MEGAN MCARDLE: Ain’t I A Woman? “I have never let worries about being perceived as unfeminine stop me from expressing an opinion. I can’t claim any feminist cred for this, I’m afraid, because it’s not a decision. It’s just how I’m built. If I get interested in an idea, I start talking, and if I think someone’s wrong, I’ll tell them they’re wrong. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more tactful about it, but the basic constitutional impulse to argue about ideas remains. So I never retired from a classroom argument in order to preserve my dateability. . . . Then, as now, women were less likely to go into finance, and much more likely to go into marketing. Judging by my reunion, ones who went into finance mostly did not stay there, especially if they had kids. That was also true of a lot of women who went into consulting. A pretty substantial percentage of the women I went to school with were home with kids or working on small home businesses. And seemingly pretty happy with the choice. I mean, perhaps they won’t be in 10 years, when the kids are well settled in school and they want to get back into work, but I have no particular reason to think they’ll regret their choices any more than the rest of us regret having to make trade-offs with the limited span of years and opportunities we’re allocated. . . . If I had been a man, could I have brought myself to take an entry-level journalism job that paid a third of what I’d been expecting as a consultant? I sort of doubt it. Just because our choices are made in the context of sexist assumptions doesn’t mean that our choices are wrong.”