriage is a happy one. But even in these studies, wives' employment does correlate positively to divorce rates, when the marriage is of "low marital quality."

In other words, the effect of women's professions leading to divorce is confined to 'low quality marriages' where the woman's income makes it possible to leave, whereas in happy marriages, dual incomes contribute to stability. So, I guess, if you want to make sure your wife can't escape (no matter how unhappy you both might be) marry a woman without a career. That way she won't be able to afford to leave and she will be less likely to meet somebody to run off with. Now there's some good advice...sheesh.

The whole article is preposterous. I wouldn't want to marry a man who wanted a woman who would be the perfect 1950s housewife. So I guess that means I wouldn't want to marry the author of the article.

My loss.

I'll take a career woman who's more likely to divorce me over the apparent alternative in my town, a 30-year-old high school graduate with a couple of years of college working some dead-end job and tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

While on-line dating, I made a decision to only pursue women who were my age with at least a Bachelor's Degree. In doing so, I discovered that the more education they had the more credit card debt they had. It was as if every piece of paper on the wall equaled another $8000 on the platnum card. In one case, I was dating a project manager making $90,000 a year for a software company. She had a Master's Degree and owed almost $30,000 to the credit card companies, was WAY over on her miles on her leased car, and didn't even own her own condo. Sinful. If I had married her, I would have inherited all those financial problems because she wasn't changing. Her habits were carved in stone. Her problem was that she couldn't walk past a shoe store without walking in a dropping $50 on a pair of shoes that she would wear exactly once. She lived high, check to check, and expected that everyone else did as well.

I would love to know why Forbes put this article up in the first place. What were they thinking? They had to know it would not be well received by their female readers, substantially all of whom would be the career women the article castigates. This article swept through my office yesterday at light speed and the women were livid. It's no wonder Forbes took it down so quickly.

On women, I'd rather have someone I can't keep than someone I can't get rid of.

Or something like that.

Paul,
That's the type of women you RUN away from.

I think the people who are focusing on the portion of the article that talks about divorce are missing part of the point. It can't be explained completely by "she has more money and therefore more ability to leave a bad marriage" (though that is undoubtedly part of the equation). Assuming the statistics referred to are correct, career women are also less happy and more dissatisfied in marriage than non-career women. I don't see how that can be explained by increased financial independence.

"Assuming the statistics referred to are correct, career women are also less happy and more dissatisfied in marriage than non-career women. I don't see how that can be explained by increased financial independence."

I certainly can. Non-career women would be more likely to see marriage as their primary source of financial security; career women wouldn't. Therefor a marriage has to offer something else, beyond financial security, to be of any use at all to a career woman.

To a non-career woman, a husband who ignores her and cheats on her, but pays all the bills, is still a man who pays all the bills. To a career woman, a husband who ignores her and cheats on her is just a really unlikeable roomate.

So... the only career women who break up with their husbands do so because the husband is a cheat and they have the ability to leave? The only reason why marriages fail is because one spouse is a jerk and leaves?

That doesn't explain it. It explains some, but not nearly all. And it still doesn't answer the question of why either spouse would feel the need to cheat in the first place.

I guess the best way to answer this would be to look at the percentages of husbands who cheat on their wives that have career wives and those who don't. If the more husbands (and wives) with career wives (and husbands) cheat, perhaps its because they are unsatisfied with their spouse?

Ultimately though, whether the spouse has a career or not, the deciding factor comes down to selfishness. Whether you want to place your needs above the needs of the relationship and the spouse. This should cover everything from "I always have to do the dishes" and "I always take out the trash" to "I want to have a good time with the secretary". It's not like making 90k a year automatically makes you a divorcee. It could just be an indicator that you MAY be a selfish person. Ya, and I make more than that so I'm pointing in the mirror when I talk.

Therefor a marriage has to offer something else, beyond financial security, to be of any use at all to a career woman.

When you take away God (Religion), Love, or children (since I haven't heard too many people ever argue that it is better to raise a child with just one parent) there doesn't seem to be much else that holds a marriage together if both the husband and the wife can afford to live apart. Then (if you don't have God, Love, or kids), one can always be looking for Plan B.

So for his sake (if he really wants to stay married to such a shallow, cold-hearted, b*tch), I certainly hope he is well hung.

Perhaps the causality is simply backwards here - the less confidence a woman has in her marriage, the more likely she is to maintain a career.

It's not that career women are more likely to make poor wives; it's that women in poor marriages are more likely to maintain a career.