Happy National Singles Week!(And: Do single people or married people make better law firm employees?)

Are you still stuck at the office, settling in for a long evening of work, and thinking about what to order from SeamlessWeb? Maybe you goofed off all day because you have nobody to go home to at night.
(We know what that’s like. It’s why we’ve been covering the ATL night shift lately.)
Fellow single people, we wish you a Happy National Singles Week (September 21-28). From the San Francisco Chronicle:

There are 92 million unmarried Americans, and this is their week.

Since the 1980s, the third full week of September has been National Singles Week. Started by Ohio’s Buckeye Singles Council as a way to recognize the role singles play in society, it is now known as National Unmarried and Single Americans Week. According to the U.S. census, the adjusted name acknowledges that many unmarried Americans do not identify with the word “single” because they have partners or are widowed.

Many of them are also rejecting the stereotyped notion that they’re living in hope of the perfect spouse appearing, a Disneylike vision in a reality-show world. They’re creating a grassroots effort to obtain equal rights in health care access, taxation and other areas while demanding that they be seen as living their lives in full.

And equal rights in law offices, too. Single lawyers: How many times have you had to pick up the slack or hold down the fort for a colleague who left work early for an anniversary dinner, daughter’s ballet recital, or Valentine’s Day celebration?
Read more — plus take a reader poll, concerning whether single people or married people make better Biglaw employees — after the jump.


Single lawyers, do you suspect that your coupled-up colleagues secretly pity you? Well, they probably do:

“The stereotype is that single people are miserable, lonely, self-centered,” says Bella DePaulo, a UC Santa Barbara psychology professor, Huffington Post blogger and author of “Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). “If only they would marry, they’d be magically transformed into healthy, happy people.”

Research suggests otherwise, said DePaulo. The findings reveal that single people are more likely to maintain community and intergenerational ties. Couples with or without children are absorbed in their own world, according to DePaulo, who says, “Single people are the glue.”

Law and public policy reflect a bias in favor of marriage, some argue:

“There’s a very heavy focus on marriage as a public-policy matter,” said Nancy Polikoff, a professor of law at American University’s Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C. “You have it in the Bush administration’s policies that spend three-quarters of a billion dollars to promote marriage, and a really widespread campaign to convince the country that the decline of lifelong heterosexual marriage is responsible for all our social problems.”

…. DePaulo has calculated that there are 1,138 federal provisions “in which marital status is a factor in receiving benefits, rights or privileges. That’s an astounding number of ways that marriage is the pass code to an elite club.”

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So, readers, what do you think? Are single people getting a raw deal under the law?
Returning to ATL’s focus on law firms, which group makes for better Biglaw employees: single people or married people? There are arguments on both sides.
Single people aren’t distracted by spouses or kids, so they have more hours to devote to billing. It’s easier to get them to cancel their weekend plans or vacations (or at least partners or clients don’t have to feel as guilty about it when they do). Singletons can be “married” — to their jobs.
On the other hand, single people may be distracted by the search for a romantic partner. Married people don’t have to worry about that; it’s all been squared away. Marrieds may be more efficient and focused at work — because they have to be, in order to balance their professional and personal lives, or because they just want to get home to their families.
(That’s under a positive view of marriage. But even a more pessimistic outlook on the marital institution weighs in favor of hiring married people at law firms. Unhappy marriages breed workaholics, who log long hours in the office to avoid their miserable home lives.)
What’s your view on singles vs. marrieds as law firm employees? Opine in the comments, and take our poll below.
And now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to go feed the cats.
(No, we don’t really have cats; the cat-owning single person is just a stereotype. But, like many stereotypes, it may have some basis in reality.)

National USA Week [Unmarried America]
Celebrating the single-minded life [San Francisco Chronicle]

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