That economists’ paper about gender inequality, marriage and divorce

I was planning to write a note about this paper by economists, “Gender identity and relative income within households,” which got a lot of play two weeks ago. But I forgot about it until today, and then noticed that in the New York Times Catherine Rampbell, economics writer, dropped it in her story on the Pew Report about women as breadwinners. In the cautionary part of the article, Rampbell mentioned “A new working paper by economists” that showed:

…perhaps even more tellingly, couples in which the wife earns more report less satisfaction with their marriage and higher rates of divorce.

Maybe reporters like what’s new, or maybe it was just on her radar because she reads Freakonomics, the Economist or the Financial Times, which all uncritically wrote up the paper when it came out. But it’s really a shame in a story about current trends to cite a “new” paper which (for this part of its analysis) used data more than 20 years old.
Anyways

Here is a brief critique I was going to give when the paper came out. Just taking two lines from the abstract, I offer a few suggestions:

1. Couple matching

The distribution of the share of household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp cliff at 0.5, which suggests that a couple is less willing to match if her income exceeds his.

Suggestion: It’s not a good idea to use the relative incomes within couples years after they got married to discuss how relative income affects mate choice decisions. People move, change jobs, have children, etc., in the first few years after they get married. You need to look at income before marriage to study mate selection.

2. Divorce

Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce.

This part of the analysis uses data from Waves 1 & 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households NSFH), which were collected in 1987-88 and 1992-94. I don’t always insist that everyone use data from this minute, but at some point — around two decades — a study becomes historical. That judgment depends on the context and the question being asked. In this case, relative earnings of spouses (as we just saw in the Pew report) has seen an order-of-magnitude change over this period. And the paper is about norms! That is, the authors speculate that couples with high-earning wives divorce because they are outside the mainstream. So if, 20-25 years later, they’re not outside the mainstream anymore, the paper might not be salient.

Secondly, this is well-worn territory, and the specific hypothesis offered here has been tested and found wanting in several award winning papers using more thorough measures and testing competing hypotheses. (The NSFH, one of the most productive data collection efforts ever, maintained a bibliography up to 2004, which lists 180 papers under the category “union quality and stability.”) For those interested in the fuller story, I recommend these:

• “Women’s Economic Independence and the Probability of Divorce A Review and Reexamination” (2001), by Liana Sayer and Suzanne Bianchi (winner of the Reuben Hill Award from the National Council on Family Relations for best article of the year on family issues). Their critique of the research existing prior to 2001 applies specifically to the 2013 Bertrand et al. paper:

…[M]easures of marital commitment and satisfaction are better predictors of marital dissolution than measures of economic independence. This strongly suggests that the independence effect found in prior research, which did not include controls for marital quality, may have been measuring the role of wives’ economic independence in exiting bad marriages, not in exiting all marriages.

• “She Left, He Left: How Employment and Satisfaction Affect Men’s and Women’s Decisions to Leave Marriages” (2011), by Liana C. Sayer, Paula England, Paul Allison, and Nicole Kangas (winner of the Rosabeth Moss Kanter award from the Purdue Center for Families and the Boston College Center for Work & Family, for the best work-family research article of the year). Their key finding is that employment within couples does matter for divorce, but it depends on marital satisfaction:

We find that when men are not employed, either husbands or wives are more likely to leave. When wives report better than average marital satisfaction, their employment affects neither their nor their husbands’ exits. However, when wives report below average marital satisfaction, their employment makes it more likely that they will leave.

• “Wives’ Employment and Spouses’ Marital Happiness,” by Robert Schoen, Stacy Rogers and Paul Amato (2006). They report that employment effects on divorce depend on marital happiness. Specifically:

…shifting into full-time employment is more likely for unhappily married than for happily married wives. … [C]ontrary to frequently invoked social and economic theories, wives’ full-time employment is associated with greater marital stability.

This provides a followup to a previous study using the same data which found…

…clear evidence that, at the individual level, women’s employment does not destabilize happy marriages but increases the risk of disruption in unhappy marriages.

The reason these marital satisfaction controls matter so much is that how happy women are within marriage affects their employment, and therefore their earnings. So what looks like an earnings effect is often an unhappy-marriage effect. Careful sequencing of longitudinal data (which these papers do) is required to sort this out.

I only mention the awards because I was shocked (shocked!) to see these major sociology papers in top journals, using the same dataset and asking the same questions, published over a decade, which have been cited hundreds of times in the academic literature, go unnoticed in this economics working paper, which — not-yet published, not-yet peer reviewed — would be quoted all over the place.

People with disabilities are more likely to get divorced

File this under things to look into about divorce.

There was a recent paper showing that people who experience the onset of a disability face an increased likelihood of divorce, but that’s about all I found in a quick search. Now that we have the giant American Community Survey, which has both disability status and marital events data, we can ask the simple question: In a given year, are people with a reported disability more likely to report they have been divorced in the previous year? The answer is yes.

Age is a tricky issue with disability, since some risks of disability are cumulative over the life course. To do this quickly I just limited this to people ages 18-49. Otherwise the disability group is dominated by older people who have been married a long time, and who have low divorce rates. Here it is, by type of reported disability for the pooled 2009-2011 ACS:

Those are pretty big effects (odds ratios from 1.4 to 1.9). Over a lifetime these odds would really add up.

Economists would tell you that when a spouse experiences the onset of disability, this is new information for the other spouse, and increases his or her chance of leaving the marriage, since the disability implies a decline in future income. Maybe. But what about people who have disabilities already when they get married, which is presumably the case for most of these people. Is having a difficult life a cause of divorce? Is this related to economic stress, or carework obligations (I checked and found not much gender difference, but men’s disability has slightly stronger effects).

If you are interested in this question, don’t let me stop you from pursuing it – send me your results!

How can we save the church from divorce?

Unable to stop gay marriage, successfully promote straight marriage, or prevent divorce, the religious right is adopting a defensive posture. Maggie Gallagher has canceled her syndicated column. And the Institute for American Values has decided that, if it can’t save the family, it may as well try to save the church. (Or, as they call it now, in some weird nod toward diversity, “the churches.”)

A new pamphlet, by Elizabeth Marquardt, Amy Zeittlow, and Charles Stokes, spells out the problem of divorce — for the churches. It’s called, “Does the Shape of Families Shape Faith?”

David Smilde and Matthew May determined in 2010 that social science is increasingly studying religion’s effects rather than its causes — asking whether religion helps or hurts rather than what makes people religious. But churches are institutions, with bills to pay, zeal to project and ideological missions to fulfill. They have to worry about the bottom line. And divorce is hurting it.

Amanda Marcotte commented at Slate:

To read this paper, you’d think non-believing children of divorce are the walking wounded, barely able to make it through the day. Words like “schism,” “rupture,” and “alienated” abound, and the study’s authors warn that even having an amicable divorce leaves your child in danger of blowing off church, which we are meant to believe is a very dire fate indeed.

But more than concern for children, the document is animated by concern for the churches:

We have learned that when children of divorce reach adulthood, compared to those who grew up in intact families, they feel less religious on the whole and are less likely to be involved in the regular practice of a faith.

The main question is, how can we keep this structural change in family life from harming the churches:

The health and future of congregations depends upon understanding, reaching out to, and nurturing as potential leaders those who have come of age in an era of dramatic social changes in family structure. The suffering felt by children of divorce may actually offer a pathway toward healing and growth, not only for themselves but for the churches.

On helpful suggestion is to take advantage of people, especially children, when they are vulnerable:

Those who have experienced brokenness in their families of origin may have had early experiences of the imperfection and frailty of human beings. They may be open to the idea of a God who loves unconditionally, a community in which to seek meaning, or a practice that engages them with more universal truths.

This can be difficult, however, because divorced parents may be turned off by the churches (especially churches that threaten them with hell-fire for getting divorced, and now are coming after their children), and thus not even bring their children to the churches anymore.

When parents do not involve their children in an active life of faith, churches seem bewildered about how to reach them.

Besides reminding parents that giving children access to the internet is risky, this might lead some parents to say, “Good! How about this: leave my kids alone unless you have my permission to ‘reach them.”"

I think the churches should consider that, if the children of divorced parents are feeling some pain, the churches themselves might not be completely blameless for that. After all, many children of Christian parents are raised to believe that:

…when a child is conceived the child is a one-flesh union of his or her parents that cannot break in two. Theologically [in Christianity], then, children whose parents divorce experience brokenness because the parental unity that they embody has been ruptured.

Not surprisingly, such children may feel torn by divorce.

And of course that can happen regardless of the parents’ religions. But here’s a suggestion: don’t teach children that they are the “one-flesh union” of their parents’ marriage. Rather, find a way to explain to children that they are the biological creation of two separately living organism which, upon achieving physical independence, has its own existence that survives its parents’ breakup. Maybe we could address the emotional challenges better if we weren’t standing in the pool of blood created by the rupture of the child’s tender body.

Is sameness the kiss of marital demise?

Does marriage thrive on the mystery? To hear religious marriage experts tell it (at least on the covers of their books), marriage is a mystery, the solving of which might just mean its demise. So just keep asking yourself, “What am I doing in this marriage?” Historically, the reason so many marriages survived arguably was because divorce wasn’t an option. So the survival of marriage was due to its external environment not its internal dynamics. Now that the padlock has been blown off the door, people need reasons to stay together, if they want to. Is it the mystery that holds them together? In the debate over marriage rights and homogamous (“same-sex”) marriage, one odd issue has been the relative stability of different forms of marriage. I say “odd” because there is no logical connection between relationship stability and civil rights, but it’s all wrapped up in the sideshow over what kind of marriage is “good” for children. It turns out there is a whole right-wing Christian theory about gay and lesbian relationship stability, which I had naively never heard of. This came to my attention recently when Carlos Maza, a marriage rights activist, went undercover at an “It Takes A Family To Raise A Village” conference put on by the National Organization for Marriage. One of his audio recordings reportedly featured Jenet Erickson, a conservative Christian teaching at Brigham Young University. She offered the students at her session this theory (transcribed by me), which she said she got second hand from Brad Wilcox:

I remember talking about this with Brad Wilcox and he said, he was talking about gay marriage being accepted. And I’ll just make this side comment — we do not have enough research to say it is any kind of law, but I want to be thinking about it, keep it in your mind, because there’s something about same-gender relationships also being unstable — they seem to be less stable just inherently. And he would say … when we look at the Scandinavian countries that accepted gay marriage some years ago … after people could get married as same gender couples after that period of time, when they measured how long a lesbian relationship — and you should know those are most likely to marry, are women, right? — how long those relationships last and the average was 18 months [someone whistles]. And so he just commented that there seems to be something — this is the way he would say it — that women don’t want to hang out, they’re not interesting enough, “They’re too much like me!” He would say, women bonding with women — it’s like there’s something about the difference between genders that allows for stability inherently, because there’s enough difference: “I’m going to stay in this to figure you out. It may take an entire lifetime to get into your brain,” right? He had an interesting thought that I thought was a fascinating idea, that there seems to be something inherently unstable about same gender relationships. We’ve known that about gay relationships with men, but it’s also true of lesbian relationships. And why, why is it this heterosexual dynamic, inherently seems to potentially lead to greater stability. He would say, you’ve got to figure this person out.

(I couldn’t find an email address for Erickson to run this by her. But Wilcox, via email, said it was not an accurate representation of his views.) In the recent scandal over Mark Regnerus’s study, this came up as well, due to his argument that children of any parent who ever had a same-sex relationship were worse off as young adults than those of forever-married-bio-parents. In his self-defense piece, apparently forthcoming in the journal Social Science Research, he returns to the issue of relationship stability. Regnerus writes, about a “study of Norwegian and Swedish same-sex marriages” (referring to this one in Demography) that, “The study authors estimate that in Sweden, 30% of female marriages are likely to end in divorce within 6 years of formation, compared with 20% for male marriages and 13% for heterosexual ones.” That sounds pretty high. He omits two important sentences from the same paragraph of the paper, however:

• “In Norway, 13% of partnerships of men and 21% of female partnerships are likely to end in divorce within six years from partnership registration.” (Selectively not mentioning the lower rates in Norway. I don’t know where Erickson got that 18-months figure.)
• “These levels are higher than the corresponding 13% of heterosexual marriages that end in divorce within five years in Sweden, but not high when compared with divorce levels in the United States.” (Selectively not putting the divorce rates in context.)

My not-yet-peer-reviewed lifetable estimate of divorce rates in the U.S. puts the 6-year risk at 19%, so I’d say those Swedish homogamous-divorce rates are a little higher, at least for the first six years. (Before death does them part, I reckon 49% of U.S. marriages are headed for divorce. With rates that high, you have to wonder if there is something inherently unstable about heterogamous relationships.) The authors of that Demography article note that lesbian marriages in Scandinavia feature a high degree of similarity between spouses in terms of demographics such as age, nationality, education and income. This is “usually assumed to enhance marital stability.”

However, some aspects of homogamy, especially in terms of economic characteristics, may be related to less-clear power structures in a couple. This situation may be conducive to a high level of dynamism in the relationship, but perhaps not to the kind of inertia that is related to marital stability.

It gets confusing trying to parse the speculation on the role of sameness and difference here. In this interpretation, sameness creates dynamism and undermines stability. On the other hand, differences associated with unequal power structures produce stability and inertia, which is good. For marriage. Is that good? In general, the research on marriage has indeed shown that difference is not good for the odds of not divorcing:

• When one spouse goes to church more often that the other, it bodes ill for the marriage’s survival.
• Ethnic and religious intermarriage in the Netherlands increases the odds of divorce.
• Difference between spouses in age or education increases the odds of divorce.
• Racial/ethnic intermarried couples are more likely to divorce (although there is debate about whether intermarriage has an independent effect) and recent research finds higher divorce rates among specific ethnicity/gender combinations.

But is gender difference different? Do couples inherently need to be similar on ethnicity, age, education, religion and income but different on gender — if they want the relationship to last?

Which comes first, getting divorced or Googling “vasectomy reversal”?

Quick follow up to the last post on the new 2011 divorce data.

I just noticed that the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey release included a calculation of the divorce rate, calculated as the number of divorces in the last 12 months per 1,000 people age 15+, with a table listing them by state (Factfinder tables GCT1253 and GCT1254).

They did it for men and women, and the rates are a little different, so I averaged them. Then, the first step in the research process is to run the state rates through Google Correlate…

Of the top 100 searches most correlated with divorce rates — that is, searches that are most common where there are more divorces, and least common where there are few divorces — about 99 of them are about guns, military paraphernalia, survivalist stuff, etc.

And then, right between “radio software” and “shotgun pistol” there is “vasectomy reversal.” I am not making this up:

That’s the divorce rate on the left, and the “vasectomy reversal” searches on the right. It’s a correlation of .79 — pretty good.

Here are the other things on the list, all correlated with the divorce rate at between .77 and .84.

And the 2011 divorce rate is…

18.9 divorces per 1,000 married people.

You heard it here first.

I don’t have a new analysis, but here’s the trend since 2008, when the American Community Survey started collecting data on “marital events” in the previous 12 months:

These are not recorded legal events, remember, but responses to a giant survey that asks people about their marital status and marital events.

The different rates for men and women are something of a mystery (to me). As long as they rise and fall together, I don’t worry about it too much. Unfortunately, in 2011 they didn’t — it’s up for men and flat for women, resulting in a net uptick. Since I’ve been predicting an uptick following the recession, I figure we should go with that interpretation. (Don’t be tempted attribute the difference to gay men’s divorces — we’re talking about 2.4 million divorces, a tiny tiny slice of which are homogamous.)

To put this in the long-term perspective, here’s the 1940-2011 trend, cobbled together from different sources. Given the long decline after 1979, any uptick feeds suspicion that something is changing or different about the last couple years.

If you want to replicate this, you start here at the FactFinder, then get the number of married people by gender (ACS Table B12001) and the number of people who got divorced in the 12 months before the survey (ACS Table S1251) — you can enter the table numbers into the search box.

For my series on divorce, divorce and the recession, and etc., follow the divorce tag.

 

Recession divorce paper preview

8:30 AM, Thursday, May 3: Be at the first session of the Population Association of American conference to hear me present, “Divorce and the Recession, 2008-2010″ (and three other interesting papers on the how the recession has affected families).

The presentation version of my paper is now available as a Maryland Population Research Center Working Paper. Here are a few highlights and additions.

This analysis supersedes some of my earlier musings about divorce fluctuations, which have been quite inconsistent (here’s the whole series). I once reported a positive relationship between rising unemployment and rising divorce rates — but no increase in Google searches on divorce. But then my Google method turned up what looked like an increase in divorce-related searching – by which point I was skeptical that there was in fact dominant effect of the recession that is discernible in the short run. And now I don’t see an unemployment pattern to speak of.

The conference paper is the most I can do with what we now have — big-sample data from 2008-2010. As I noted before, there is a drop in divorce rates from 2008 to 2010, but that hides a rebound from 2009 to 2010; that pattern holds when individuals factors are controlled. In the context of a long-run decline in divorce rates, I don’t make much of that. At the state level, this my story:

After establishing an individual level model predicting women’s divorce, I test whether unemployment and foreclosures are associated with the odds of divorce, and for whom. Results show that foreclosure rates are positively associated with the odds of divorce, but only for those with more than a high school education. State unemployment rates show no effect on odds of divorce. I also test the effect of state laws delaying divorce, and find they have an increasingly negative effect of the three-year period, suggesting a backlog of new divorces during the recession.

The interpretation of those state law patterns — a late addition to the paper — is up for discussion. Anyway, here’s the figure showing the foreclosure pattern by education level, from a model that controls for individual characteristics and state fixed effects:

Maybe this means marriages in which people are more likely to own homes are more at risk of real estate shocks, but that’s pretty indirect. There might be a fancy way to work that out, with a prediction model for which of these divorced people probably owned a home before divorce (be my guest!).

Those state patterns are built on an individual model shown in this figure. Bars that point left show negative effects on divorce odds, bars that point right are for increased risks.

None of these patterns are surprising given past research, but it’s very nice to have recent big-data estimates as new benchmarks.

Finally, I updated the Google analysis, because I couldn’t resist. The trend for a basic “divorce” search, which I used previously, was seriously diverted by the something called “the Kardashian event” in October 2011. How much did this mess up the data? This much:

Partly for that reason, this time I stuck with lawyer searches: “divorce lawyer,” “divorce attorney,” and “family law attorney,” which are all pretty well correlated over time. This is the trend (dates on the x-axis appear at the end of each year):

I could interpret this as consistent with the divorce/recession lull-rebound hypothesis, but time will tell. It doesn’t fit well from 2004 to 2008, since divorce rates were probably falling during most of that time. Still, that’s a pretty rapid rise at the end. If there isn’t an increase in divorce in 2011/2012, remind me to report that this method didn’t work.

Divorcing our way to prosperity

Matthew Yglesias had a funny post recently about how the backlog of divorces, births and young people waiting to move out from the parents’ homes is holding back the economy. It’s true, strictly speaking. But no one really wants more divorces just to stimulate the economy, right? That would be as crazy as wanting more marriages just to stimulate the economy — which must be crazy, because it’s exactly what Brad Wilcox has advocated (hopefully just to see if his deep-pockets corporate sponsors are paying attention to what he does with their slush funds).

All that is why it was funny to see the Wilcoxian Elizabeth Marquardt take offense at the Yglesias piece. “Sure, America, get divorced and go shopping,” she huffed. “A divorced household means two refridgerators rather than one, and what could be better for the economy?” Of course, waste is consumption, and consumption is a good way to get out of a recession. As Yglesias put it:

 There are millions of “missing” households in America that can appear—through childbirth, divorce, or moving out—very suddenly if people get a bit more in their pockets.

Put another way, all those divorces waiting to happen are really shovel-ready households, ready to be formed. But what kind of moral view of the family is that?

Seriously, I have to put my foot down on this. I don’t want either divorces or marriages just because one or the other stimulates more shopping — even if it means shopping for cool new beds:

That image is from a post by Mike Konczal, who believes the recession is reducing divorces. His data is a little old. I’ve done quite a bit on this issue, and my latest leaning is in the direction of the recession creating a backlog of divorces that may already be showing themselves, with an uptick in the number of couples reporting divorce in the 2010 American Community Survey and Google divorce searches trending upward.

When the economy improves — and more new households are formed, by people moving out, for better or for worse — the improvement will be good news, and the boom in broken marriages will be good or bad depending on whether they were good or bad divorces, not because they are good or bad for “the economy.”

NPR on divorce, recession and violence

NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam the other day did a very nice job in a long story on how the recession may be affecting relationships and divorce. He interviewed me, and in this post I provide the sources for my comments.

The story began with a reference to this paper by Judith Hellerstein and Melinda Sandler Morrill, who find that divorce rates in the last few decades are lower in states with higher unemployment rates. They apply a rigorous set of tests and alternative explanations, and it looks pretty solid. This is tricky because research on couples shows that unemployment increases marital stress and the risk of violence. That’s not necessarily a contradiction, of course, since the research on states doesn’t show the people who are actually unemployed are the ones getting divorced — it could be other people in those states who are not getting divorced (people who fear unemployment, for example).

Vedantam’s story focused on two women: one who postponed a divorce because she couldn’t afford the legal fees and costs of starting over, and another who felt she was at risk of violence because economic scarcity was keeping her and her husband together after they intended to separate permanently. The examples made a good case for how unemployment could worsen marriages even as it prolonged them. NPR also has a new survey out, which shows marriages suffering when one partner is unemployed:

From my own explorations on divorce in the current economic crisis, it looks like there might be a delayed uptick in divorce, and higher rates in states where the crisis was worse — but that remains to be confirmed.

Anyway, my job in this story was to interpret the evidence that unemployment increases the risk of domestic violence, which I’ve blogged about before, here and here.

The NPR transcript reads:

Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that multiple studies have found that the marital distress that comes from money problems and feeling trapped is strongly associated with an increased risk of domestic violence. One study, for example, looked at women who showed up in hospital emergency rooms for injuries that were both intentional and non-intentional.

“When you compare the women who were injured intentionally and women who were treated for other conditions in the emergency departments, they found that those who were injured intentionally were more likely to have experienced recent unemployment in their families,” Cohen says….

At the same time, however, Cohen says the overall rates of domestic violence have generally been on the decline. But what’s clear, he says, is that unemployment increases the risk of domestic violence.

“I’m quite confident from the research on couples — and what drives violence within couples — that among the people who are experiencing economic shock or dislocation or unemployment, there is an increased risk of violence,” he says. “And I would not expect that to be any different during this recession.”

These were my principal sources:

• Risk Factors for Injury to Women from Domestic Violence, by Demetrios N. Kyriacou and colleagues.
• Intimate partner physical abuse perpetration and victimization risk factors: A meta-analytic review, by Sandra Smith and colleagues.

In addition, my searching around over the last several years has not turned up any evidence that would lead me to doubt this association between unemployment and violence. Still, if you think I’m off on this, I’d be glad to hear about it.

Chinese divorce, modern style

China is experiencing a rapid increase in divorce rates.

China Daily — a government-friendly newspaper — calls the increase “alarming,” and showed the number of divorces since 1978. Using U.N. population numbers, I converted those divorces to a crude divorce rate, or divorces per 1,000 total population.

Because population growth has slowed, the steady increase in divorces has produced an accelerating crude divorce rate. For comparison, this brings China up to where the U.S. was in 1940.

A quick search in the English-language social sciences reveals no systematic analysis of this trend that would help explain its causes, but the China Daily article summarizes the view of Peking University law professor Ma Yinan:

Ma suggests that China’s transformation to a market economy and modernization also began to reshape lifestyles and values, including those on marriage. With material comforts vastly improved, people are no longer satisfied with marriages that merely fulfilled the need to carry on the family line. Especially for women, economic independence has meant power to be emotionally more independent, making them brave enough to walk out of an unsatisfactory union.

This explanation is plausible (though the “material comforts” thing is not universal). But I have two reasons to be unsure. First, the women’s independence story and the post-materialist values story don’ t necessarily go together. In the U.S., for example, divorce has become less common among women with college degrees than it is for those with less education, at least for Whites, who have the highest level of potential financial independence. And second, fitting the Western modern-family narrative over Chinese culture is generally dicey, as argued by historian Philip Huang.

Still, given how fast Chinese demographic trends have moved in the past century — most notably mortality and fertility — rapid change in this area is not a surprise.