Another First: Brightest Near-Term Futures Belong to American Women

March 5, 2007

According to the results of a recent survey, those with the brightest futures are more often than not, for the first time in history, women rather than men. The survey, administered to more than three million hypothetical respondents, consisted of a brief questionnaire, reproduced here in its entirety.

ASSESS YOUR FUTURE, IN TEN EASY STEPS

Rate each of the following statements on a scale of 1 to 5, according to the following key:

1—Not at all true, or true only as a fantasy.
2—Conceivably true, if circumstances were different.
3—Somewhat or intermittently true.
4—Formerly true.
5—True.

• I am considered to be outrageously attractive by almost every single person I've ever met.___
• I am between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three.___
• I have long hair of the type that most hairdressers use as a kind of mental picture for what they would like to achieve for their female clientele.___
• I am worth more than 2 million U.S. dollars as of today, and I do not have, nor have I ever had, a gambling problem.___
• I am thin, but not too thin.___
• I am fit, healthy, and articulate.___
• I have the kind of intelligence that would cause me to be enthusiastically recruited by any of the top-tier colleges and universities in the world.___
• I look great in clothes and out of them.___
• I am kind and compassionate, and if I have faced adversity, I have triumphed over it.___

Please include a photograph of yourself with your completed survey. On the back of the photograph, write one and only one of the following words that you predict will come closest to characterizing your own life over the next several years: TRAGIC, LACKLUSTER, MIDDLING, PROSPEROUS, BRIGHT, PHENOMENAL.

The Results

In order to begin to analyze the results of the survey, the author arranged the completed questionnaires according to the photographs, compiling two different categories: (1) young, beautiful women, and (2) other. Responses were tallied and averaged, with the following results:

As you can see, a higher average score on the questionnaire strongly correlates to the likelihood that a respondent predicted a positive outlook for the next several years of his or her life.

It is interesting to note that the prediction of a tragic future occurred with the same frequency in both groups, though the author was unable to fathom the reason for this. One possibility is that a certain percentage of people, regardless of who they might be, tend to be aware that all of us are subject to the same ultimate fate, and that none of us can with absolute certainty choose the manner or timing with which it will befall us.

The rest of the results are pretty straightforward. Young, beautiful women are extremely likely to predict at least a bright near future for themselves. All others tend to have more modest expectations.

When individual scores were looked at, the results tended to further support the findings suggested by the breakdown of the results into two groups. Those who scored a perfect 45 predicted a phenomenal future for themselves at a rate of 97 percent. Those who, on the other hand, scored the lowest possible number—9 (factored together with those who, older than twenty-three, were obliged to write 4 next to the second statement on the questionnaire, for a total score of 12)—predicted a middling or lackluster future at a rate of 93 percent. (If the outcomes are less than perfectly predictable, perhaps pride and its inverse, modesty, are to blame. Those with almost nothing to brag about may yet hold out hope; whereas those with everything in the world may not be the type to trumpet their good fortune.)

Conclusions

What, then, does a person with outstanding near-term prospects look like? We have been able to glean from the results of the questionnaire that almost all of these happy respondents were young, attractive, thin, wealthy, intelligent women between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three. All of them were American (the survey was conducted in the United States and was open only to United States citizens). The vast majority of them had nice hair. This is good news for women everywhere. If equal opportunity is any measure of equal rights, women of a certain type have already surpassed the goals set forth by so many of their worthy predecessors, from Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw to, more recently, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

© 2010 Russell David Harper