Friday, April 26, 2002

Hewlett -- Skewered and Diced

The latest doom and gloom prognosis for professional women -- spurred by Hewlett's book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, is given the slicing it deserves by two very articulate writers at Salon.

If you aren't familiar with Hewlett -- link to not only one, or two, but three related Bohica postings.

The first article, The Baby Panic, analyzes Hewlett's book in the context of Hewlett's own life choices and her past books.

The second, A Woman's Place, chronicles the phenomenon of backlash and establishes Creating Life as just another flick of the anti-woman whip.

Both Salon articles make this important point on Hewlett's research:

The book's most questionable piece of data has come in for some criticism, and that's her finding that only 14 percent of these childless high achievers actually chose not to have children. It's worth paying attention to the way she derived her number, because it shows the way her survey stacked the deck. She asked respondents whether they knew in college that they definitely didn't want children, and only 14 percent knew that then -- leaving the impression that the other 86 percent were sentenced to childlessness and lament it.

Of course, few of us knew what we wanted in college; if our lives were judged by what we wanted then, most of us would probably be deemed disappointed failures. (Oh my God, I forgot to write my novel!) Strangely, Hewlett's survey failed to ask a straightforward question about whether childless women are unhappy they didn't become mothers, or whether, looking back, they'd make different choices in order to have children. No doubt many of the childless women she surveyed would answer yes to both questions, but I'd bet it would be a whole lot less than 86 percent.

A Woman's Place goes even further -- exposing Hewlett's use of the discredited "women over 40 have a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married" saw:

Hewlett resurrects the famously discredited study by Neil Bennett and David Bloom that claimed 40-year-old women were more likely to be shot by terrorists than tie the knot. Hewlett writes, "The Bennett and Bloom data stirred up a furious debate -- and inspired a slew of new studies. When the dust settled, it turned out that although the odds were not nearly as dismal as first advertised, Bennett and Bloom were quite correct in their conclusion: The older she gets, the harder it is for a college-educated woman to find a husband."

Quite correct? Bennett and Bloom initially said that at 30, a woman had a 20 percent chance of marrying, which dropped to a minuscule 1.3 percent chance a decade later. Yet as Susan Faludi reported in "Backlash," when a demographer in the U.S. Census Bureau's Marriage and Family Statistics branch did her own study drawing on 13.4 million households, she found that, as Faludi says, "At thirty, never-married college-educated women have a 58 to 66 percent chance at marriage. At forty, the odds were from 17 to 23 percent." In other words, Bennett and Bloom said women over 40 had a one in a hundred chance of finding a mate. The more accurate number -- which Hewlett doesn't bother citing -- is one in five.

Society needs to stop identifying women as walking wombs.

posted by Bohica at 11:42 AM