Saturday, September 24, 2005

'Many Young Women' Must must read follow-up by Slate's Jack Shafer to the NYTimes bogus trend story earlier this week: "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood" based on a specious, unscientific survey of just over 100 Yale girls where even the so-called "data" was misinterpreted and extrapolated all over the Ivies and to educated working women in general. (see my previous posts) Turns out the writer Louise Story, not a Times staff reporter but an intern, was herself a '03 Yale grad. This article came out of her masters project at Columbia Journalism School. Shafer unearthed some of the leading questions she sent; her revision of the questions mid-way through the survey; her continued use of earlier responses which should have been dumped. And the general shrug the Times gave to foisting this piece of drek on readers as an opinion survey. [Apparently enough readers complained about the methodology that Story later had to write a separate article explaining how she went about the survey.] Moreover, the Times has no institutional memory, having printed news of the exact same "trend" in a 1980 article: "Many Young Women Now Say They'd Pick Family Over Career." In a wonderful flourish, Shafer went so far as to track down the young woman featured in the lead anecdote of that article to see what became of her: One criticism of Story's article is that college students are poor predictors of what sorts of adults become. To test this idea I conducted some purely anecdotal research of my own: I Googled the lead character of the 1980 New York Times story, Mary Anne Citrino. Within minutes, I reached her at her New York City office at the Blackstone Group, an investment and advisory group, where she is a senior managing director. Citrino laughed at this week's Times story when she read it, recalling her role in the similarly squishy Times story from a generation ago. She says the Times reporter misrepresented what she said, attributing to her sentiments that were "the exact opposite of what I meant." "I never wanted to be a full-time mother," says Citrino. She says she was considered the most gung-ho career woman among her classmates, never stopped working after finishing school, has three children, and put in 20 years at Morgan Stanley before joining Blackstone a year ago. "I never even considered giving up my career," Citrino says. But that's just one anecdote, mind you. -RH   9:09:45 AM    comment []

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