I'm going to pretend this is satire, because it's fantastic.
Citing a blog post about a paper, Suzanne Venker shows an incredible ability to cut through the context and get right to the facts. From
- couples who resist traditional gender roles, or who shoot for a so-called equal marriage, are less happy than those who swim with the tide.
to
- While these findings aren’t surprising to many of us, they certainly defy the cultural narrative. Americans are forever being told that “gender equality”— which is no longer defined as equal opportunity but as male and female interchangeability—is the only road to a happy life.
and
- Typically speaking, a man’s identity is inextricably linked to his paycheck. A woman’s is linked to her children. [...] Giving birth is a woman’s unparalleled accomplishment—her first instinct is to provide for that child physically and emotionally. A man’s first instinct is to protect and to provide for that child. That’s his unparalleled accomplishment.
to
- Societal attitudes may have changed, but human nature has not. Perhaps it’s time we surrendered.
Suzanne holds no punches and pays no heed to pervasive liberal notions.
Does happiness have something to do with personal expectations, emotions, or ideals?
Is wanting to stay home with kids different than getting laid off?
Is it important to also quite the second half of a sentence when only the first half agrees with you?
Shut up, you liberal snowflake
Great to hear. It's always about compromise isn't it?
Wise words that have helped keep the peace. My father-in-law told my wife and I early on in our marriage "Try for 50-50, but if each of you feels like you're the 60% of a 60-40 compromise, that's pretty typical, so just let it go."
Anybody else feel like she just repeated herself ? I mean the only difference here really is the woman popped the thing out. —her first instinct is to provide for that child physically and emotionally.
A man’s first instinct is to protect and to provide for that child. That’s his unparalleled accomplishment
Emailed for the study two days ago. Got it this morning. So the NLSY79 cohort was given the CES-D depression scale in '91, again in '94, and then not again until '98 and '08. The NLSY79 cohort was also queried about share of family income yearly. In '87, the cohort was queried "about their opinion towards women’s roles in work and family domains using eight-item on a four-point scale (1 = strongly agree, 2 = agree, 3 = disagree, and 4 = Strongly Disagree). They limited their sample to 2-parent households in a married or committed relationship where at least one parent worked full time that had at least one child under 13 living at home. They ended up with 1463 fathers and 1769 mothers. CES-D is 20 questions. This study picked 7 of those 20 and discarded the other 13. Then they looked at the '87 numbers for gender roles. Then they looked at the money numbers and did this: That's for depressive symptoms and relative earnings. stay-at-home status is another 30 coefficient table. For those keeping track at home, that's 15 questions, and 76 cofactors to find 2 correlations in a sample size of 3k. I'm no statistician so maybe what they're doing is totally rigorous and makes absolute sense but the results aren't exactly jumping out at me. I would also argue that the amount of massaging they're doing of the data makes my spidey senses tingle regardless of what they're looking for.
Had you dug deeper, you would have found even more gold: Yeah. This is the NLSY79 cohort, queried about everything under the goddamn sun, as reported twenty six years ago. So the first real question is why, exactly, did they go with '91 and '94 when they've been interviewed every two years since. In other words, there are twelve data sets newer than the ones they used. Especially since it's a longitudinal data survey with a customer-facing front-end. You can literally query every dataset but '94 and older. Where it gets funnier is if you wanna see their paper, you have to ask "the news bureau" to email it to you. It's not like you can just look it up - you have to beg one by one. And if you wanna see where that paper has spread, you get only the "marriage and religion research institute." Which has a gmail address, by the way. Yet Fox not only snatched at this, they read it wrong: If everybody was between 14 and 22 in '79, they were between 26 and 34 in '91 and between 29 and 37 in '94. Most people would argue that the differences in aspect between 60-year-olds and 26-year-olds are substantial... but not Fox News.The data sample comprised more than 1,463 men and 1,769 women who participated in the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. A majority of the individuals in the study, all born between 1957 and 1965, were members of the baby-boom generation. Participants’ psychological well-being was measured in 1991 and 1994 using a seven-item scale that assessed their levels of depressive symptoms.
New research at the University of Illinois examined data on nearly 1,500 men and 1,800 women between the ages of 52 and 60 and found that couples who resist traditional gender roles, or who shoot for a so-called equal marriage, are less happy than those who swim with the tide.