'Acting Wife': Marriage Market Incentives and Labor Market Investments

http://www.nber.org/papers/w23043

by jessaustin • 9 years ago

104 111 9 years ago

Clubber3• 9 years ago

Women have been trained to be a timid, subservient partner to men for a millennia, and it's hard to get away from. The answer is the same for women and men: know your value, constantly strive to improve your value, and command that you get paid your value. Also, know your interaction with business is just that, business. Be more willing to cut a business relationship than a personal one. Don't blame yourself if someone doesn't see your value, just find someone who does.

Disclosure: My wife is also a programmer.

Chris20486• 9 years ago

it's hard to get away from

Could have fooled me, many western women lean towards tsundere...

arjie• 9 years ago

The set is so large and our sampling so biased that I doubt any of us can conclude anything based off our personal experiences.

chongli• 9 years ago

it's hard to get away from

Could have fooled me, many western women lean towards tsundere...

These two properties are not incompatible.

khazhou• 9 years ago

For the benefit of people who don't have "tsundere" in their daily vocabulary like Chris2048:

"Tsundere (ツンデレ?, pronounced [tsɯndeɽe]) is a Japanese term for a character development process that describes a person who is initially cold and even hostile towards another person before gradually showing a warmer side over time. The word is derived from the terms tsun tsun (ツンツン?), meaning to turn away in disgust, and dere dere (デレデレ?) meaning to become 'lovey dovey'. Originally found in Japanese bishōjo games, the word is now part of the otaku moe phenomenon, reaching into other media such as maid cafes, anime, manga, novels, and even mass media. The term was made popular in the visual novel Kimi ga Nozomu Eien."

Kenji2• 9 years ago

May I offer a counterpoint?

In the current climate in western culture, it's more like women know exactly what they want and how to demand it, the problem is more that it is given to them without challenging them enough, thus preventing personal and professional growth. Right now, I get to witness how a coworker has to give private lessons to students in the evenings, beside working 100% as a software engineer, because he is forced to pay for the life of his ex-wife who moved in with her new boyfriend. He is financially ruined and barely able to make ends meet.

the_realist• 9 years ago

You can offer counterpoints in the voting booth. The Internet is taboo.

j2kun• 9 years ago

This story is not realistic enough to be credible, nor is it reasonable evidence as a counterpoint. "Pay for the life of his ex-wife"? What does that even mean? Is it court-ordered alimony? I can hardly believe a judge would order alimony that is "financially ruinous" for either party, and if it is the case your coworker can appeal the judgement.

Even if your story were true, it has nothing to do with the climate of western culture, nor is it reasonable to extract a broad judgement of women from this anecdote. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it also seems from your comment that you don't personally know the woman whose intentions you're inferring (from the evidence of a biased party).

dominotw• 9 years ago

have been trained

seems to be the crux of modern gender wars.

devoply• 9 years ago

It's hard to say things about an entire group for 3.5 billion humans. Evolution has some stuff to do with it. Everything is not rhetorical.

mirimir5• 9 years ago

I'd say that the "timid, subservient" bit is mostly an illusion and male fantasy ;) It is true that women, in many cultures, were trained to focus on family and reproduction. And men were encouraged to "do great things". And to die in wars :(

Maybe there's some biological basis for that. But mostly, I think, it was just historical accident. Driven by technological limitations, perhaps. And for sure, it's all in flux now :)

VodkaHaze• 9 years ago

I don't think it's a male fantasy. I also don't think it's biological. Just look at how women and men are socialized from a young age.

Example: up until recently, many young girls in the west grew up on Disney princesses. Rewatch the movies, and pay attention to the female protagonists in those movies being active vs passive agents. Most are passive -- they're simply dealt a series of events (which generally happen only because they are beautiful or otherwise intrinsically valuable, not because of how they act).

Being exposed to those narratives from a very young age surely has an effect on identity, personality formation, etc.

ProxCoques• 9 years ago

In my job I sometimes conduct software usability research. One of the first things you notice when you do this is that without connection to demography, and almost without exception, men will blame the system under test when they can't use it, while women will blame themselves. There are deep-seated issues in gender identity that I think are implied by this, and which this "Acting Wife" study is consistent with.

guard-of-terra• 9 years ago

Men are twice as stronger on certain operations - for example, grip by hand.

That's a lot of biological basis, which nevertheless is much less relevant today.

elindbe2• 9 years ago

If that's the case then why do married women not change their responses? If it's just a matter of "training" then why would getting married affect the answers? A simpler explanation is that single women realize that the type of men they would like to attract tend to prefer more feminine women. Married women don't have to care since they're not trying to attract a man.

Now sure, no woman should be forced to care about being feminine. Nor should she be forced to care about beauty or any other traits that the men she wishes to attract like. But at the same time, men shouldn't be forced to like any certain person either and if they happen to favor more feminine women, then that's 100% their choice to make.

erikpukinskis2• 9 years ago

Wow, your post was dead (I vouched it), but you are exactly right. Everyone in this thread is missing the point. Shocking to see the one scientifically valid interpretation of the article downvoted below threadshold. I thought we were pro-science on HN?

If women were just "choosing" to approach their career in a different way, or had just been brainwashed, then they would react the same regardless of who is around.

What this study shows is that single women expect single men to react badly to their ambition. Not that the women actually have less ambition. Yet so many in this thread are discussing this as if it's evidence that women have different inclinations. Incredible confirmation bias.

u_wot_m8• 9 years ago

I wouldn't say "trained", I would say evolutionarily selected. Sexually dimorphic phenotypes and differences in IQ distribution show this.

CryoLogic• 9 years ago

In my experience, it is deathly hard to meet ambitious women. I've known many ambitious men, but women in my experience seem to lack the desire to really go all out in their careers.

I am sure there are biological factors, including variations in androgenic hormones etc. But I do believe it is largely cultural and this study matches what I've seen in my own life quite closely.

This is unfortunate because I am attracted to more ambitious women.

tsunamifury• 9 years ago

It's actually quite easy to meet ambitious women in a major city. I mean, realistically, they are so ambitious they probably neither have the time nor need to meet you.

dajohnson892• 9 years ago

Can confirm, living in DC.

sokoloff4• 9 years ago

I had a direct report for years. She was very smart, capable, effective, and a great thinking partner on my leadership team. She also got an unfair (IMO) amount of blowback from her interactions with other leaders.

"Rough", "abrasive", "difficult" were the common labels. While there were things she may have done differently, I don't think I'd have seen the same blowback from an identically-acting male leader. I suspect that her experience is common and that if it's gender biased (I think it is), this continual molding could tend to create the outcomes you observe.

Thought experiment: How often do we tell young girls "Don't be so bossy" as compared to how often we say that to young boys?

Or "Imagine that you just heard a mom tell her kid, 'Don't be so bossy!' What gender is the child that she is addressing?"

jjoonathan2• 9 years ago

How often do we tell young girls "Don't be so bossy"

I can't say, but every time I wind up watching a children's show targeted at girls (usually in a lobby or exercise room), the protagonists are all highly assertive and there's often heavy-handed promotion of the subtext "boys are dumb and useless and it's OK to be a complete asshole to them if it gets you what you want."

ryanmonroe• 9 years ago

Imagine that you just heard a mom tell her kid, 'Don't be so bossy!' What gender is the child that she is addressing?

Imagine if you heard a parent tell their child "don't be an asshole". What gender is the child? I think it's true that women are held to a different standard when it comes to assertiveness, but the existence of a female-specific insult is not evidence of that. There are plenty of male-specific insults of the same nature. Asshole, dick, douche, prick, bastard, etcetera

sheepmullet5• 9 years ago

Thought experiment: How often do we tell young girls "Don't be so bossy" as compared to how often we say that to young boys?

I think a more enlightening question is:

Are parents/teachers etc being overly unfair towards girls than they would be towards boys for the same bossy behaviour?

I'd argue no. If anything it is the opposite. Only different language is used.

sheepmullet5• 9 years ago

I don't think I'd have seen the same blowback from an identically-acting male leader.

Let's take a step back and remove gender from the discussion.

My experience working with senior leadership has been to get results you end up stepping on toes. As such you get called all sorts of things.

It's also my experience that the way a person acts towards their boss is different from the way they act with their peers which again is different than the way they act towards their subordinates.

With this in mind are you sure it had anything to do with sexism?

notadoc3• 9 years ago

If you want to meet ambitious women, find ways to interact with careers that require ambition. Typically something that requires an advanced education will have ambitious people by default.

skywhopper• 9 years ago

I think you may be misreading the study. Based on the abstract, my takeaway was that women are not less ambitious, but that single women feel social pressure to appear to be less ambitious. Which does eventually play into what actions they take. But the fact that non-single women do _not_ follow the same pattern is strong evidence that the concealment of ambition is a social issue, not a biological difference.

aianus• 9 years ago

I think it's more accurate to say it's men that feel social pressure to be more ambitious than they might be otherwise.

It's certainly a lot easier for an unambitious low-income woman to find a husband than vice versa.

gaius2• 9 years ago

women in my experience seem to lack the desire to really go all out in their careers

It depends what you are optimising for. If men "go all out" but experience burnout, stress ulcers, depression, carpal tunnel syndrome, problems from bad diet and poor posture and lack of fresh air and exercise, yadda yadda then are women wise or foolish to emulate them? What about the life expectancy gap that no-one likes to talk about?

Consider that many men who sacrifice their health to "ambition" are doing so to provide for or at least to impress a woman. Who is really exploiting who?

beachstartup• 9 years ago

i didn't see any value judgments in the gp. it's common knowledge these days that a career could very well jeopardize your physical and mental health. i think that was the exact point gp was trying to make - women exhibit less sacrificial behavior in pursuing their careers.

laughfactory2• 9 years ago

This. Much of the conversation on this thread has made work sound like a hallowed calling, something to be prized and cherished. But it's just a job people. And it's equally brutal on the minds and bodies of men and women alike. I hope my daughters can find a better way than just working some pointless corporate gig for a paycheck. I don't know what that looks like yet, but I do know the world will look a lot different in a decade or two when they become adults.

tomp• 9 years ago

Maybe it's the other way round - maybe it's the women who are "normally" ambitious, but it's the men who feel more pressure to be successful and thus ambitious (because women seem to value that more than men, in average, as far as sexual relationships are concerned), so you see more ambitious men than women.

I'm guessing both effects have an effect in reality.

sampo• 9 years ago

In my experience, it is deathly hard to meet ambitious women.

If we believe the posted study, you might have met several, but they are just hiding their ambitions from you.

stephencanon• 9 years ago

I have several close friends who are extremely ambitious women. By and large, they are too busy working 80+ hour weeks as surgical residents or profs trying to get tenure to spend any time dating. Those who are married met their partners earlier in life when they were less busy (my wife and I met while in school, for example) or through work (plenty of couples form during residency).

erikpukinskis2• 9 years ago

What this study shows is that you've met a lot of ambitious women, but they pretended to not be ambitious around you because they expected you to react badly.

morgante6• 9 years ago

Just move to NYC. Or go to an Ivy League university.

notadoc3• 9 years ago

You'd probably get different answers if you didn't study MBA students.

jcoffland2• 9 years ago

I think the assumption is that MBA students are more ambitious than normal. Students often choose the MBA degree because they are unsure what they really want to do. An MBA is seen as a generally useful degree which could lead to a high paying job in many different fields. Limiting the study to students who had made that choice, for whatever reason, could very well have an effect on the study's outcome.

ben_jones2• 9 years ago

I fear instead the MBA and post-undergrad route has become the new "safe way to go". Extend your student loans, stay with your friends from college, keep going out on the weekends, keep a relative life of leisure (subjective, the course loads of some people are egregiously harder then others but from what I've seen it tends to be similar to undergrad for most).

notadoc3• 9 years ago

So why not study medical students? You'd get vastly different responses.

_m8fo• 9 years ago

I don't have access to the full paper, but I'm surprised to see that there's no definition of "ambitious." Is it ambitious to want to start a company or to want to raise children successfully? Perhaps women have a different definition of "ambitious", therefore men are trying to hold up women to their standard.

BurningFrog2• 9 years ago

I'd rephrase that to Perhaps women have different ambitions than men. On average, with large individual variation, of course.

To me "ambitious" is about both how big your ambitions are and how hard you pursue them.

huac• 9 years ago

It is self-reported and relative to others.

"The questionnaire asks how often students are willing to travel for work, the number of hours per week they are willing to work, and their desired compensation. They were also asked to rate their ambition relative to their most recent work colleagues and their tendency to lead in day-to-day interactions on a 1-to-5 scale."

BurningFrog2• 9 years ago

So it's about ambitions in the workplace.

srssays• 9 years ago

Ambitious in this context seems to mean materialistic.

wikibob• 9 years ago

Full Text PDF: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/pallais/files/acting_wife.p...

thedevil2• 9 years ago

The funny thing is, I preferred ambitious women, especially when contemplating marriage.

It seems easier to get along with someone who has a career and therefore similar goals and troubles and life-rhythm.

And a wife with a career is less likely to look for long term alimony in the event of a divorce.

kchoudhu10• 9 years ago

Be ready to have serious discussions about the two body problem when you're in a relationship with an ambitious woman. When opportunities come, someone's going to have to take the hit and swallow the disruption. Men are accustomed to having their way in these matters -- this is not necessarily the case anymore.

In my case, it forced me to rejig my career plans and strike out on my own. I'm far, far, far better off for having done so (and so, more importantly, is my family), but at the time, it did seem like the end of the world.

Pxtl• 9 years ago

As a developer who took 7 months off of pat leave, I'd recommend devs seriously thinking about it.

A remote working dev has the flexibility to earn a good keep while also letting their partner have the more rigid location and schedule.

graeme3• 9 years ago

So you're not a location independent entrepreneur/freelancer?

I was talking about this with my girlfriend recently. She's leaving the city in a year to do graduate studies. I'm a mostly location independent entrepreneur. But, leaving Canadian tax residency is complicated, and there are some big advantages to the fixed office setup I have here, because I do some video production.

I was thinking of keeping my residence here, but frequently traveling to visit her. There's some types of work I can do quite easily on the go. I'll only find out how well that works once we actually do it.

How did you arrange things?

silencio• 9 years ago

Yep, this is the rarely-discussed side of finding an "independent"/"ambitious" partner. It seems great on paper to be "equal" but it's not so simple. I've broken off relationships over partners refusing to even humor a discussion.

Thankfully the person I married is far more willing to face my ambitions and discuss compromises and other options. We've run the gamut from me pursuing med school to SAHM-hood (and SAHD for him, too) - which, despite society generally looking down on childrearing, I think it's possible and great for someone to be ambitious about it.

Alimony is a bit amusing to consider from my perspective, then. It's being seen here and elsewhere as a bit of a "woman takes my hard-earned money" thing. I could easily think the opposite! I'm not sure all these people would necessarily appreciate being on the end of that kind of criticism if they made any sacrifices for my ambition that created an imbalance :) And with my relationship and aiming to work with my partner as much as possible for the benefit of our family, I wouldn't begrudge spousal support so easily, even if we split acrimoniously.

beagle3• 9 years ago

She might be too ambitious to have kids (or might want to wait until her career is sufficiently advanced). This might be fine for some, but not for others. Also, the global implications of this are described in this documentary[0]

The other issue is location/lifestyle: even if all else is agreed, it often becomes impossible to decide where to live (or to stay in one place) when both partners are ambitious.

I am not passing value judgement here - different strokes for different folks. But the strokes must match for a married couple, if it is going to work out.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

epx• 9 years ago

The fact that a woman can look for alimony shows that system is broken.

kgwgk• 9 years ago

Men can get it as well. (The system may be broken nevertheless.)

thedevil2• 9 years ago

I agree that the system is broken. Alimony is usually an atrocity.

But I advise against mentioning gender. Turning it into a gender-issue is going to make people dislike and downvote you and kill any hope for reform.

It's also unfair to women who pay alimony (my half-sister for example).

nugget• 9 years ago

Many women pay men alimony these days. I know a handful of female MDs whose ex-husbands ''supported'' them through medical school and are now receiving quite generous spousal support.

The real problem is a divorce system laden with incentives for couples to rip each other to shreds, with lawyers and others (follow the money) only too happy to help. Watch 'Divorce Corp' on Netflix. It may change the way you think about marriage and divorce in the United States.

jelliclesfarm8• 9 years ago

Alimony comes after divorce. I am questioning the validity of something that comes even before that..marriage. I have often questioned the usefulness of marriage in the modern world. What is its function other than the religious aspect of it? There is certainly no moral clause to it..fidelity doesn't have anything to do with a piece of legal paper. Does the state benefit by validating and continuing to reward what is essentially was born as a religious contract between two people. Personally..I think a lot of issues from gender inequality to lgbt inequalities can be resolved if the artificial social contract of 'marriage' loses its validation from courts and the state.

morgante6• 9 years ago

Seriously, this paper really surprises me. I find ambition very attractive, especially as a signal for a bunch of other personality traits (intelligence, seriousness, drive, etc.).

I understand that there's men who don't, but it really feels like they're either hung up on weird gender norms or trying to find a method of asserting dominance.

z3t4• 9 years ago

i think down grading your worth is negative in the partner market. and that is why they are single. or that they rated themself acording to social rank to not piss off their class mates.

jelliclesfarm8• 9 years ago

I am going to guess that there aren't any women in this thread..

lazyasciiart• 9 years ago

Try reading it to find out next time instead of just popping in with a mindless comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13681690

'Acting Wife': Marriage Market Incentives and Labor Market Investments

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