Getting Women Wrong, Again and Again and Again

Posted on Jan 5, 2006

Did you know that a woman is more likely to get hit by lightning than marry after 30! Or was that run over by a bus? Or, wait, maybe it was get killed in a terrorist strike?

If you read the papers and magazines, watch movies, or leave your house, you’ve heard the line before, or something close to it:  X number of women die single and alone. Y number of women “decide” to quit their jobs when they have kids. Z number of women get left for younger women after their fourth kid.  The list of supposed truisms is endless.

These kinds of stories give women nightmares… they say how far the women’s movement has come (and how far it hasn’t), and they make A1 headlines almost monthly in the top national newspapers. 

Only problem is, they usually aren’t true.  Reyhan Harmanci of the San Francisco Chronicle exposes the sensationalism, class bias, and pseudo-science behind women’s trend stories....

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