The first tool you need is the truth: There are more SWANS than ever before.

Women are excelling in the academic world and becoming the strong achievers previous generations dreamed their daughters could be. In 1970, there were only 68 women enrolled in college per 100 men. In 2005, 133 women graduated from college for every 100 men, and women make up the majority, 57 percent, of college classes. This trend is expected to continue: In 2010, projec­tions estimate there will be 142 college degrees awarded to women for every 100 that go to men.

The gains for women in higher education are often even more impressive. More than three times as many women receive master’s, doctoral, or professional degrees now than did in 1970.

The majority of all associate, bachelor, and master’s degrees awarded during the 2000–2010 decade will be conferred on women, and by 2010 women will earn 151 master’s degrees for every 100 awarded to men.

In 1977, only 23 women received professional degrees, such as in law or medicine, for every 100 men. But today, about 50 percent of law school and medical school classes are women, and the vast majority of graduate students in the social sciences and health ser­vices fields are women. Even in the traditionally male fields of busi­ness and finance, women are excelling: Today more than 33 percent of MBA graduates are women. By 2010, women are ex­pected to earn almost as many professional degrees as men. The projections suggest that women will earn 91 professional degrees for every 100 degrees conferred on men by 2010.

This translates to major strides in the workplace. Women hold almost 50 percent of all corporate management positions, and an increasing number are attaining the top jobs and board seats. Al­most half of all privately held businesses are at least 50 percent owned by women. And women hold twice as many senior man­agement positions at large national companies as they did even in 1995.

Women’s strides in the workforce make staying single econom­ically feasible. In addition, changing social mores and the wide­spread availability of birth control pills and other forms of contraception have lessened the pressure on Americans of all back­grounds to marry young.

The implications of these changes are felt nationally: In 1970, only 6 percent of American women between the ages of 30 and 34 had never married. Now it’s 24 percent, four times greater. The me­dian age of marriage for all women is about 25, but for women with a college degree it’s closer to 27, and for those with a graduate degree it may be above 30 years old. For men, it’s the same story: Thirty-two percent of men age 30–34 have never married, more than quadrupling the 1970 rate.

Today marriage is a choice, not an obligation. For a woman, a solid educational background and a good salary means she can be more selective: Instead of marrying a man for financial security or out of fear of being a spinster at 30, women may now choose to marry for compatibility, love, or companionship. For men, success­ful women represent an equal partner with whom to share life, not a constant drain on their hard-earned money.

Indeed, according to a nationally representative survey I conducted for this research, marriage is important for SWANS: 88 percent of single, successful women reported that they would like to get married, and 86 percent of both men and women in the sample said they wanted to get married. This is in keeping with the national data: The majority of men and women want to be married, and more than 90 percent of Ameri­cans do marry. In attitude surveys from the past several decades, three-quarters of men and women consistently report that a good marriage is “extremely important” to them—and an even higher percentage said they had positive feelings about being married.

For most SWANS, there have been long-term relationships, dozens of men who were interested, and at least several conscious choices to remain single. In some cases, SWANS choose not to marry men who are alcoholics, verbally abusive, or completely stuck on themselves, even though these men had great money, power, and prestige. Why? Because as strong women who can achieve in their own right, they know they deserve more. Some­times SWANS won’t give a guy the time of day because he’s too short, has a spare tire around his waistline, or talks too loudly. These may be petty reasons, but still, it’s their choice.

SWANS are accomplished, smart young women who realize that the goal isn’t to get married—it’s to have a good marriage and to lead a happy and fulfilled life. Finding Mr. Right takes time and patience.

Articles, movies, and television reinforce the stereotype that suc­cessful women are cold, calculating, and, well, bitchy. According to my national research, high-achievers most commonly perceive en­tertainment media portrayals of successful women as aggressive and ambitious. “I would say the stereotype of a high-achieving woman is driven, smart, savvy, goal-oriented, and someone who is not going to let things get in her way. It’s a cold stereotype,” said Bill, a 32-year-old think tank researcher in Washington. Indeed, warmer characteristics such as kindness, creativity, and good par­enting skills scratch the bottom of the list of qualities that pop to men’s minds when they see successful women on TV. Successful women suffer from a bad public image—and it’s gone on for too long. For decades, we’ve read articles about the problems that ensue when a successful man mar­ries a similarly successful woman, namely, how an accomplished wife “complicates” the male CEO’s life as “schedules and interests collide.” According to some media watchdogs, women are more vulner­able to bad reporting. “Women’s lifestyle choices are subjected to greater scrutiny,” said Julie Hollar, the communications director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. “These articles are more about sparking debate and being controversial than about getting at some real truth.”

Still, these media caricatures reinforce the conventional wisdom that men are intimidated by successful, strong women. And SWANS are paying attention. Should women reinvent themselves to play down their strong side and play up the many other Ss of being a woman: soft, sweet, sexy women achievers? Evolutionary bi­ology tells us that men are looking for youth and beauty in women: Make her pretty, docile, sweet, subordinate, and chaste, and she’s the one. But these go-getter SWANS aren’t docile or sub­ordinate. Is it possible that both high-achieving men and women seek similar goals in life but are blinded by stereotypes?

Yes!

Your grandmother was a smart woman. She offered you lots of good advice about sitting up straight, respecting your elders and carrying yourself like a lady. But her dating advice just doesn’t apply to you.

In Grandma’s day, things were different for smart, successful women: Women were told to demur to their man. “No one likes a smarty-pants,” mothers told their precocious daughters. Decades went by, times changed, yet the advice remained the same: Men don’t like women who are too smart, so if you want to land the man, you’ve got to play up your softer, sexier side—and hide those smarts.

Today SWANS worry that this conventional wisdom is still true: that men are scared off, or turned off, by a woman’s accomplishments. Indeed, nearly half of successful women believe their suc­cess is hurting their chances of getting married. Some 48 percent of single women ages 35 to 40 said they believed a woman who has achieved career or educational success would be less likely to get married, and 41 percent of all women with graduate degrees dis­agreed that men were more attracted to women who are successful in their careers.

“I’m sexy, attractive, entertaining, and I have wonderful friends and an interesting job. But I’m worried that by being interesting I might be scary and intimidating to men,” said Emily, a 29-year-old credit card company consultant. “It seems like at least half of the men I meet are intimidated by me,” says Adrianna, a dentist in Tucson. And Amanda, a petite 33-year-old museum curator, said there are days when she is terrified that she stayed in school too long and educated herself out of the marriage market.

Today’s damaging myth represents the painful realities of recent generations: the grandmothers, and even the mothers, of today’s young professional women. A woman who graduated from college in the 1920s had lifetime marriage probabilities that were fully 20 percentage points lower than those women of their generation who hadn’t gone to college.

For women of the generation that has now risen to the highest ranks of most professions, women for whom graduate school became more common, higher education seemed to be the way to spinsterhood: In 1980, a woman with 19 years of education—that’s college plus graduate school—had ap­proximately a 66 percent chance of being married at age 40 to 44, compared to a woman with 12 years of education, who had an 83 percent likelihood of being married at that age.

Loosely trans­lated, those statistics said, “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.” Sober statistics like these prompted Newsweek maga­zine in 1986 to famously declare that a single, college-educated 40-year-old woman had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of ever tying the knot.

In the 1970s and 1980s, sociology embraced the findings of evolutionary biology as a way to explain the dating and marriage patterns of the time as somehow predetermined by nature. Acade­mic articles routinely reported that women were more attracted to high-status men because such men were perceived as “providers,” whereas men were attracted to pretty and docile women because they were perceived as “motherly” and fertile. Although feminism was making enormous legal strides, leading academic sociologists, buried in prehistoric eras, were oblivious to the major social changes going on all around them.

In real life, media reports and academic theories of the day notwithstanding, dating and marriage trends had already begun a historic shift. SWANS who are now approaching or in their 40s re­flect happily on the differences between today and recent decades past. “It was very depressing in the 1980s to hear the stats,” said Julia, a 37-year-old lawyer in New York who once considered her­self, a successful married woman, to be “a fluke.” Said Elaine, 43, “Femininity and power don’t necessarily clash anymore. But when I was growing up, there was still a dichotomy.”

Mothers of today’s SWANS marvel at the different paths their daughters are taking—and the myriad choices available to them.

Alice, 56, has her master’s in public health and teaches at a prominent college. Yet she said she always felt that her husband had the “career” while she merely had a job. Her career, she said, was raising her two children.

Alice worked at prestigious posts at government agencies, helped launch grant programs for others studying public health, and worked full-time with the help of a nanny to watch the kids. “I was unusual then,” she said. “I loved my work, but the family al­ways came first—it had to.”

Allison, 60, agreed that her experience in her 20s is very differ­ent from the options available to young women today. “I grew up, went to college, got married after my junior year, and finished se­nior year married,” she said. “I followed my husband in his career and stayed home after my daughter’s birth. At least until the chil­dren were in kindergarten, women stopped working when they had children. My mom had done that, and that’s what I did, too.” Allison’s daughter is 28 and taking a completely different path: She has a graduate degree; she’s seriously dating a smart, accomplished man; and she’s looking forward to balancing children and a career simultaneously. “It’s just a different world from what I was doing at her age.”

Still, the negative conventional wisdom that successful women don’t marry is routinely perpetuated in the media, by well-meaning but misguided relatives, and by young women themselves who are concerned that they have overqualified themselves for romantic happiness.

A 2005 letter to the Dear Abby advice column sums it up: A woman in her early 30s wrote to Abby after reading several articles “about how smart women are less likely to get married.” She and her friends want to meet Mr. Wonderful and get married, she wrote, but she worries that “if we have to curtail our professional success, financial wherewithal and IQ to do it, how can a person even begin to do such a thing? . . . Help, Abby! What’s the answer for smart, fun women who have their acts together? How can we best poise our­selves to find true love while being true to ourselves?” The young woman signed her letter “Losing Faith in Finding Mr. Right.”

True to form, Abby had some good advice: “Stop reading de­featist newspaper and magazine articles. They’ll only make you desperate, clingy and depressed—and none of those traits is attractive.”

For young women today, the “success penalty” has disappeared. Educa­tion and income now have little negative effect on marriage rates, and in many situations, they actually act as benefits, if you have the right tools to use these skills to your advantage. Even Newsweek recanted its gloom-and-doom pronouncements in 2006. Times have changed, but may of our perceptions haven’t … until now.

It’s time for women like you to use the advice in this book to make your own headlines. C’mon girls, it’s time for some good news!

Still, these media caricatures reinforce the conventional wisdom that men are intimidated by successful, strong women. And SWANS are paying attention. Should women reinvent themselves to play down their strong side and play up the many other Ss of being a woman: soft, sweet, sexy women achievers? Evolutionary bi­ology tells us that men are looking for youth and beauty in women: Make her pretty, docile, sweet, subordinate, and chaste, and she’s the one. But these go-getter SWANS aren’t docile or sub­ordinate. Is it possible that both high-achieving men and women seek similar goals in life but are blinded by stereotypes?

Yes!