Having It All... the way to the bank

This in the Washington Post about women having it all; it looks to me like precisely the sort of high-carb pandering that women gobble up, particularly the Whelan book (Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women, by Christine B. Whelan), although it would be lovely if it were all true.

From the article:

As late as the 1980s, according to economist Elaina Rose, women with PhDs or the equivalent were less likely to marry than women with a high school degree. But the "marital penalty" for highly educated women has declined steadily since then, and by 2000 it had disappeared. Today, women with a college degree or higher are more likely to marry than women with less education and lower earnings potential.

Here's my understanding of the data: the marriage rate against years of education is a roughly bell-shaped curve. During the past decades, the peak of the curve has moved up the educational scale, precisely as one would expect as more women pursue higher education. So yes, at the moment women with college degrees have a higher marriage rate than women without. But women with advanced degrees still have LOWER marriage rates than women with college degrees (not sure about women with PhDs v. women with high school). I think the article's presentation of the data is misleading.

From the article:

Career women who postpone marriage, she explains, still have a good chance to marry in their 30s or 40s, and she cites a study by three sociologists who find that, unlike in the past, wives' fulltime employment is now associated with a lowered risk of divorce.

I don't know what data she's citing, and I don't know how to make sense of this. It seems like increasing women's earning potential could only increase the divorce rate. (Unless it's a simple matter of SES---that is, financial stress contributes to marital difficulty, so to the extent that the wife's income increases SES, it would benefit the marriage. You'd have to compare couples with the same total income, some with wives working and some without, and see what it looks like then.)

From the article:

Low-income, poorly educated men have the worst prospects of any group in today's marriage market, suggesting that it is a mistake to frame the revolution in marriage as a woman's issue.

Yes. This fits with my intuition that what is good for advantaged women is men, children, and disadvantaged women (and men and children).