According to a soon-to-be-published study by Washington & Lee University School of Law and reported in the Wall St. Journal, women with M.B.A.s are twice as likely to get divorced or separated as their male counterparts. In short, a professional degree is often hazardous to marital health. According to the study:

Women with M.B.A.s described themselves as divorced or separated more often than women with only bachelor's degrees (12% of female M.B.A.s compared with 11% of women with only bachelor's degrees) and more than twice as often as men with M.B.A.s (5% of whom reported being divorced or separated).

The study's author believes that the root cause is that highly successful women "can't summon up the TLC and support that high-earning men need." Her advice, according to the WSJ story, is that " Well-educated, highly compensated women should be targeting particularly loving and supportive men."

Anyone familiar with statistics will know that while accurate conclusions can be drawn against populations, it is dangerous and inappropriate to attempt to apply so conclusions to specific individuals or families--especially for something as complex as marital success.

SOURCE: Wall Street Journal  (article by Anita Raghavan reprinted below)

SOURCE FOR POST: LifeTwo.com

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Women M.B.A.s More Likely
To Divorce Than Men

Women with M.B.A.s are twice as likely to get divorced or separated as their male counterparts. The picture isn't much rosier for women with law or medical degrees.

That is the finding in a soon-to-be-published study by Washington & Lee University School of Law Prof. Robin Fretwell Wilson. Using a National Science Foundation survey of more than 100,000 professionals, Prof. Wilson analyzed data on newly minted professionals in business, law and medicine. Her conclusion: For women, a professional degree is often hazardous to marital health.

"It's like the Virginia Slims ad -- we've come so far -- but, man, we haven't come so far," says Prof. Wilson, herself a divorcée. "In a lot of ways women aren't getting the same deal as men." Unlike men, she says, "women can't have it all because there is a social stigma to having or being a stay-at-home spouse."

Much has been written about the growing "opt-out revolution" in which female professionals, buffeted by crosscurrents at work and at home, are exiting the workplace in droves. And the topic of female success and marital status has been explored by others. In 2001, for instance, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett collected data on high-achieving women, defined as being both high-earners and "super-credentialed" -- with graduate degrees, for example -- and found that the more women earned, the more likely they were to be single and without children.

What Prof. Wilson's study highlights is the large number of professionals -- particularly women -- who remain in the workplace but "opt out" of having families.

Women with M.B.A.s described themselves as divorced or separated more often than women with only bachelor's degrees (12% of female M.B.A.s compared with 11% of women with only bachelor's degrees) and more than twice as often as men with M.B.A.s (5% of whom reported being divorced or separated), according to Prof. Wilson's study. The study will be published next week by the Witherspoon Institute as a chapter in a book to which Prof. Wilson contributed, "Rethinking Business Management."

According to Prof. Wilson's study, women with law or medical degrees divorce less often than those with only bachelor's degrees, but are still more likely to divorce or separate than their male counterparts (10% of women with law degrees and 9% of women with medical degrees, compared with 7% of male lawyers and 5.1% of male doctors).

Prof. Wilson also found that female professionals abstain from marriage at double and sometimes nearly triple the rate of men.

Ms. Hewlett believes more is at play than just a prevailing image that high-earning women are a threat to men. Suggesting that highly successful women are attracted to similarly successful men, she put forward the idea that such women "can't summon up the TLC and support that high-earning men need."

Her advice? Well-educated, highly compensated women should be targeting particularly loving and supportive men.