Forbes to Readers: Don’t Marry a Career Woman

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Yesterday Forbes posted a helpful little gem telling men (apparently its only readers): Don’t Marry Career Women. Michael Noer writes:

Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career. Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage….Recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it.

He’s mostly saying that marriage, childrearing and housework (“your house will be dirtier” if your wife has a career) are stressful, and a wealth disparity between couples — likely of any sex I might add — adds to that stress. To this we can all sigh a collective, duh. That women make less, have to clean the house more, and are the kid raisers all at once isn’t new information. I guess we only get from Noer that he and his business-minded audience may not be ready to step up.

Earlier this year Mother Jones looked at the oh so many ways the working woman gets screwed, and getting married is the least of her worries. Herewith, a sample:

-74% of female executives have a spouse who’s employed full time while 75% of male execs have a spouse who’s not employed.

-42% of female execs over 40 don’t have kids.

-For full-time working fathers, each child correlates to a 2.1% earnings increase. For working moms, it’s a 2.5% loss.

-40% of married professionals feel that men do less work around the house.

Sources for the above, and the rest, here.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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