Wives for Hire

According to a Forbes article, marriages with career women are doomed. A career woman doesn’t totally disagree

By Eevon Chung

“What women suffer, then, is more insidious than invisibility. It is deliberate erasure.”
– Louise Armstrong

On 22 August 2006, business publication Forbes featured an article on Forbes.com by its executive news editor Michael Noer, entitled Don’t Marry Career Women. In it, Noer attempted to draw a correlation between professional career women and what can be termed as a “lasting and happy marriage”, advising menfolk not to marry career women because “the more successful she is, the more likely she is to be dissatisfied with you”. This, according to him, would inadvertently lead to a divorce.

Unsurprisingly, the response was swift and extremely heated. Numerous blogs lambasted the author for his sexism. The article was quickly removed, and eventually put back up with a counterpoint by Forbes staff writer, Elizabeth Corcoran, who suggested that men continuously learn new skills and adapt to changes in order to keep their marriage exciting and blissful.

As I read the article, it brought a chuckle. Mostly, it was amusing to find such patriarchal worldviews still in existence, especially coming from someone as well-respected as a Forbes.com editor. Yet in the midst of the nonchalance, a thought crept into my head: what was the motivation behind this global uproar among working females?

Was the flurry of strong responses really a stand for women, or was it a merely a bruise to the ‘power suit’ females? It could most likely be a case of the former masking the latter. Corcoran’s stance was admirable, but neither hers nor Noer’s bandwagons are worth jumping on. More importantly, a line needs to be drawn somewhere with regards to the proverbial battle of the sexes.

FOR FIGHTING’S SAKE
Since Mary Wollstonecraft’s classic 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman came out, women have fought hard to be recognised as capable, if not equal, compared to their male counterparts.

We see the fruits of yesterday’s women enjoyed by today’s generation of young working adults. City women no longer suffer from “deliberate erasure”, nor are we being ignored. If anything, we are being highly noticed and accounted for. Men are respecting our capabilities and considering us as equals. In fact, when it comes to the working world, women are enjoying more benefits than their male counterparts: maternity benefits, sponsored Pap smears and, in some companies, menstrual leaves.

Yet instead of enjoying the benefits, some women consider these provisions patronising. Do we really need that extra leave day, they declare, just because we might be suffering from a bad case of the cramps? How dare you marginalise our capabilities to work while we have horrible cramps!

Is that really what women want? Do men complain about the lack of a yearly gonad check? Why is there always a need to prove that we exist, can do better and are worth the extra money our bosses should pay us?

As Corcoran mentioned in her article, women have always had a choice to constantly reinvent themselves in order to keep out of a deeply set patriarchal system. No doubt, there is also a choice for women to not take the career high ground and stay at home to bake. Yet many women today choose to juggle both the role of a nurturer and also the breadwinner, which can only serve to alleviate women to a higher pedestal.

While striving to become the financial head of the family is perfectly fine, women cannot ignore the equal importance of the former role. Granted, we might have to work doubly hard to get to where we want to go. (Soon after the Forbes article was published, the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that women working full-time and year-round continued to make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, a number that remains virtually unchanged since 2004.) But while we’re busy trying to prove ourselves worthy of equal treatment, we should not cry foul or bloody murder if we are accused of failing to deliver according to our God-gifted blueprint as the nurturer.

* * * * *

As a fellow career woman, was I offended by Noer’s marriage advice? No. Did I find Corcoran’s response justified and worthy of praise? No. Noer said something, Corcoran responded. Noer’s write-up had facts, quotes and statistics from respected social scientists and resources. Corcoran’s? An honest working female’s opinion—one opinion. Far from wrong, it would nonetheless have been better received were it backed by as much factual and statistical proof. In the end, the supposed ‘balanced’ point of view was so heavily laced with emotions that I’m sure men could only think that such a response was expected. That, to me, a fellow woman, is more disappointing.

The long-acknowledged fact is, women are wired differently from men. We emote more. We speak at least twice as much. We have the ability to carry another human being in our bodies. We have a lower blood count compared to men (which explains why we’re often unable to do heavy labour). We bleed once a month.

This truth should be taken ‘like a man’, but not ‘as a man’. We are made women, and no one says ‘frailty’ has to be our name. The battle of the sexes is not a battle to prove that women are men; we are not, and will never be. Likewise, men will never pop babies, no matter how much scientific engineering takes place. Once we’ve settled on this truth, maybe we can also start questioning ourselves each time we expect our men to dress, cook, and talk like all the made-up men with fake metrosexuality on television. But that’s for another day, and another controversial article.