{"id":1314,"date":"2005-01-20T08:28:29","date_gmt":"2005-01-20T16:28:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/01\/20\/intelligence-achievement-and-marriage\/"},"modified":"2005-01-20T08:28:29","modified_gmt":"2005-01-20T16:28:29","slug":"intelligence-achievement-and-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1314","title":{"rendered":"Intelligence, achievement and marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

This recent New York Times<\/em> op-ed<\/a>, by Maureen Dowd, has caused quite a stir. Dowd’s premise is that “The more women achieve, the less desirable they are” to men.<\/p>\n

After some analysis of recent movie plots (quite interesting as an indication of what the culture is thinking about, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about what people are doing), Dowd summed up two recent studies:<\/p>\n

A new study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggests that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, she’s gotten the details wrong (it amazes me how often writers for major newspapers do that), but on the whole that’s a fair summary.<\/p>\n

A few things to remember when thinking about this study.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. This study asked undergraduates who among their hypothetical co-workers they’d prefer for a hypothetical long-term relationship: a boss, a peer, or an assistant. Most undergrads are 19 or 20, while the average age of first marriage for a US man is 29<\/a>. Isn’t it likely that many of the 19-year-olds surveyed here are going to grow up a lot, and alter their preferences, in the next ten years?<\/li>\n
  2. There was a high degree of overlap in this study. On average<\/em>, men ranked the assistant a 6.4 out of 9, while ranking equal peer woman only 4.9 out of 9. But (if I’m reading the data correctly) some of the men ranked the peer as high as 7.1, and some ranked the assistant as low as 4.3.<\/li>\n
  3. The data reported in the study doesn’t support the conclusion that “a majority of men preferred the assistant.” The study only reported averages. While clearly more men preferred the assistant than preferred any single <\/em>other option, it’s quite possible that the combined number of men who preferred the boss, the peer, or who had no preference outnumbered men who preferred the assistant. I’m not assuming this is the case; but I’m not assuming the opposite, either. My point is, neither assumption is justified from the data the researchers published.<\/li>\n
  4. The researchers were expecting to find that women preferred dominant men. They found, instead, that women didn’t have any notable preference for dominant men (or for peers, or for underlings).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Dowd cited another study, this one from Britain:<\/p>\n

    A second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman’s chance to get married, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    As far as I know, this study has not yet been officially published. This article in the UK’s Sunday Times<\/a> seems to be the primary source of information about this study. Curiously, the Times <\/em>writer suggests an explanation for the findings that Dowd ignores: Perhaps smarter women are less likely to want <\/em>to be married.<\/p>\n

    From the blogger Ann Althouse<\/a>:<\/p>\n

    It may well be that some or all of these things are true: 1. women have less to gain from marriage once they are able to provide for themselves economically, 2. women with a higher IQ are more likely to be able to support themselves well, 3. more intelligent persons are better able to form preferences by analyzing real world factors and less likely to adopt established conventions, and 4. not marrying is the more rational choice for an intelligent woman. If some or all of these things are at least partially true, a high IQ in women might be a hindrance for the institution of marriage, but not for the woman herself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Anecdotally, the “men prefer to marry stupider women” implication that some have read into this study totally contradicts what I’ve seen in my friends group and family; men I know are not looking for stupid women to wed. (Or anyhow, if that’s what they’re looking for, they’re not finding ’em).<\/p>\n

    More importantly, the numbers reported for this study – “the prospect for marriage drops 40 percent for each 16-point rise in IQ” – is, without context, completely meaningless. What we should be asking is, 40 percent of what? What’s the scale?<\/p>\n

    Most people who read this statistic assume it’s an expression of real-life odds of being married (i.e., if a woman with an IQ of 120 has a 50% chance of getting married, than a woman with a IQ of 136 must have a 10% chance of getting married). But that’s obviously not what the study found. At that rate, it would take only a 40-IQ-point-rise to move from 100% of women being married to absolutely no women being married. If real odds fell and rose that <\/em>steeply with IQ, then none of us would have ever met a brilliant married woman, or a stupid single woman.<\/p>\n

    The same researchers confirmed their findings by doing a similar analysis of income and marriage odds. But the Sunday Times<\/em> reported these results with statistics that are considerably more meaningful, because they’re given in terms of real-life odds of being married:<\/p>\n

    They found 88% of 40-year-old men in the top socioeconomic class were married, compared with 80% in the lowest class. Among women aged 40 the trend is reversed. The researchers found that 82% of the top class were wed, compared with 86% in the lowest class.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    So according to this, being successful lowers women’s odds of being married – from 86% to 82%. That’s not exactly a big deal, is it? It’s not a statistic which will get a lot of play in the press (or in the blogosphere). Yet the researchers apparently felt this finding confirmed<\/em>, rather than contradicted, their findings on IQ and marriage. There’s no way to know for sure without seeing the actual research – but I suspect this means that the IQ differences, expressed in real-life terms, are probably not huge either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This recent New York Times op-ed, by Maureen Dowd, has caused quite a stir. Dowd’s premise is that “The more women achieve, the less desirable they are” to men. After some analysis of recent movie plots (quite interesting as an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism-sexism-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}