Ann Friedman disagrees with Douthat as to what worries today’s young women:
Now, I’m doubtful that educated twentysomething women are itching to reform and marry every L-train Peter Pan they swipe right on Tinder. But fertility is a legitimate back-of-the-mind anxiety for many young women, and we tend to imagine (explicitly or otherwise) timelines for ourselves as we try to navigate the limitations of biology. Douthat is wrong in assuming that the challenge lies mostly in getting the Nathaniels of the world to grow up and commit. It’s a much bigger question of how women successfully combine family and career. We’re well aware that we lose fertility at a certain age, but also that we lose professional power after we have kids. This is a generation of women who were raised on movies portraying the plight of the working mother, came of age in one of the worst economies in recent history, have read dozens of trend stories about the expense and trauma of IVF, yet still hope to have “it all.” They know the tough decisions that await them in their thirties. And so, they figure, better put in the professional work now — get as far as you can before it’s time to procreate. I wasn’t surprised to read a report from the Pew Research Center last week that women in their twenties are out-earning their male colleagues. The pressure is intense: Do it all now so you can have it all later.
Douthat pulls out some more sociology in his response to his critics:
If there’s evidence that 1) women’s stated sexual preferences are somewhat more conservative than what men say they want and what our cultural norms encourage, that 2) women’s happiness increases when their sex lives conform to their own preferences rather than to the culture’s more libertine script, and that (at least anecdotally) 3) men tend toward a kind of indecisive, listless, semi-exploitative relationship style when their preferences are too easily fulfilled, then perhaps — just perhaps — what we have here is a case for a somewhat more conservative sexual culture. Not a culture where the Ministry of Virtue locks Nathaniel P. away for crimes against chastity; not a culture where nobody ever has a one-night stand or a friend with benefits; not a culture where women are treated like porcelain or taught to quiver in fear of the ravening lusts of lecherous males. Just a culture where it’s a little easier for women (and men) to act on attitudes and preferences that, in the aggregate (!!!!), seem to correlate more with happiness and flourishing than many social liberals are willing to acknowledge or admit.
Andrew Gelman points to another study that found the exact opposite effect from the one Douthat cited in his column:
[T]he existence of two published results in the exact opposite direction suggest, at the very least, that any effects are likely to be lower than claimed in the published articles. As always, multiple comparisons problems are all over the place here — the Conley and Rauscher paper also had some “the difference between significant and non-significant is not itself statistically significant” moments — and I think reporters should be careful before taking the claims based on this sample and assuming that they apply to the population. The sex of your children is going to have all sorts of effects on your behavior and attitudes. With so many possible outcome measurements and various small effects in different directions, we can’t expect a sample size of 600 or 1,000 to form a coherent story, and I think there is a problem in that the conventions of scientific research papers, and of journalism, are that all the results should cohere.
He has a problem with this whole line of inquiry, however:
Why is it all about “the effect of daughters”? Why not “Does having sons make you support the Democrats?” … Lots of discussion about how you, as a parent, might change your views of the world if you have a girl. But not so much about how you might change your views if you have a boy. Lots of discussion of how having a girl might affect your attitudes on abortion, not so much discussion about how having a boy might affect your attitudes on issues such as gun control or war, which disproportionately affect young men. This is a real problem, when issues of girls and boys, men and women, are treated asymmetrically.
The Dish 