I looked over that article yesterday and was kind of puzzled by insinuating that a voluntary response email questionaire resembles data.
Then I saw that slate, curse them and their paid reporters, beat me to it.
http://www.slate.com/id/2126636/ (ps: Mr. Shafer, I resent the term social-science dropout.)
I think an important note missed there is that even in the Yale alumni survey, absolutely no data supports the main thesis: that the number of women who are choosing to stay at home at a given age is growing: all that doing a cross-cut survey like that of five different alumni classes yields a correlation of working gap with age, not that this is a generational attitude.
(I'm also not keen about that data too: I'd be willing to put even money on it being another self-selecting questionairre, or even better, a survey conducted in 1999 at the reunions, and published in 2000; either of those could be highly unrepresentative.).
Most likely, a meaningful percentage of women are giving up their careers (although I wouldn't use any of those percentages in the articles), and that this is probably a higher amount than at least some of us would have guessed: I don't see* any data which should make us think this trend is growing, let alone that the cause of this is generational. I barely see any data at all.
* I'm guessing that if you tracked back to the 60's, you would find that fewer women abandoned their careers, but I'm not sure this is meaningful either, since like the SAT's back in the 60's, the pool of people involved was very different and much much smaller. What you'd really want is a longitudinal study of capability vs working. If you sorted that out, I think you'd find a level or increasing amount of women working in families from 1950 onwards.
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Then I saw that slate, curse them and their paid reporters, beat me to it.
http://www.slate.com/id/2126636/ (ps: Mr. Shafer, I resent the term social-science dropout.)
I think an important note missed there is that even in the Yale alumni survey, absolutely no data supports the main thesis: that the number of women who are choosing to stay at home at a given age is growing: all that doing a cross-cut survey like that of five different alumni classes yields a correlation of working gap with age, not that this is a generational attitude.
(I'm also not keen about that data too: I'd be willing to put even money on it being another self-selecting questionairre, or even better, a survey conducted in 1999 at the reunions, and published in 2000; either of those could be highly unrepresentative.).
Most likely, a meaningful percentage of women are giving up their careers (although I wouldn't use any of those percentages in the articles), and that this is probably a higher amount than at least some of us would have guessed: I don't see* any data which should make us think this trend is growing, let alone that the cause of this is generational. I barely see any data at all.
* I'm guessing that if you tracked back to the 60's, you would find that fewer women abandoned their careers, but I'm not sure this is meaningful either, since like the SAT's back in the 60's, the pool of people involved was very different and much much smaller. What you'd really want is a longitudinal study of capability vs working. If you sorted that out, I think you'd find a level or increasing amount of women working in families from 1950 onwards.