Most women without a spouse? - look again - 1/19/07

[Smartmarriages]

Diane, 
In case you wondered about the saying, "you can make stats say anything you
Want" read this response to the NYTimes front page article stating the
majority of women live without a spouse.

Here is a snippet of an Townhall.com article "Journalistic Malpractice in
'Marriage is Dead' Report"by Michael Medved January 18, that I think many on
the list would find useful, one of those "keepers" you often point out.
Mark Taylor
  
Snippet: 
> According to the most recent available figures (from 2005), a clear majority
> (56%) of all women over the age of 20 are currently married.
> 
> Moreover, nearly all women in this country will get married at one time or
> another. Among those above the age of 50 (a group that includes the
> celebrated Baby Boomers of the famously revolutionary '60's generation), an
> astonishing 94% have been married at one time or another and some 79% are
> either currently married or widowed.
> 
> Even including the younger, supposedly "post-marriage" generation, and
> considering all women above the age of 30, some 61% are currently married
> and another 12% are widowed. In other words, nearly three-fourths (73%, a
> crushing majority) of all women who have reached the tender age of 30 now
> occupy a traditional female role as either current wives or widows -
> avoiding the supposedly trendy status of divorced, separated, co-habiting or
> single.
> 
> How, then, could America's "Journal of Record," the New York Times, possibly
> peddle the ridiculously distorted story that most females now count as
> unattached?
> 
> Reporter Sam Roberts begins his tendentious account with the following
> declarations: "For what experts say is probably the first time, more
> American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a
> New York Times analysis of census results. In 2005, 51 percent of women said
> they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent
> in 2000."
> 
> This conclusion provided a shocking front-page headline ("51% of Women Are
> Now Living Without Spouse") that gave rise to considerable cluck-clucking
> and tut-tting throughout the media echo-chamber.
> 
> So how could reporter Roberts read the same Census figures that any American
> can view ("according to a New York Times analysis") and come up with such
> bizarre conclusions?
> 
> It's all based on a fundamentally dishonest decision that Roberts never
> acknowledges in the entire course of his lengthy article. It turns out that
> in his analysis he chose to count some 10,154,000 girls between the ages of
> 15 and 19 as "women." It should come as no surprise that this vast group of
> teenagers (yes, teenagers, most of whom live at home) are officially
> classified as "single." In fact, 97% of the 15 to 19 year olds identify
> themselves as "never married." The Census Bureau, by the way, doesn't call
> these youngsters "women" - it labels them "females" (a far more appropriate
> designation).
> 
> Yet even the ridiculous inclusion of his ten million unmarried teenagers
> couldn't give Sam Roberts the story he wanted to report - that most American
> "women" are now unmarried. As a matter of fact, the Census Bureau shows that
> among all females above 15 the majority (51%!) are still classified as
> "married."
> 
> So the New York Times required yet another sneaky distortion to shave off
> that last 2% from the married majority, though this bit of statistical
> sleight-of-hand Sam Roberts had the decency to acknowledge. "In a relatively
> small number of cases, the living arrangement is temporary, because the
> husbands are working out of town, are in the military, or are
> institutionalized," he writes. In other words, in his brave new majority of
> "women" without spouses, he includes all those thousands upon thousands of
> wives and mothers who are waiting and praying at home for the return of
> their husbands from Iraq or Afghanistan. By arbitrarily removing this 2% of
> all females (2,400,000 individuals) who are classified as "married/spouse
> absent" from the ranks of the married, and then designating as "unmarried"
> his millions of middle school and high school girls who are living with
> their parents, together with some 9 million elderly widows who have devoted
> much of their lives to marriage and husbands (42% of all women over 65 are
> widows), Roberts can finally arrive at his desired but meaningless
> conclusion that "most women" now "are living without a husbands." Eureka!

The full link to the article:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MichaelMedved/2007/01/18/journalistic_mal
practice_in_marriage_is_dead_report

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