Onely.Org

single. academic. female. January 26, 2010

Over the weekend, I took a walk with my friends B & A, and B — who is male, pursuing a PhD in my program, and married to A — asked me about how I felt about something he had heard: That women who begin pursuing their PhDs while single are less likely to find partners or be married in the long run when compared with men (my apologies to B if I’ve paraphrased incorrectly, but this is what I remembered). B sounded pretty stunned about what he had heard, but I was not.

So although I have not found any statistics to verify whether what B heard was true or not, I want to go over the reasons why this fact seems relatively unsurprising to me (as a single academic female myself) and to see what you, Copious Readers, have to add to the conversation (especially if you have access to any useful statistics or personal experiences related to this issue!): (more…)