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Brainy sons owe intelligence to their mothers
GLENDA COOPER 27 June 1996 [ Source: The Independent Online ]
TWO Articles Here: The M.R.S. and the Ph.D. By STEPHANIE COONTZ : February 11, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/opinion/sunday/marriage-suits-educated-women.html?_
TODAY women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees and more than half of master’s and Ph.D.’s. Many people believe that, while this may be good for women as income earners, it bodes ill for their marital prospects. As Kate Bolick wrote in a much-discussed article in The Atlantic last fall, American women face “a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be ‘marriageable’ men — those who are better educated and earn more than they do.” Educated women worry that they are scaring away potential partners, and pundits claim that those who do marry will end up with unsatisfactory matches. They point to outdated studies suggesting that women with higher earnings than their husbands do more housework to compensate for the threat to their mates’ egos, and that men who earn less than their wives are more likely to experience erectile dysfunction.
Is this really the fate facing educated heterosexual women: either no marriage at all or a marriage with more housework and less sex? Nonsense. That may have been the case in the past, but no longer. For a woman seeking a satisfying relationship as well as a secure economic future, there has never been a better time to be or become highly educated. For more than a century, women often were forced to choose between an education and a husband. Of women who graduated from college before 1900, more than three-quarters remained single. As late as 1950, one-third of white female college graduates ages 55 to 59 had never married, compared with only 7 percent of their counterparts without college degrees. Some of these women chose to stay single, of course, and that choice has always been easier and more rewarding for educated women. But the low marriage rates of educated women in the past were also because of the romantic and sexual prejudices of men. One physician explained the problem in Popular Science Monthly in 1905: An educated woman developed a “self-assertive, independent character” that made it “impossible to love, honor and obey” as a real wife should. He warned that as more middle-class women attended college, middle-class men would look to the lower classes to find uneducated wives.
That is exactly what happened in the mid-20th century. From 1940 to the mid-1970s, the tendency for men to marry down educationally became more pronounced and the cultural ideal of hypergamy — that women must marry up — became more insistent. Postwar dating manuals advised women to “play dumb” to catch a man — and 40 percent of college women in one survey said they actually did so. As one guidebook put it: “Warning! ... Be careful not to seem smarter than your man.” If you hide your intelligence, another promised, “you’ll soon become the little woman to be pooh-poohed, patronized and wed.”
Insulting as it may have been, such advice was largely sound. Studying national surveys on mate preferences, David M. Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, and his colleagues found that in 1956, education and intelligence were together ranked 11th among the things men sought in a mate. Much more important to them was finding a good cook and housekeeper who was refined, neat and had a pleasing disposition. By 1967, education and intelligence had moved up only one place, to No. 10, on men’s wish lists. Men in the postwar period were threatened by the thought of a woman with more or even as much education as they had. One man who taught at a women’s college in the 1950s told me his colleagues used to joke that once they knew a woman had earned a Ph.D., they didn’t even need to ask what she had specialized in: clearly, it was in “Putting Hubby Down.”
But over the past 30 years, these prejudices have largely disappeared. By 1996, intelligence and education had moved up to No. 5 on men’s ranking of desirable qualities in a mate. The desire for a good cook and housekeeper had dropped to 14th place, near the bottom of the 18-point scale. The sociologist Christine B. Whelan reports that by 2008, men’s interest in a woman’s education and intelligence had risen to No. 4, just after mutual attraction, dependable character and emotional stability. The result has been a historic reversal of what the economist Elaina Rose calls the “success” penalty for educated women. By 2008, the percentage of college-educated white women ages 55 to 59 who had never been married was down to 9 percent, just 3 points higher than their counterparts without college degrees. And among women 35 to 39, there was no longer any difference in the percentage who were married.
African-American
women are less likely to marry than white women overall, but educated
black women are considerably more likely to marry than their
less-educated counterparts. As of 2008, 70 percent of
African-American female college graduates had married, compared with
60 percent of high school graduates and just 53 percent of high
school dropouts. One reason educated heterosexual women may
worry about their marriage prospects today is that overall marriage
rates have been slipping since 1980. But they have slipped less for
educated women than for anyone else. Furthermore, college-educated
women, once they do marry, are much less likely to divorce. As a
result, by age 30, and especially at ages 35 and 40, college-educated
women are significantly more likely to be married than any other
group. And according to calculations by the economist Betsey
Stevenson, an educated woman still single at age 40 is much more
likely to marry in the next decade than her less educated
counterparts.
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Brainy
sons owe intelligence to their mothers
GLENDA COOPER 27 June 1996 [ Source: The
Independent Online ]
Intelligent men owe their brains to their mothers, according to research published today in The Lancet. Growing evidence shows that several genes which determine intelligence appear to be located on the X chromosome, the one men inherit from their mothers .Any mutation on the X chromosome has more effect on a man than a woman because a woman inherits X chromosomes from both her parents, which tends to dilute the gene's impact.
But a man only has one X chromosome inherited from his mother, which is paired with the much smaller Y chromosomes from his father. Therefore, an intelligence-enhancing X gene has more of a chance of becoming the predominate gene, determining the man's basic intelligence, looks and character. It also works the other way; if the predominate gene is not as strong as it should be, the man is more likely to suffer mental retardation.
Professor Gillian Turner, the author of the study, said: "If the gene is the one that increases intelligence then its full effect will be seen in men, while in women the benefit is less pronounced. This explains why some men are extraordinarily intelligent." She concludes that if a man wants smart sons his best bet is to marry a smart woman.