Half Changed World

I’m wiped, so this is mostly going to be a few pointers to some links I found useful in putting that Times article about Yale women and their future plans in context.

• Gelf Magazine has the full text of the "survey", showing that many of the questions were fairly leading.
• Mediabistro reports that the students quoted in the article are pretty unhappy about it.  Am I being too cynical when I think that maybe they just realized that this is the first thing that’s going to come up when anyone — a potential employer or a potential date — googles them for a long time to come.  (Via Alas)
• Jack Shafer at Slate hit the ground running last Tuesday with an article pointing out Story’s use of "weasel words" like "many" in the article.  Friday, he followed up with a second article, noting that the Times had run a very similar article back in 1980.  I was particuarly amused by that, since the last time I went hunting for statistics on mothers’ labor force participation, I found a 1994 BLS article entitled "Are women leaving the labor force?"  Some things never seem to change.
• There’s been a ton written about this article around the blogosphere, but I think Fred Vincy at Stone Court does a particularly good job of sorting out the different questions that can be asked.
• Judith Stadtman Tucker at Mothers Movement Online offers a thoughtful response to the article that goes beyond pointing out its flaws.
• Finally, I think it’s worth noting that none of the family-oriented young women quoted in the story seemed at all interested in David Brooks’ and Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s advice that they get busy having babies right away.

I’m also working on a post about SAHMs and welfare, but I know too much about welfare and so keep getting lost on tangents…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Magazines and Newspapers, Work-family choices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.