Tag Archives: marriage

April 4, 2013 · 6:15 am

Educational endogamy (a good Princeton word), ca. 2011

Lots of people are pushing marriage on young women. For those with less than a college degree, a group of Christian conservatives is promoting marriage so women won’t be poor (mothers). And for those with elite educations, a Princeton alumna says women her daughters’ age should find a husband before graduation so they won’t be bored by a non-Ivy League dimwit for the rest of their lives.

(All this marriage promotion shouldn’t be confused with marriage rights promotion. Should it?)

Marriage markets are very complicated. People can marry (and divorce) anyone they want whenever they want (subject to legal restrictions), or not. People can move to marry, or marry and then move. They can marry up, down, sideways, or internationally. After divorce, they can repeat the process, with variation.

With the economy the way it is and sequestration threatening the jobs of government bureaucrats and the social scientists who depend on them, demographers are delighted by this complexity, since it assures a steady stream of unanswered questions to generate demand for our profession (another good reason to repeal DOMA).

Anyway: Some information about marriage and education

Take all the people ages under age 50 who told the American Community Survey in 2011 that they got (heterogamously) married for the first time in 2011. Break them down by education and sex, and look at the education of the people they married.

The first thing you notice is the BA / non-BA gap. Of this population, 71% of college graduates married another college graduate. Women college graduates were less likely to hold rank, with just 65% of them marrying above the BA line, compared with 78% of male college grads. This isn’t surprising considering women earn the majority of BA degrees. But it’s not as big a deal as it might seem for gender equality, because – don’t forget – unmarried men earn more at every level of education. When I looked at these numbers for Atlanta 25-34 year-olds, for example, I found that 46% of the women with BAs who married men without BAs still had a husband who earned more than them. That is, marrying down the education ladder didn’t stop them from marrying up the income ladder.

Here is the rest of the breakdown, offered without further comment except a caution that there are a lot of ways to slice these things. The figures show the percentage of spouses at each education level for the under-50s who just got married for the first time, by education level, first for women and then for men. For example, the first graph shows that 25% of newlywed women with PhDs married husbands with PhDs. The colors are intended to highlight the BA / non-BA divide, with non-grads in bluish and grads in reddish.

who do women marry

who do men marrySource: My calculations from the 2011 American Community Survey, from IPUMS (which tacked on the spouses’ education for those with a present and identifiable spouse).

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March 1, 2013 · 1:26 pm

Can the marriage movement survive gay marriage?

Originally published on TheAtlantic.com as, “The Most Surprising Thing About Conservatives Embracing Gay Marriage“

cohen_gendermarriage_post.jpg

Pichi Chuang/Reuters

Maggie Gallagher, who more than almost anyone is the face of marriage-rights denial, is justifiably upset about the course chosen by another leading face of the cause, David Blankenhorn. Whichever side wins (and “winning” in this context may simply mean maintaining a donor base sufficient to keep their jobs), the chaos on the family right is interesting and important.

The question they face is this: Can a “marriage” movement survive on gender-neutral terms? That is, are they willing to settle for promoting stable, monogamous parental bonds even if a tiny portion of those bonds are between people of the same sex? At stake, Gallagher fears, is nothing less than the cherished view of men and women as inherently complementary in their essential oppositeness, without which society goes down the drain.

Blankenhorn now stands opposed to that view. President of the Institute for American Values, he recently stopped resisting the march of marriage rights after serving as a standard-bearer for the cause. His capitulation was stunning, as he had previously been dedicated enough to testify as an expert (until his qualifications were disqualified) in the federal case against Proposition 8 in California. In the wake of Blankenhorn’s reversal, Gallagher—best known for running the National Organization for Marriage—has emerged as the purist’s answer to the outbreak of tolerance (which now includes a number of former-A-list Republicans).

In a piece on her website, Gallagher compares the statement she co-signed with Blankenhorn in 2000, called “The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles,” with his new “Call for a New Conversation.” The comparison is revealing.

In 2000, the movement declared:

Marriage is a universal human institution, the way in which every known society conspires to obtain for each child the love, attention and resources of a mother and father.

Forget the erroneous reading of human history and culture that statement implies for the moment and just think about the vision it conjures for contemporary marriage politics: Marriage, man and woman, mother and father. This is what Gallagher likes—it’s not gender-neutral.

In his new statement, Blankenhorn has substituted generic, almost bureaucratic language:

Because marriage is the main institution governing the link between the spousal association and the parent-child association, marriage is society’s most pro-child institution.

To Gallagher, this distinction is fundamental. She wants to keep the gender of the spouses at the center of the effort to maintain a preferred family structure through public policy. Blankenhorn and his co-signers, on the other hand, are willing to ignore that issue and merely demand marriage between “spouses.”

As Gallagher writes, “That is the difference gay marriage makes in how we converse about marriage.” In decision after decision, appellate judges have failed to find that gay marriage hurts straight marriage—and I agree. But Gallagher has a point that the possibility of same-sex marriage (what I prefer to call homogamy) changes the linguistic frame of reference. If marriage is all about stability and well-being for children, then the gender of the parents doesn’t matter and Blankenhorn is right. But if it’s really about the man-woman marriage and the traditional gender dichotomy, then this change is truly cataclysmic.

The genderless marriage movement

Whether the difference between Gallagher and Blankhorn’s articulations of marriage is really a big deal is the question of the day for the family right. But it is fascinating that in Blankenhorn’s new statement there is no mention of men, women, fathers or mothers—or even love. That’s some marriage movement.

By one interpretation, Blankenhorn sold out in the face of gay marriage’s advance, waiting barely a month last summer to jump on President Obama’s delayed-embrace bandwagon. He used to oppose gay marriage, Blankenhorn wrote, because it was part of the “deinstitutionalization” of marriage, its transformation from a “structured institution with a clear public purpose” to the mere “licensing of private relationships.” He still believes all that, he says, but now he has “no stomach” for culture wars, and besides, “the time for denigrating or stigmatizing same-sex relationships is over.”

Although he futilely promises, “I am not recanting any of it,” Blankenhorn seems relieved to have abandoned the issue. He may have realized gay marriage brought what used to be called the“marriage movement” to its knees, tying up their dwindling resources in a losing battle that also cost them the support of small-government conservatives and a generation of laissez-faire young people who don’t want government to legislate people’s sex lives.

But maybe he was really ahead of the curve, recognizing the inherent conservativeness waiting to emerge from the marriage rights movement. Maybe it was gay rights politics—not conservatives—that were distracted by the marriage battle. So they fought for membership in a conservative institution instead of for the more ambitious agenda of destabilizing gender itself. Maybe, by explicitly coopting them at their moment of triumph, Blankenhorn’s apparent fallback is actually a clever strategy to revive traditionalist moralism in the public sphere.

That’s an interesting argument, and there are more positions than just these. But either way, Gallagher has a point that Blankenhorn’s “new conversation” about marriage is not just a return to the good old days of the culture wars before gay marriage became an issue. It’s throwing in the towel on the ideal of marriage as an institution for maintaining gender distinction.

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February 26, 2013 · 7:00 am

Pediatrics essay on child wellbeing in the homogamy debate

The medical journal Pediatrics has a nice, short essay on the child wellbeing argument over homogamous (same-sex) marriage.

The authors, Jeremy R. Garrett and John D. Lantos, write:

Our primary goal in this article has been to provoke or reinforce skepticism about the conceptual, empirical, and normative adequacy of opposition to same-sex marriage on the basis of claims that such marriages are detrimental to the well-being of children.

And they suggest three principles for the state’s role in family structure regulation or support. In my paraphrase:

  1. Provide necessary support to ensure parents have the resources they need to raise children.
  2. For family living arrangements, set a minimum threshold rather than a maximal ideal, because family structure categories are not reasonable or effective means of identifying good or bad situations for children.
  3. After setting a low bar for family structure, be vigilant in protecting or supporting children if things are not working out.

Just as we don’t (or rather shouldn’t) punish criminals based on the social category they belong to but rather by the nature of their crime and individual qualities, so we shouldn’t legislate family categories but rather child wellbeing itself.

As we approach the Supreme Court decisions on homogamous marriage rights, this essay might be a good resource for the child wellbeing aspect of the debate.

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February 25, 2013 · 7:00 am

The best they’ve got for DOMA?

The big news last week was the Obama administration’s historic throwing under the bus of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

The President already had made clear where his heart lies on homogamous marriage rights, and the administration already was undermining the law, which prohibits the federal government from recognizing homogamy as practiced in the states. But the brief they handed the Supreme Court last week in the DOMA case U.S. v. Windsor still broke ground in arguing that laws infringing on the rights of gays and lesbians should be scrutinized as if those groups constitute a minority to be protected — in other words, that the government needs a very good reason to discriminate against them — and that DOMA could not withstand such scrutiny.

But in my catching up on the case, what floored me was the brief by the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the House of Representatives, who are left with the sorry job of defending DOMA sans assistance from Obama. We have known for a while that the intellectual bullpen is getting a little thin on the anti-homogamy side, epitomized by the tossing-out of David Blankenhorn’s claim to expert status in the anti-gay marriage California Proposition 8 case. But I didn’t realize they had slipped this far.

This is the argument that got me: the government has to support straight (heterogamous) marriage — and straight marriage only — because that is the only way to ensure that straight people’s tendency to carelessly produce children doesn’t result in lots of children living on welfare (or worse).

If homogamy becomes legal, who will care for the orphans?

If homogamy becomes legal, who will care for the orphans?

Here is an excerpt:

The link between procreation and marriage itself reflects a unique social difficulty with opposite-sex couples that is not present with same-sex couples — namely, the undeniable and distinct tendency of opposite-sex relationships to produce unplanned and unintended pregnancies. Government from time immemorial has had an interest in having such unintended and unplanned offspring raised in a stable structure that improves their chances of success in life and avoids having them become a burden on society. … Particularly in an earlier era when employment opportunities for women were at best limited, the prospect that unintended children produced by opposite-sex relationships and raised out-of-wedlock would pose a burden on society was a substantial government concern. Thus, the core purpose and defining characteristic of the institution of marriage always has been the creation of a social structure to deal with the inherently procreative nature of the male-female relationship. Specifically, the institution of marriage represents society’s and government’s attempt to encourage current and potential mothers and fathers to establish and maintain close, interdependent, and permanent relationships, for the sake of their children, as well as society at large. It is no exaggeration to say that the institution of marriage was a direct response to the unique tendency of opposite-sex relationships to produce unplanned and unintended offspring.

Although much has changed over the years, the biological fact that opposite-sex relationships have a unique tendency to produce unplanned and unintended offspring has not. While medical advances, and the amendment of adoption laws through the democratic process, have made it possible for same-sex couples to raise children, substantial advance planning is required. Only opposite-sex relationships have the tendency to produce children without such advance planning (indeed, especially without advance planning). Thus, the traditional definition of marriage remains society’s rational response to this unique tendency of opposite-sex relationships. And in light of that understanding of marriage, it is perfectly rational not to define as marriage, or extend the benefits of marriage to, other relationships that, whatever their other similarities, simply do not have the same tendency to produce unplanned and potentially unwanted children.

Is this really where we are, in legal history? Are they really still arguing that in the face of fathers abandoning their bastard children, the state’s response is to shore up marriage? Have they not noticed the millions of children born to straight parents who aren’t married, the decades-long demonization of “deadbeat dads,” the IVF, gay/lesbian couples, adoptions, and countless other family innovations in the last half century?

I’m open to suggestions for why this is anything but laughable as a legal argument against gay and lesbian marriage rights. I suppose you could use this argument against the rights of unmarried people to have children, but why, then, I wonder, did the government go to all that trouble to prevent unmarried people from acquiring birth control? Do they realize that implementing their vision also requires prosecuting adulterers and repealing no-fault divorce?

I expect anti-homogamy arguments to be hateful, or at least mean-spirited. And I recognize that this passage is just one part of a lengthy legal argument that I couldn’t stomach reading further. But this just reinforces my previous conclusion that there’s nothing left to argue over rationally.

Asides

…to my fellow college teachers: How many papers have you graded with unsourced phrases such as, “Government from time immemorial…”, and, “the institution of marriage always has been…” I wouldn’t automatically give such a paper a ‘C’ or worse, but it’s an uphill climb out of failing-grade range from that passage forward. (For real histories of marriage — which belie such ridiculous historical claims about the olden days — I recommend Marriage: A History, by Stephanie Coontz; and Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, by Nancy Cott.)

…to people who write for law reviews: I’ve been working on the edits of my forthcoming article in the Boston University Law Review, which I had the privilege of writing after presenting at their law school’s conference on The End of Men. I’m super impressed by the detailed editing the piece is getting — for example, they seem to be physically checking books out of the library to verify — and back up — my references. I can’t imagine they would have tolerated such slipshod writing as what the BLAG has produced here.

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February 17, 2013 · 8:00 am

Data visualizations: Is U.S. society becoming more diverse?

Trying to summarize a few historical trends for the last half century (because what else is there to do?), I thought of framing them in terms of diversity.

Diversity is often an unsatisfying concept, used to describe hierarchical inequality as mere difference. But inequality is a form of diversity — a kind of difference. And further, not all social diversity is inequality. When people belong to categories and the categories are not ranked hierarchically (or you’re not interested in the ranking for whatever reason), the concept of diversity is useful.

There are various ways of constructing a diversity index, but I use the one sometimes called the Blau index, which is easy to calculate and has a nice interpretation: the probability that two randomly selected individuals are from different groups.

Example: Religion

Take religion. According to the 2001 census of India, this was the religious breakdown of the population:

RELIGION Number Proportion
Hindus 827,578,868 .805
Muslims 138,188,240 .134
Christians 24,080,016 .023
Sikhs 19,215,730 .019
Buddhists 7,955,207 .008
Jains 4,225,053 .004
Others 6,639,626 .006
Religion not stated 727,588 .001
Sum of squared proportions .667
Diversity .333

Diversity is calculated by summing the squares of the proportions in each category, and subtracting the sum from 1. So in India in 2001, if you picked two people at random, you had a 1/3 chance of getting people with different religions (as measured by the census).

Is .33 a lot of religious diversity? Not really, it turns out. I was surprised to read on the cover of this book by a Harvard professor that the United States is “the world’s most religiously diverse nation.” When I flipped through the book, though, I was disappointed to see it doesn’t actually talk much about other countries, and does not seem to offer the systematic comparison necessary to make such a claim.

With our diversity index, it’s not hard to compare religious diversity across 52 countries using data from World Values Survey, with this result:

wvs-religious-diversityThe U.S. is quite diverse — .66 — but a number of countries rank higher.

Of course, the categories are important in this endeavor. For example, Turkey and Morocco are both 99% “Muslim.” So is Iraq, but in Iraq that population is divided between people who identify as Muslim, Shia and Sunni, so Iraq is much more diverse. You get the same effect by dividing up the Christians in the U.S., for example.

Increasing U.S. diversity

Anyway, back to describing the last half century in the U.S. On four important measures I’ve got easy-to-identify increasing diversity. What do you think of these (with apologies for the default Microsoft color schemes):

religious-diversityrace-ethnic-diversity

household-diversity

age-at-marriage-men-60-11a

The last one is a little tricky. It’s common to report that the median age at marriage has increased since the 1950s (having fallen before the 1950s). But I realized it’s not just the average increasing, but the dispersion: More people marrying at different ages. So the experience of marriage is not just shifting rightward on the age distribution, but spreading out. Here’s another view of the same data:

age-at-marriage-men-60-11b

These are corrected (5/11/2013) from the first version of this post. I have now calculated these using the this report from the National Center for Health Statistics for 1960, and comparing it with the 2011 American Community Survey for those married in the previous year.

I have complained before that using the 1950s or thereabouts as a benchmark is misleading because it was an unusual period, marked by high conformity, especially with regard to family matters. But it is still the case that since then diversity on a number of important measures has increased. Over the period of several generations, in important ways the people we randomly encounter are more likely to be different from ourselves (and each other).

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January 28, 2013 · 12:51 pm

Why taller-wife couples are so rare

Originally published on TheAtlantic.com.

It’s not just because women are, on average, shorter than men.

kidman urban.jpg

Keith Urban and his wife Nicole Kidman arrive at the 2009 American Music Awards. (Chris Pizzello/AP Images)

Men are bigger and stronger than women. That generalization, although true, doesn’t adequately describe how sex affects our modern lives. In the first place, men’s and women’s size and strength are distributions. Strong women are stronger than weak men, so sex doesn’t tell you all you need to know. Otherwise, as retired colonel Martha McSally put it with regard to the ban on women in combat positions, “Pee Wee Herman is OK to be in combat but Serena and Venus Williams are not going to meet the standard.”

Second, how we handle that average difference is a matter of social construction: We can ignore it, minimize it, or exaggerate it. In the realm of love and marriage, we so far have chosen exaggeration.

Consider height. The height difference between men and women in the U.S. is about 6 inches on average. But Michael J. Fox, at five feet, five inches, is shorter than almost half of all U.S. women today. On the other hand, at five-foot-ten, Michelle Obama is taller than half of American men. So how do people match up romantically, and why does it matter?

Because everyone knows men are taller on average, straight couples in which the man is shorter raise a problem of gender performance. That is, the man might not be seen as a real man, the woman as a real woman, if they don’t (together) display the normal pattern. To prevent this embarrassment, some couples in which the wife is taller might choose to be photographed with the man standing on a step behind the woman, or they might have their wedding celebrated with a commemorative stamp showing her practically on her knees—as the British royals did with Charles and Diana, who were both the same height: five foot ten.

height1.jpg height2.jpgBut the safer bet is just to match up according to the height norm. A new study from Britain—which I learned of from the blogger Neuroskeptic—measured the height of the parents of about 19,000 babies born in 2000. They found that the woman was taller in 4.1 percent of cases. Then they compared the couples in the data to the pattern found if you scrambled up those same men and women and matched them together at random. In that random set, the woman was taller in 6.5 percent of cases. That means couples are more often man-taller, woman-shorter than would be expected by chance. Is that a big difference? I can explain.

For illustration, and to compare the pattern with the U.S., I downloaded the 2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a U.S. survey that includes height reported for 4,600 married couples.* These are the height distributions for those spouses, showing a median difference of 6 inches.

height3.png

Clearly, if these people married (and didn’t divorce) at random we would expect the husband to be taller most of the time. And that is what we find. Here is the distribution of height differences from those same couples:

height4.png

The most common arrangement is the husband five to six inches taller, and a small minority of couples—3.8 percent—are on the left side of the red line, indicating a taller wife.

But does that mean people are seeking out taller-husband-shorter-wife pairings? To answer that, we compare the actual distribution with a randomized outcome. I made 10 copies of all the men and women in the data, scrambled them up, and paired them at random. This is the result:

height5.png

Most couples are still husband taller, but now 7.8 percent have a taller wife—more than twice as many.

Here are the two distributions superimposed, which allows us to see which arrangements are more or less common in the actual pairings than we would expect by chance:

height6.png

Now we can see that from same-height up to “man 7 to 8 inches taller”, there are more couples than we would expect by chance. And below same-height—where the wife is taller—we see fewer in the population than we would expect by chance. (There also are relatively few couples at the man-much-taller end of the spectrum—at 9 inches or greater—where the difference apparently becomes awkward, a pattern also seen in the British study.)

Humans could couple up differently, if they wanted to. If it were desirable to have a taller-woman-shorter-man relationship, it could be much more common. In these data, we could find shorter husbands for 28 percent of the wives. Instead, people exaggerate the difference by seeking out taller-man-shorter-woman pairings for marriage (or maybe the odd taller-woman couples are more likely to divorce, which would produce the same result).

What difference does it make? When people—and here I’m thinking especially of children—see men and women together, they form impressions about their relative sizes and abilities. Because people’s current matching process cuts in half the number of woman-taller pairings, our thinking is skewed that much more toward assuming men are bigger.

* I must note that Dalton Conley and Abigail Weitzman have a forthcoming paper for the 2013 Population Association of America conference on height differences, which also uses the PSID data, as well as the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. I haven’t seen the paper, but the abstract is here.

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January 8, 2013 · 9:34 am

Online dating: efficiency, inequality and anxiety

My contribution to an Atlantic.com forum on online dating, originally published here.

White men are the most sought-after group on OkCupid, while black women are the least.

the dating game 615.jpg

ABC

Even in Super Sad True Love Story—the Gary Shteyngart novel where everyone wears an “äppärät,” a device around their necks that broadcasts to everyone around them their credit history, income, cholesterol, and how attractive they are compared with everyone else in the vicinity—even in that world people fall in love. And we’re not quite there yet.

Executives in the middle of a growing business can be forgiven for overstating trends—as can individuals used as anecdotal launching pads for trend pieces—but readers should take it a little slower. So rather than go right to “online dating is threatening monogamy,” as Dan Slater argues in his article in The Atlantic magazine, maybe we could agree with the less alarmist conclusion that people who engage in rapid serial online dating are probably less likely to make commitments because they won’t settle down. And then we could look at how that trend fits in with the larger questions we face.

Efficiency

First, I’m skeptical of the claim that, as one executive put it in the article, “the market is hugely more efficient” as a result of online dating. Plenty of the people who spend all day online are interacting with real people less than they used to. They waste huge amounts of time dealing with online daters who lie, mislead them, stand them up, or dump them on a moment’s notice.

In a terrific 2003 New York Times article by Amy Harmon, a fourth-grade teacher, retold the statistics of her four-months of online dating: messages exchanged with 120 men, phone calls with 20, in-person meetings with 11—and 0 relationships. That’s not efficient at producing relationships—but it is efficient at producing anxiety. My favorite sentence from that article:

It’s amazing how all women say they’re slender when a lot of them are overweight,” said one 79-year-old Manhattan man who lists himself as 69 on his Match.com profile.

On the other hand, back in the days of dating, women entering college in the 1950s reported an average of about 12 dates per month (three per week) with five different men. These women were grossly outnumbered in college, and most women didn’t go to college, so it wasn’t a system for the whole society. But it tells us something about efficiency: Since dating reliably ended in marriage within a few years, it was pretty efficient, but that’s because of the attitude and expectations, not the technology.

For people who are intent on being choosy, online dating might be more efficient than meeting people in person, but people in urban areas have been finding alternative partners for a long time. For example, we have known for several decades that people are more likely to divorce when they are presented with more, or better, alternatives. In the 1990s researchers discovered that “the risk of [marital] dissolution is highest where either wives or husbands encounter an abundance of spousal alternatives.” They concluded, “many persons remain open to alternative relationships even while married.” This has been shown not only by looking at the composition of the surrounding urban area, but also by simply comparing the divorce rates of people who work in gender-mixed versus gender-segregated occupations (the former are more likely to divorce). Marriage hasn’t been unleavable for quite a while.

Still, maybe online dating speeds up the turnover process, and this might contribute to the trend of delaying marriage going on since the 1950s.

Inequality

Second, I think it’s possible that—in addition to undermining what’s left of monogamy—the spread of online dating will widen some social inequalities. Remember those left behind by Jacob’s wandering webcam eye in the article? When he wanders off to a new partner, he leaves one behind. She might or might not have the same options to exercise. In this rapid-turnover process, the richer, better-looking, healthier, better-lying, etc., might make things miserable for more people than they used to be able to. Jacob’s efficiency might be their wasted months and years.

But remember, divorce rates have probably been falling more or less continuously since about 1980. And it is the less well-off who have been marrying less and divorcing (relatively) more. The people who are divorcing more—or marrying less—are the ones who aren’t going to do as well in the “efficient” competition on dating sites. They aren’t going to gain much from this onlinification.

A few years ago I reported on an amazing analysis of message patterns by the dating site OkCupid. It showed that black women got the lowest response rates to their messages on the site. Here is the pattern—with each cell showing the percentage of men replaying to messages from women, according to the race of the sender (left) and the recipient (top). For example, black women got a 32 percent response rate from white men, whereas Middle Eastern women got a 47 percent response rate from white men.

cohen_onlinedating.png

If this system is efficient at finding perfect matches, it is also efficient at sorting people according to existing social hierarchies—applying what Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic called “algorithmic perversity.” Some people will use online dating to constantly trade up—maybe ditch a sick or unemployed spouse—and that will also speed up other processes, like the widening of social inequality.

Reflexive responses

There’s no reason not to overhype a trend. The reward in attention is much greater than the penalty down the road if it turns out you’re wrong. But put this in perspective. Granting that the situation may be changing fast, let’s just consider that in 2006 the Pew Center published a report on its survey of 3,215 adults. Of those who were married or in a committed relationship, 3 percent had met their partner online, and of those, just 41 percent—or 1 percent of the total—met through a dating website.

So online dating may be affecting a fair number of Jacobs and their partners, but it hasn’t remade all of our relationships yet. Articles like this, however, increase the pressure on people to consider—and reconsider—their choices. The same happens with articles about parenting, or biological clocks, or cohabitation—all the family decisions for which choices appear to be multiplying. And it may be true that people are less content when they have more choices—but I bet it’s also true that the effect is magnified when the extent of their choices is hyped and rehyped, and evaluated by competing experts.

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January 1, 2013 · 7:00 am

Take it from the Pope

pontificating

For the “World Day of Peace,” which is today, instead of congratulating the newly weds – who are upholding the transformed but still living (for better or worse, in sickness and in health) institution of marriage – Pope Benedict (Ratzinger) issued a statement that included this about homogamous marriage:

There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union; such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society.

These principles are not truths of faith, nor are they simply a corollary of the right to religious freedom. They are inscribed in human nature itself, accessible to reason and thus common to all humanity. The Church’s efforts to promote them are not therefore confessional in character, but addressed to all people, whatever their religious affiliation. Efforts of this kind are all the more necessary the more these principles are denied or misunderstood, since this constitutes an offence against the truth of the human person, with serious harm to justice and peace.

I’m not enough of a Pope-ologist to know how rare this is, but what struck me was his claim that his opinion is “accessible to reason and thus common to all humanity.”

There is a convention in the U.S. that we can criticize each other’s opinions, but it’s impolite to criticize each other’s beliefs (as long as those beliefs are religious, meaning not too recent in origin). So it’s fine for me to say that you are wrong about secular subjects, like physics and sports, but it’s impolite to say you are wrong if you believe that God speaks directly to you or that cavemen played with dinosaurs. Or, more directly relevant to the Pope, scientists can say that virgin conception is generally unlikely, but it would be impolite to say it never ever happened, not even once.

Anyway, that’s a long way of getting around to the point that I find the Pope’s statement galling. If he wants to express political opinions, fine. I have no objection to that as long as the giant, multibillion-dollar real estate and educational empire he runs isn’t tax exempt.

But if he’s going to make statements with that hat on — that is, subject to a declaration of infallibility* – he should lay off the social-science proclamations. If he wants to argue in the realm of reason, rather than faith, then we may weigh his record of expressed belief in fairy tales against his scientific credibility.

Believe it or not

Learning as I go here: turns out the Pope has a whole scientific academy called the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (where the “peer review” is not done by your peers, if you know what I mean). And naturally they’ve been all over this subject of reason and faith. I read a 2006 talk titled “Secularism, Faith and Freedom,” which was apparently presented to this audience:

secularismontrial

And I thought the American Sociological Association conference was a dynamic scene!

The paper says it’s necessary for religious people to argue their positions freely in a secular state’s public square. These positions include, “Faith is the root of freedom,” and “a proper secularism requires faith.” That is because liberal democracy otherwise is a moral vacuum of pragmatic consumerism with no higher purpose. So I gather that, just as any “gaps” in the fossil record summon Creation as an explanation, so does any lack of morality in the public sphere demand to be filled by faith — specifically, a “Creator who addresses us and engages us before ever we embark on social negotiation.” Absent that presence, “the liberal ideal becomes deeply anti-humanist.”

Although, after reading this whole paper and the Pope’s statement, I confess (my word choice) that I’m not sure “humanist” is really what they’re going for.

* Can. 749 §1. By virtue of his office, the Supreme Pontiff possesses infallibility in teaching when as the supreme pastor and teacher of all the Christian faithful, who strengthens his brothers and sisters in the faith, he proclaims by definitive act that a doctrine of faith or morals is to be held.

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October 22, 2012 · 6:00 am

When women earn more but wives earn less (Mundy/Rosin edition)

We have been told many times now that in U.S. metropolitan areas, among 22-30 year-olds who have no children, have never been married, and work full-time and year-round, women’s median income is higher than men’s.

One implication both Hanna Rosin and Liza Mundy draw from this is that, when these people get married, there will be more marriages in which women are the higher earners.

I previously showed that women’s advantage in this group is partly the result of its odd race/ethnic composition — with a lot of White women and Latino men especially — reiterating  that men outearn women at all ages and all education levels.

But what if that group really was the marriage market, with more and more women looking down the economic ladder at the men they’re dating? Would we have more egalitarian married couples? Maybe, but not necessarily.

Atlanta is a good place to start, since, according to Liza Mundy’s book The Richer Sex, it’s the place where women’s advantage is greatest:

Of all the major cities where young women outearn young men, Atlanta is number one. Well do these [high-income women she's interviewing] know the accuracy of that statistic. “I never had a boyfriend who made more than me,” says one of them.

Let’s look at this case, starting with a hypothetical income distribution of men and women:

These women have it made, with a median income $2,000 greater than men’s. Now let’s imagine that 80% of them get married — which is 8 marriages involving 16 people. Look how egalitarian the couples will be:

Whoops. Turns out men and women don’t get married randomly. If all men decide to marry women with lower incomes, they can — they just have to squeeze out the poorest two men and ignore the two richest women. Or, maybe it’s that the richest two women opt out of marriage, and the rest of the women taking advantage of the chance to marry up, ignoring the two poorest men. Either way, there’s a $2,000 male advantage in every couple, and the median incomes are now reversed, with married men having a $2,000 advantage, $41,000 to $39,000.

Is this what’s happening in Atlanta? Pretty close, I think.

Using the 2008-2010 American Community Survey (ACS) for the Atlanta metro area (three years pooled for larger sample size), I got the never-married, childfree, full-time and full-year employed men and women ages 25-34 (22-30 is not a good marriage market, since the average age at marriage is near the top of that range).

Sure enough, the women in this group have an earnings advantage, with median earnings of $37,473, compared with $35,000 for men. The distribution looks like this:

I’ve added a few calculations to the figure. The “index of net difference” (ND) is a handy tool for showing how two groups rank hierarchically along a single dimension (in this case income). Using the formula given by Lieberson here, and these categories, I reckon that the chance that a random woman will be in a higher category than a random man from this distribution is 45%. The opposite, that a man will be in a higher category, is 39%, so the ND is -.06. So, that’s good for women.

Note also that, despite the alleged statistical know-how of the high-income women at Mundy’s table, there are actually 1.6-times as many men in the the top income range of this marriage market as there are women. They have plenty to choose from at the high end, even though women’s median is higher. That’s because there are more men than women in the pool. I suppose there are two reasons for this: First, fewer women work full-time year-round. And second, lots of people are single parents, and when children live with their mothers, it’s the mothers who are excluded from this pool — the fathers, not the mothers, come up as childless.

Anyway, that’s the pool. What about the marriages? The ACS identifies people who got married in the past 12 months. In that 3-year sample I have about 200 couples to work with. So, here is the income distribution for men and women, ages 25-34, with no children present, who just got married. I dropped the full-time and -year restriction, since people could have quit working, and I limited it to couples where both are in the age range:

Just as in our hypothetical example, richer men and poorer women got married. Now the distribution skews decidedly male. The ND has reversed, and husbands’ median income is $12,527 higher than wives’.

How is that possible, when, as we are reminded so often, women are so much more likely to have graduated college? Two reasons: first, people overwhelmingly marry partners on the same side of the BA/no-BA divide; and second, men with BAs make more than women.

Here’s the Atlanta situation. First, education: Women in this group — 25-34, FTYR, never-married, no kids — are much more likely to have BAs: 62% to 41%.

However, in 72% of couples both spouses are on the same side of the BA divide (57% + 15%):

Setting aside all that educational endogamy, with so many more women BAs, women really are much more likely to marry down the educational ladder: 25% of childless, 25-34-year-old Atlanta newly-wed couples have a BA wife and a non-BA husband.

But men earn more at every education level. As a result of that — and by whatever additional machinations of partner-selection — only 38% of these couples have a higher-earning wife. Only a third of the BA-BA couples have higher-earning wives, and even when the wife has a BA and the husband doesn’t, that number is only 54%:

That’s how, even when you define the marriage market in such a way as to paint women’s situation as positively as possible — finding that rare niche in which women earn more than men — you discover the marriage system reproducing gender inequality.

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October 15, 2012 · 5:30 am

Video segment on Regnerus and divorce studies

Over the summer Karen Sternheimer and I sat for an interview, and Norton Sociology has released a segment of the video, in which she asks about the Regnerus study on parents’ same-sex relationship history and child outcomes. I don’t have the references for my comments, but I think/hope they’re mostly true.

Click on the picture to go to the Youtube video:

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