Another Example of the Roe Effect

James Taranto has long promoted the idea of the Roe effect (you can read my post on it here), and he may have another example in this article which he discusses in Best of the Web Today:

Earlier this year, Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, set off a kerfuffle when he made the commonsense observation that women have different priorities from men. Today the New York Times reports that Summers was right:

At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.

There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.

Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. . . .

For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation's top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.

"They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they're accepting it," said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women's and gender studies at Yale. "Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

"I really believed 25 years ago," Dr. Wexler added, "that this would be solved by now."

But this may be another case in which, à la the Roe effect, the feminist "solution" actually exacerbates the "problem." Think about it: The vast majority of today's young women are the daughters of women who decided to have children. Women who abjured motherhood for full-time careers can't very well pass their values on to the daughters they never had.

Interesting.