Reply #100: No....

[rinsd]

I am not sure the rep of this blog but it is a fairly convincing take down. Even cites a near identical story from the NYT in 1980!

http://lettrist.blogspot.com/2005/09/many-women-at-elite-colleges-set.html

"I also criticized Story's story for citing the results from an e-mail survey of 138 Yale undergraduate females without crediting the survey to any author. For a story so dependent on the fuzzy quantifier "many," it's important for readers to know the provenance of Story's purported hunk of hard data, that "roughly 60 percent said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely."

Story says she conducted the survey from November 2004 to January 2005 while at Columbia. Earlier this week, the editors of Gelf Magazine posted a list of questions from the survey, and remarked how some of them were "loaded," that is, likely to produce a biased result. For instance, the first question—"When you have children, do you plan to stay at home with them or do you plan to continue working? Why?"—assumes that the respondents intend to have children.

Story says she revised the survey after its weaknesses were pointed out to her. But in her final tabulation, she retained the responses from about 30 women who answered the first survey because, she said, the responses didn't vary significantly from those given to the revised version. She concedes the survey wasn't conducted with social-science rigor but calls it "a very good journalistic questionnaire.""

Read the whole thing.

So this is based on an e-mail survey from 138 Yale women.

Also here's a Katha Pollitt take down from the Nation

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051017/pollitt