There may be a difference in cultures, here, but in the u.s. there's been a lot of info, disguised as "neutral" but actually often funded by right-wing think tanks to show a strong "marriage benefit" for both men and women, although they'll concede that in the us, married men make more money and live longer than do married women. however, here's an excerpt from a report from "[American] Women in Science" that looks at professional marriages more in depth, that complicate the "surely things have changed, no?" picture--
quote: The worst thing a professional woman can do is marry and have children. For men, by contrast, marriage has brought distinct
advantages; married men with families on average earn more, live longer, and
progress faster in their careers than do single men.2 The conflict women encounter
between family and career is not just a private matter. Since the 18th century, what
North Americans have called individuals have been male-heads of households.
Professional culture has been structured to assume that the professional has a
stay-at-home wife and access to vast resources of unpaid labor. Our meager initiatives to hire dual-career couples and our feeble parental leave policies all leave the basic structures favoring traditional arrangements in place.
For historical reasons, women in our culture practice hypergamy, the tendency to marry
men of higher (or at least not lower) status than their own. As a result, more women
than men professionals are married to other professionals. A stay-at-home husband is
a rare luxury. While only 6.5 percent of the members of the American Physical Society
are women, 44 percent of them are married to other physicists. An additional 25 percent are married to some other type of scientist, according to a 1 April 1991 report in The Scientist. A remarkable 80 percent of women mathematicians and 33 percent of women chemists also married within their disciplines. Women, as members of dual-career couples, suffer from decreased job mobility. They also shoulder more than their share of domestic labor.3 Within dual-earner families, women continue to do 80 percent of the domestic labor. It is not true that male Harvard Ph.D.s are genetically incapable of doing laundry, they just need mentoring in how to care for fine linens and
silks.
While it is no longer required (as it was at the turn of the century in New England's
women's colleges) that professional women remain single and childless, women are not
as free to choose to have families as their male colleagues. The 13 March 1992 Science
reported that 38 percent of women chemists, for example, are single compared to 18
percent of the men; 37 percent of women chemists over the age of 50 are childless
compared with only 9 percent of the men. Women go to great lengths to "fit in" to
institutions structured around the assumption that scientists do not bear children.
Biologist Deborah Spector displayed perhaps the ultimate dedication to her profession,
having labor induced on a 3-day weekend so she could attend a student's thesis defense
the following Monday. A neurobiologist at Tuebingen's Developmental Biology Institute
reports further that roughly a dozen young women of her acquaintance have had
abortions because they thought that having a baby would end their careers.
I'm interested in this, because, although I'm in a good relationship and for the first time in my life have a "real job", I am frustrated by the exhaustion levels my partner and I both experience . . . and when I see the older male professors with their stay at home wives, the "honorary degrees" and "endowed chairs" being ladled onto them, I admit, I get a little pissed off, still. Does the situation described here sound similar, different to other parts of the world?
There was also an article in yesterday's NYTimes about women being "less committed" to the career path, to defining "success" in terms of career--taking as its starting point the decisions by Oprah, Rosie O'Donnell and a few other high profile media women to call it quits ...
(And of course I recognize that I'm privileged in so many ways, but I think the system that creates these "slight" differences also sustains the more major differences in power, privilege, status, and access to environments that will be life-sustaining/enhancing that pervade all through the culture.) |
married men live longer and make more money than any other demographic) 
