A feminist and sociologist 'academic' named Lenore Weitzman created a myth.... | |
How is this possible one may ask. We have seen and read many examples of feminists lying, here is just another example..
Oooops, she says "it must have been the computer", lying is lying and no justification by this feminist will repay all those men that were screwed in the family courts, no amount of apology will bring back those father's that suicided because of the situation this feminist caused. No amount of pretended apology will salve the pain and agony those millions of kids suffered, another lying feminist screwed it up for everyone..
As ludicrous as it sounds, but feminists still insist they are about equality. Here we have facts that they are not even close.. A feminist and sociologist 'academic' named Lenore Weitzman created a myth, since disproven but living on with a life of its own, that after 'no-fault' divorce women's standard of living drops whilst men's rises.
Quote: A Harvard sociologist' s 1996 study of California women after no-fault divorces concluded that women's standard of living dropped by 70 percent, while men's rose 40 percent, though some have questioned those results. Allen, of California NOW, said her office is inundated with calls from women who say they were steamrollered in custody battles and in family court. "There's this assumption that men and women come into divorce on equal footing, and that's just not the case," she said.
Note that the Newsday article ("Critics: No-fault divorce isn't a panacea", appended below) reference is to Weitzman's dodgy study, published in 1985, and not 1996 as reported. The 1996 date is when Katherine Webster wrote and The Seattle Times published an article exposing Weitzman's lies.
Additionally, Yuri Joakimidis notes:
"Those trained in the psychological sciences know that it is possible to devise research methodology to obtain desired results. The classic example of such a study is the now-discredited results orientated work by the gender feminist sociologist Lenore Weitzman. Since its publication in 1985, Lenore Weitzman's "The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America" (New York, Free Press, 1985) has had a crucial role in shaping the debate on divorce and its economic effects. In particular, her claim that in the year after divorce women's standard of living decreased by a whopping 73 percent while men enjoyed an increase of 43 percent caught the attention of spin doctors, policy makers and judges.
"Weitzeman's distorted figures are a puerile falsehood which is not made less absurd by repetition (Amneus 1990).
"Weitzman has admitted that she was "mistaken" (see accompanying Seattle Times article below).
"However, this was not an innocent computer error. The computer did what it was supposed to do - the investigator staged the result. The thought that vast policy changes can come from such incompetence is nothing less than mind-boggling."
Here's the original 1996 article by Katherine Webster:
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http://community. seattletimes. nwsource. com/archive/ ?date=19960519&slug=2329984
The Seattle Times
19 May 1996, A3
Post-Divorce Wealth Gap Was Wrong, Agrees Author
By Katharine Webster
There's only one problem with sociologist Lenore Weitzman's 1985 report on the huge post-divorce standard-of- living gap between men and women: It's wrong. Weitzman now acknowledges the error and says she's responsible.
Boston - It was a jaw-dropping statistic, widely influential in the movement to change America's divorce and child-support laws.
Eleven years ago, sociologist Lenore Weitzman published "The Divorce Revolution," her groundbreaking study of California's no-fault divorce system. In it, she reported that women's households suffered a 73 percent drop in their standard of living in the first year after divorce, while men's households enjoyed a 42 percent rise.
Since then, the figures have been quoted hundreds of times in newspapers, politicians' speeches and court rulings.
There's only one problem: Her figures are wrong.
Richard Peterson, a New York sociologist who reanalyzed Weitzman's data from computer and paper records archived at Radcliffe College's Murray Research Center, found a 27 percent decline in women's post-divorce standard of living and a 10 percent increase in men's - still a serious gap, but not the catastrophic one that Weitzman saw.
Weitzman, a professor of sociology and law at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., now acknowledges her figures were wrong. She blames the error on the loss of her original computer data file, a weighting error or a mistake in the computer calculations
performed by a Stanford University research assistant.
But "I'm responsible - I reported it," she says.
Peterson went back and checked Weitzman's conclusions because they were so much at odds with what other researchers had found and because they conflicted with some of her own data. For several years after the publication of her book, she did not make her data available to other researchers; she explained there were errors in the master computer data file that she wanted to correct first.
Peterson's research and Weitzman's response will be published in the American Sociological Review next month.
The dispute over Weitzman's standard-of- living figures is more than just academic.
A search of the Nexis database found more than 175 newspaper and magazine stories citing Weitzman's numbers.
Peterson says he also found citations in 348 social-science articles, 250 law review articles and 24 appeals and Supreme Court cases. The statistic even appeared in President Clinton's 1996 budget.
"This has been one of the most widely quoted statistics in recent history," says Anne Colby, director of the Murray Center.
Weitzman's figures have been cited by policymakers and others as hard evidence of what's become known as the "feminization of poverty." And her book is credited with helping bring about stricter child-support enforcement and more flexible property-division laws.
Moreover, in a recent essay, Susan Faludi, feminist author of "Backlash," called Weitzman's statistic "the centerpiece for recent attacks on no-fault divorce."
Weitzman's study, which looked at divorcing families in Los Angeles in 1977 and 1978, was designed to evaluate California's first-in-the- nation no-fault divorce law and accompanying economic reforms.
Because Weitzman's findings varied so dramatically from what other researchers had found, many analysts concluded the bigger gap in California was caused by that state's switch to no-fault.
In the past year, several states, including Michigan and Iowa, have considered a return to fault-based divorce, in which one spouse must assert adultery, cruelty or some other type of wrongdoing.
But Weitzman, her critics and other divorce scholars say no-fault divorce is not to blame for some women's economic plight. Peterson says research on both fault and no-fault systems has found similar gaps - about a 30 percent drop in women's standard of living and a 10 percent rise in men's.
Weitzman says it was the accompanying economic changes - originally intended to foster greater equality - that hurt women and children.
Those changes included requiring equal division of the marital property instead of giving judges discretion, and basing alimony and child support strictly on need and ability to pay instead of fault.
Judges often required the immediate sale of the family home so assets could be split equally between husband and wife.
Weitzman says her book helped bring about changes in California and elsewhere, including better child-support enforcement and laws allowing judges to delay the sale of the family home until the children are grown. ------------ --------- --------- --------- -------- More... |
23rd-August-2008
