– Daniela Drake, M.D., attended Wellesley College and received an MBA from Stanford University. She, along with Elizabeth Ford, authored the book “Smart Girls Marry Money.” A former McKinsey consultant, she is now a full-time primary care physician. Drake married (for love) and has reaped the consequences. The views expressed are her own. –
I had to pause when I came across a blog out of South Africa that read, “I think a way forward, or backwards some of you might say, is to encourage our smart, savvy and capable daughters to marry for money.” Since I co-authored a book with a similar premise, this sassy assertion definitely grabbed my attention.
The blog’s author Jackie May, an editor for The Times world pages in South Africa, penned these seemingly heretical comments after learning of alarming research by Dr. Caroline Gatrell at Lancaster University in England. Dr. Gatrell found, “women who explicitly choose career over kids are often vilified at work.”
Huh?
Conventional wisdom says just the opposite: Sacrificing baby-making is often necessary in the calculus of getting ahead at work. Many mid-career women have forsaken motherhood to obtain career goals. Indeed, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett made news a few years ago when she presented the statistic that 49% of mid-career women who made $100,000 a year or more were childless, compared to only 10% of men.
Yet, despite the sacrifices many women make in order to climb the corporate ladder, women are still woefully under represented in top executive ranks. Eight of the CEO’s on the Fortune 500 were women a couple of years ago. Now, two years later, we’ve got 12. At this rate it will take a little over 100 years for us to represent half of the CEO’s in the Fortune 500, in the year 2128.
Although the number of CEO’s is a lofty benchmark, in general even at the lower reaches, workplace parity is coming at a glacial pace. The reasons are complicated, and it isn’t just sexism. Many have suggested that it has to do with the choices women make to fulfill personal life ambitions.
Even today, many young women don’t foresee that these choices will affect their career success. Hewlett’s more recent national survey found that the typical young woman graduate plans to have a high paying job, take two to three years off to have children and benefit from career flexibility that lets her pop back in to the workplace when the mood strikes.
While Hewlett found the women’s optimism charming, she also noted that this generation follows hot on the high-heels of a generation of women who had similar ideas. By following non-linear career paths, that generation “lost 18…to 37% of their earning power,” and suffered a complete “downsizing of their ambitions.”
But the new graduates aren’t heeding the warning signs of the slightly more senior women’s failures.
These young women are counting on their talents to grant them repeated entrée into a marketplace they were brought up to believe is a meritocracy. The bad old days are behind us, as one co-ed commented to Hewlett, “Back then—when there were dinosaurs—people just did bad stuff to women.”
But is this true, or are people still doing bad stuff to women? If Dr. Caroline Gatrell’s study is right, women who have sacrificed important personal goals are penalized at work. As Gatrell’s study indicates: Childless women are viewed as lacking an “essential humanity” and viewed as unfit to manage others.
Yet at the same time Gatrell assures us that mothers don’t fare much better. Gatrell avers, “Women with children are blamed for combining motherhood with paid work and women with no children are sidelined and discounted because they are not mothers.”
The problem of women in the workplace is so complicated that the answers themselves sound like Orwellian double-speak. Or, have we at long last entered an age when double-speak simply means that both things can be true, that workplace discrimination can take on many forms and that there are no easy answers? But one thing is certain: achieving success in the workplace is like winning a competition. If half the entering team shows up thinking it’s something less than that, then men will still have the home field advantage—and achieving parity may take more than the 100 years estimated by my back-of-the-envelope calculation.
So what will I say if my daughter asks me, “How can I make sure my life is financially secure?”
I would have to pause before I answer. I would have to consider that in all likelihood she won’t live to see true workplace equality. But her life matters now. So I will have my own Orwellian answer for her and offer it with a hefty dose of irony, “Apply yourself at school and at work. And to cover all your bases, marry a man with money.”
If being "financially secure" is someone's highest goal in life, why shouldn't they marry for money? The trick is that since they pinned their hopes of being a complete human on an arbitrary, fickle, and narrow quality, they should not be surprised when they must sacrifice other goals to achieve it.
It's not neccessary to be rich to have a good life, though it helps.
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What does marrying for money say of the man (to presume on a man/woman marriage) being married? His worth as a person?
Being married to a rich “tool” is sure to make a woman unhappy and then all the money isn’t going to help. That said, being married to a poor “tool” would leave you unhappy AND stressing over finances.
Better to marry someone you like spending a lot of time with and hopefully lights your fire occasionally. If you’re happy and doing what you love, money will usually follow AND the occasional lack of it will not be quite as pressing.
I guess the key is to protect your finances guys - and girls get the best pre-nup you can and then set about making your own money (and protecting it too). Marry for love and common interests.. Money comes and goes.
They used to call such women “goldiggers” and the only men stupid/desperate to have anything to do with them were balding old men with prostate problems/ED as well as spare tires expanding faster even than their bank accounts.
Marrying wealthy will provide food on the table. Anything more remains uncertain. Moreover, the strategy will not solve the fundamental problems that this article touches.
We are raised in the expectation that today only the sky is the limit. In actuality, our options are very much limited. The greatest limit in our lives is time. Most people are able to execute only one task at a time well. Our social lives are just more complicated than driving a car. We are not very good at parallel processing complex situations and multitasking. It is simply impossible to do everything equally well. Hence, pursuing a power career and raising children requires a continuous balancing act. Its chances of success are greatly improved when both partners join in the effort extensively. The effort requires more than just writing checks, and our engagement may take more than twenty years, that is two decades per child during which life is not only about us. On the other hand children permit us to share experiences we would have never had without them.
Whether careers are worth the sacrifice is a very personal question. Just the other day I was reminded of the controversial and distinguished career of Wernher von Braun, the man whose name will forever be synonymous with manned space travel. In 1961, he promised in a letter to Vice President Johnson that the United States could send people to the moon in seven years. He missed his self-imposed deadline by about a year. I hardly know of anyone who made such audacious promise and was only a year late in its fulfillment. However, his greatest ambition, to send people to Mars, remained a dream.
Could a woman have accomplished this? I am sure she could have, had they let her. The first rocket pilot was a woman named Hanna Reitsch.
I asked myself, would I want to be like Wernher von Braun? Could I still muster the time and the energy to instill in my children the knowledge that they may need to grow into self-sufficient, responsible citizens? The prospects were intimidating. Money is the least of all worries, when ambitions come into play.
You may wish to read more about Wernher’s dream here:
http://brainmindinst.blogspot.com/2009/0 5/von-brauns-dreams-milestones-in-space. html
The notion of marrying for money reminds me of the conversation penned by a great author of American lore:
background: a man encounters a beautiful woman at a society party
man: You are outstandingly beautiful, would you sleep with me for $10,000
woman: You are a despicable man, get away from me
man: Well would you sleep with me for $1,000,000
woman: Well yes, I would consider that bargain
man: Well then, what if I offer $100,000
woman Absolutely not, what do you take me for!
man: we’ve already established that, we’re just arguing about the price!
A woman who marries for wealth is akin to someone who trades dignity for money. Some of these women earn that money with all the heartache and humiliation that the title of trophy wife entails. Best of luck to them, I hope they don’t ever look back at life and wish they had the opportunity to live a different one. There is not enough money in heaven and earth to grant them this.
DWG
The comments on this thread are more intelligently written than the article they are addressing.
it is just a natural for a woman to marry for money, i.e. to be well provided for herself and her offspring, as it is for older men to marry younger healthy women who can bare him many children. It is hardwired in your genes. It doesn’t mean either scenario will make you happy.
Surely the dichotomy is between “wage slave” and parent, not “career” and parent? It’s perfectly possible to have a successful part-time career based on royalty earnings - Madonna and JK Rowling being merely the first two names that come to mind.
Of course, if you do decide to marry for money, you’ll presumably have to choose someone not very bright, say an investment banker, and if you choose one of them you’ll have to get in line between all those young Russians in vanishingly small skirts. And, looking at your photo and trying hard not to be shallow, I have to say I don’t think you’d beat them
And then when you find out your spoiled s**** called kids don’t like you, you can turn to cosmetic surgery .
No no no this well will never run dry. If your not happy it most likely is some external factor that you can pay to fix right? That’s the way this life stuff works now isn’t it?? OH JEBUS SAVE ME!!
“Conventional wisdom says just the opposite: Sacrificing baby-making is often necessary in the calculus of getting ahead at work. Many mid-career women have forsaken motherhood to obtain career goals. Indeed, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett made news a few years ago when she presented the statistic that 49% of mid-career women who made $100,000 a year or more were childless, compared to only 10% of men.”
Not a single mention of how many of these women are in relationships. I know us men are pretty useless, but for the most part we still play a role here. Maybe this statistics is because these women are also looking for rich men who would much rather flash some $$, as your article title suggests, to pick up a young philly rather than an old mare who also earns cash monies? Maybe??
Way to take a stat and run with your angle.
I’m a guy, but I’ll marry for money! Any nice mid-aged women career women out there?
The amount of responses to this article really shows what a hot topic this is!
I’m lucky enough to be an at home mother without a job…though I do freelance when work is offered. When I married, I worked and we still had a modest paycheck. So its not like I married for money…but I did marry someone with ambition and drive and some smarts. We both grew up lower middle class and are fortunate to be very comfortable now. But that does come with sacrifices…no european vacations, cheap cars, more eating at home. Some people aren’t willing to do that. We all have different goals and need to make difficult decisions to accomodate what we want. I wanted to be with my kids and have never had my nails done or the inside of the spa. I can do my own nails and who has time to waste getting a massage?
As for women who don’t have kids, I don’t perceive them as cold hearted. I would much rather a woman not have kids than have some she didn’t want to fulfill expectations.
I doubt I’ll get a decent job when my children are all in school. But I know what I got on my SATs. I know I graduated from a university honors program and had no debts because of scholarships and grants. I chose an unimpressive future to be with my kids, banking a lot on my husband’s continued affections. If that means working retail with undergrads for years, its still worth it to me.
Ah yes… and one should divorce for money too… and those men left with nothing should shoot their brains out because they are worthless. Greed Wins. It’s people with values like this, that have caused the ills of the world we live in. Positively sickening.
Why would you set 1/2 as a goal for CEO’s of the Fortune 500? That seems ridiculous to me. That would only be an indicator “fair” or “equal” treatment if all women stopped having kids, something I hope doesn’t happen.
Also, you should be adjusting for choices women make. To bluntly stereotype, far and away the top science and technology programs in the world contain significantly more men than women. If you’re going to correct your “1/2 representation indicator”, you should also correct for the representation of women in top technology and business programs. Quite frankly, there are significantly fewer women in the world to be promoted to various VP level positions, which would naturally lead to under-representation at the CEO level. Then you could correct for the number of women you’d statistically expect to see at the top, were all things fair.
The fact that you penned such an obvious fallacy and called it “conventional wisdom” does discredit to both yourself, and your alma mater Stanford.
How cold a thought to marry money as an escape route to future unseen goal shifts.Makes for a wonderful marriage I’m sure, one with lasting statistics.Lets see, now 1 out of every 2 marriages fail so you are setting your daughter up for a 100% chance of failure.Pre Nups Men, Pre Nups are the answer, or perhapse don’t marry an American woman, all their looking for is money.I’ll take a girl that loves me for me before I’d take a trophy wife.Marriage is a relationship not a business contract.
This idea that women are under-represented or that the linear career oath is sexist is bunk. Anyone who takes large blocks of time off — whether it is to have a baby, circumnavigate the globe, climb Mt. Everest, or whatever — will find their career path crippled. Chose one thing and do it well and excel. Chose two things, and they both suffer.
Interesting that the GOAL the Dr. ascribes to work is “financial security” If that is the goal, why is it not acceptable for marrying, procreacting couples to consider how best to acheive that for the family without regard to measuring “equality” of work station?
These judgments–women not having equal CEO positions-BAD, women being denigrated for their commitment to home or lack thereof-BAD, the real economy not fitting the illusions of women graduates that they can drop in and out of a career-BAD–all are based on arbitrary subjective values unrelated to the stated goal of financial security. But our society might be better off if we judged men equally harshly for a lack of family commitment: in other words of sacrificial love were a higher goal than personal satisfaction (financial or relational).
The world becomes a little more cynical and depraved every year. Women in the age of feminism have shown they can be every bit as shallow, selfishly narcissistic, and materialistic as men at their worst. Women who essentially sacrifice what makes them unique–their ability to procreate and nurture children–for the sake of careers make me want to vomit. I’ve known a number of these creatures–they don’t deserve to be called women–and with few execeptions, they are miserable specimens of the human race viewed as people.
Sure–marry for money. Whey not lower yourself to the level of the common whore, who in many cases provides the same service without pretense and often with much greater expertise? As the song says “What’s love got to do with it?” Why would any man with a brain want to marry a (b-word) as cold and greedy as the author of this article?
I’m 64 years old–and I grow ever more disgusted with what society in the Western world is rapidly becoming, of which this article is symptomatic. I’m glad I’m not 21. If I was, before I died I would likely have to endure watching the world descend totally into degeneracy and a renewal of barbarianism.
Are you completely lost in the last century. A woman vilified because she doesn’t have children? A woman losing earning power because she does have children?
As usual, another sociologist pounding the common man with statistical data basing a career on misleading conclusions AND making a couple hundred thousand a year doing it.
My case study: I (that would be the husband) stay at home with the kids while unemployed. When I return to work, the kids go back to day care. Meanwhile, my wife, earns in excess of $100K per annum working for a pharmaceutical company. This company, to my best recollection, does not condone vilification of their female employees because they have children.
Now, for those of you who will say “Yeah, but I didn’t get a raise because I’m a woman with children.” or “Yeah, but my coworkers think I’m off my rocker because I don’t have children.” I say tell your coworkers to mind their own business and move into the 21st century or, in the case of the “I didn’t get a raise” situation, sue your employer.
Unbelievable that Reuters posted Dr. Drakes’ juvenile comments. Grow up Dr. Drake.
Smart girls marry a man they truly love. Money doesn’t matter one bit.
marry for money ?
i don’t think the way is right .
when the world have anything except money,lack love,only money ,it will be so sad ..
money is tool ,it is not the most important .
I completely agree. To marry a man with at least some kind of financial background makes things a lot easier. With a good financial background one is able to do what ones really wants to do. Specially when times gets tough it saves women from having to take or work in jobs they don’t like or which are underpaid, “purely for income reasons”, to help covering costs. To marry “at least secure” allows self development.
And – money “on the back” can be very supportive for a career – it enable a women to get the best possible child care, instead of having to accept that they might have to wait ages to find a place in government sponsored child care or having to drive their children miles and miles each morning, as just to often child care is not to be found just around the corner. Not to think of the possibility of having to accept “second choice” in child care.
So – what’s wrong about having a look at the finances before changing rings? Marrying a well off man does not rule out marrying for love, does it?