That’s the title of an “op-ed recap” of that Forbes.com column by Michael Noer, by Caryl Rivers, professor of journalism at Boston University, and Rosalind C. Barnett, senior scientist at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Below is an excerpt:
The newest chimera’s head comes from Forbes.com, in the form of an article last week by editor Michael Noer with a headline “Don’t Marry Career Women” and subtitled “How do women, careers and marriage mix? Not well, say social scientists.” The article was accompanied by a slide show purporting to show the “social science” on which the piece was based.
The way this story played out tells us a lot about the workings of today’s media, the Internet and the 24-hour continuous news cycle. It may also herald a major new media power source: Femalebloggers Inc.
Forbes Retreated from StoryForbes quickly took down the slide show. The solo Noer article was repackaged as a point-counterpoint commentary with Forbes staff writer Elizabeth Corcoran. Disagreeing.
Her commentary (obviously turned around on a dime) was anecdotal. So the result was a guy taking over the commanding heights of “science” and the woman offered a flimsier personal rebuttal.
Meanwhile, Slate media critic Jack Shafer weighed in, with a story headlined “Forbes’ Female Trouble. So what if career women are divorces waiting to happen?”
Shafer rightly said the original Forbes piece was largely junk and noted “the Web site entries appear to be a holding pen for crap Noer couldn’t shoehorn into his overstuffed thesis.” Noer included studies irrelevant to this thesis. One, for example, found that higher-income people cheat more in marriage.
But Shafer claimed he didn’t understand why women got so upset over the article, saying, “I’ve yet to read a blog item or a protesting e-mail from a reader that convinces me that the article, as opposed to the deliberately provocative headline, really insults women, career or otherwise.”
To which Jen Posner, executive director of Women In Media and News and occasional commentator for Women’s eNews, responded: “He hasn’t been convinced that the article insults women? Really? Even after all these women online and on radio have said outright that it’s insulting?”
Read the entire piece here, at Women’s eNews.
