A notorious Newsweek cover story in 1986 said, based on a Harvard-Yale study, 40 year old, educated, single women "were more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than land a mate.
Now we cringe at the thought of such a comparison. Hey, scare-mongering then and now always boosts sales at news-stands.
From the WSJ, An Iconic Report 20 Years Later: Many of Those Women Married After All by Jeff Zaslow. (subscription only)
A lot of us recall the hand wringing over that study, the countless articles and TV debates, the tearful conversations between single women and their mothers. The statistics were later challenged by U.S. Census Bureau demographer Jeanne Moorman, who calculated that those 30-year-olds actually had a 58% to 66% likelihood of finding a husband; for 40-year-olds it was 17% to 23%. But the Harvard-Yale study's core message -- that educated, career-focused women risk spending their lives alone -- still reverberates today.
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Well, a new study suggests that new research suggests that highly educated women are actually MORE likely to find husbands.