Back in my single days, my friends and I used to joke about a dating dilemma we called "dropping the P-bomb."
"Where did you go to school?" a gentleman would inquire at a party.
"Oh, in New Jersey." We'd smile and try to change the subject. No luck.
We'd grip our drinks and wait. Would he scurry away? That's what we expected — especially as we began collecting graduate degrees and serious paychecks.
Growing up as a smart, ambitious girl in America, you can't miss the assumption that neither of those attributes wins you points in the love game.
In 2002, Sylvia Ann Hewlett's book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, claimed that only 60% of high-achieving women in their 40s and early 50s were married vs. 76% of men and 83% of extremely high-earning men. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd subsequently rued that despite succeeding beyond the dreams of her Irish maid ancestors, her odds of landing a husband might have jumped if she, too, never aspired to anything beyond keeping house.
Dumb it down, we learned. Men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses.
There's just one problem. It's not true — not anymore. A growing body of research finds that the success penalty — the lower marriage rates among high-achieving women vs. their lower-achieving sisters — has nearly disappeared.
'Volley with an equal'
"While there are certainly some men who want a woman to play fetch for them, the majority of men, and certainly the ones we would want to date, are definitely looking to volley with an equal," says Christine Whelan, author of the new book Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women. As children of egalitarian baby boomer moms and dads hit their 20s and 30s, high-achieving women now marry at the same rate as others, they just do so a few years later. The first part of that sentence is reason to celebrate. The latter is more worrisome. Later marriages tend to mean later and fewer births, and this country needs the bright kids bright moms raise. Though given how quickly society has changed on the first count, there's every reason to hope that soon young women will succeed in changing the second part, too.
Whelan, herself a Princeton grad who's getting married next summer, combed through years of Census data, studies and a Harris poll that she commissioned. The finding? Hewlett and Dowd missed a big shift that's just showing up on the radar among high achievers, whom Whelan defines as women with graduate degrees and/or incomes in the top 10% for their age.
In the bad old days — alas, as recently as the 1980s — a woman with a graduate degree was 16% less likely to be married by age 44 than a woman with a high school diploma. Now, while 55% of women with graduate degrees marry by age 29 vs. 61% of other women, after 30, the odds reverse. A single, 30-year-old woman with a graduate degree has about a 75% chance of getting married. A single 30-year-old woman with less education has about a 66% chance.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that women ages 28 to 35 who earn more than $55,000 a year (roughly the top 10%) are just as likely to be married as other women who work full-time. Indeed, Whelan's survey found that 90% of high-achieving men want a spouse who is as smart as they are, and 71% say a woman's success makes her more desirable as a wife. Maybe it's because these men do want to marry Mommy — 72% of moms of high-achieving men worked outside the home as they raised their sons.
So why does the myth persist? Blame the higher age of first marriage for women with graduate degrees or high paychecks — fueled by a belief that starting a family during grad school, or during the early years of a "big" job, is impossible. These women marry, on average, around age 30; women overall first marry at about 25. From ages 25 to 30, Whelan notes, "you'll go to many weddings on your own," believing bad news after bad bouquet tosses.
Reason to worry
But though it's reassuring to know the odds of marrying are good, the older age of first marriage for high-achieving women is not so reassuring. Despite headlines about professional women becoming single moms by choice, most won't have children out of wedlock, so later marriages mean later births. Indeed, America's brightest people — men and women — tend to delay childbearing.
This may be a choice, though it's too bad for society that successful people aren't so successful in the Darwinian sense.
But even this, I believe, will change. New York's sidewalks these days are clogged with $700 double strollers pushed by the nannies of high-achieving parents who can afford such wheels. Trendsetting Manhattan's preschool age population soared 26% from 2000-04; from Britney Spears to Angelina Jolie, young moms are becoming hip.
When women decide that they want to get married, they tend to make it happen. They approach dates with open minds. They ask to be set up. They seal the deal.
Until now, young women haven't adopted that mindset in graduate school or in the early years of their big careers because they believe the myth that it's impossible to have it all.
If the marriage penalty can disappear in a generation, though, there's no reason that young women can't demand that suitors, schools and employers work on a different timetable when it comes to families, too.
That will take guts, but so does being honest during party chitchat. In time, we can learn to do both.
