On the morning of April 3, though I didn’t know it at the time, the little red roses of voice mail were blooming madly on the telephones of 26-year-old women around the country. I arrived at my office that morning to find the message indicator on my own phone already aglow–a vague and early greeting from my friend Ellen, a reporter at the Newark Star-Ledger. “Kiki,” she said bemusedly, “Katy Dick is quoted on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal.”
“‘It’s kind of a ’50s mentality,’ Ms. Dick says. ‘But it’s what feels natural, normal, rational for us.’”
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I called the reporter, Christina Duff, at the Journal’s Washington, D.C., bureau to ask why she had chosen this particular gaggle to represent us. She said that she had started out calling law offices in the D.C. area but soon decided it would be better to talk to a circle of friends. I’m no demographer, but this seems an especially dubious tack to take when positing a national trend. “I called a sorority to ensure that the people were from the same group,” she said, yet the story doesn’t mention that all the women interviewed were either friends or sorority sisters–or that their sorority had a reputation for pursuing “Mrs.” degrees. Duff didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with this approach, and several times she proudly referred to her story as “counterintuitive,” since it apparently contradicts the latest census (1993), which found that women were getting married later than ever–at an average age of 24.5.
Once Duff finished with the Chicken Little proclamations, she didn’t seem quite sure how to back up her claims. How old are these brides exactly? One study she cited deals with women 21 to 24, and another with women 25 to 29. Are these really career-oriented women, or simply women who went to college? One young matron, pictured sipping cappuccino, admitted that the last time she stayed out past two was at a Junior League function. If she had a career, Duff didn’t deem it important enough to mention. In fact, the only person whose employer was named was a 25-year-old researcher for Gloria Steinem who was also the only interviewee not hitched or husband hunting. Two of the studies Duff chose to prove that marriage rates have climbed “in the past decade” actually compared the 1970s with the 1980s–the decade in which our “older sisters” were supposed to be busy burning out. And the only justification for the headline’s assertion that a wedding ring can be a corporate asset was an interview with one “superachiever” who said that a flash of gold on the left hand makes women “less distracting” to male coworkers.
In her condemnation of this and other widespread untruths about working women, Faludi writes: “The trend story is not always labeled as such, but certain characteristics give it away: an absence of factual evidence or hard numbers; a tendency to cite only three or four women, usually anonymously, to establish the trend; the use of vague qualifiers like ‘there is a sense that’ or ‘more and more’…and the invocation of ‘authorities’ such as consumer researchers…who often support their assertions by citing other media trend stories.”
“One thing that happens among reporters,” observes University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite, a marriage expert who says Duff misquoted her in the story, “is that they look at their friends and say, ‘Oh, everybody is….’ On one hand, it gives us the earliest indications that we have of trends. On the other, it gives us some things that aren’t real. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know what’s somebody being insightful and what’s just somebody’s two weird friends.”
Whether or not we have mostly men to blame, Rivers is right that despite their obsession with objectivity the media have an inherent bias against stories about women. She’s certainly not the first to examine it, but what’s disturbing is that this knowledge and the resulting protests–Backlash, for example–have so little effect.
