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Notes -
ITT: amateur psychoanalysis, aka projection. I’m not going to put much stock in evopsych guesses about risk assessment or competition for mates.
With that said…yeah, sounds plausible. Most of the higher-ups I know are married. Maybe generational, but the few climbers with whom I work are married too.
Of course this has so many confounders! Are go-getters more likely to get that ring? Are gold diggers more likely to ID and pounce on up-and-coming men? Note: that does not match my coworkers…not as far as I can tell.
Among my cohort, there’s definitely a perception that you can boost your career by spending a couple years miserable in Silicon Valley. Then you take your pay cut and still make bank in Huntsville thanks to the SpaceX or Google on your resume. I bet a lot of these guys aren’t married—but I don’t know, because they all moved to Mountain View instead of coming back to the Dallas suburbs.
It’s also worth noting that the West is a little short on honor cultures. Though the listed attributes seem pretty general, and I would expect them to show up as status symbols in any decently-sized society.
Also ITT is a lot of speculation about motives or causes without characterizing the thing itself, or the scale. If being married affects your career choices ... by how much? "Putting a number/probability on it" is worse than directly characterizing the relevance, but at least it's something, and "this takes off [3%] vs [20%] of the career-potential of unmarried men in [x position]" might clarify some of the claims about 'social status'
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