Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Girls just wanna stay home?

I ranted yesterday about how ignorant and unreflective the Yale women in this NY Times article sounded. It looks like Yale's been failing its undergrads for some years now. The writer of the offending story, Louise Story, is a recent Yale grad. Another website got a copy of the exceedingly unscientific email survey she used to come up with this absurd piece. I used to work for an institute that did a lot of survey research, so I am somewhat aware of the difficulties sampling and question writing pose in getting accurate results. Story's survey is somewhere between a Cosmo quiz and my 8th grade Science Fair project in terms of rigor (and I'm putting my survey of stereotypes in suburban high schools on top here; at least it wasn't slanted). She lost me with question one (emphasis added):
When you have children, do you plan to stay at home with them or do you plan to continue working? Why?
It goes without saying that such a sample would be self selecting and fail to include childfree or lesbian Yalies. (h/t/ Crooked Timber)
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