Equal-education and wife-more-education married couples don’t have sex less often

In my review of Mark Regnerus’s book, Cheap Sex, I wrote: “The book is an extended rant on the theme, ‘Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?’ wrapped in a misogynist theory about sexual exchange masquerading as economics, and motivated by the author’s misogynist religious and political views.”

Someone just reposted an old book-rehash essay of Regnerus’s called, “The Death of Eros.” In it he links to my post documenting the decline in sexual frequency among married couples in the General Social Survey. In marriage, Regnerus writes, “equality is the enemy of eros,” before selectively characterizing some research about the relationship between housework and sex. (Here’s a recent analysis finding egalitarian couples don’t have sex less.)

But I realized I never looked at sexual frequency in married couples by the relative education of the spouses, which is available in the GSS. So here’s a quick take: Married man-woman couples in which the wife has equal or more education don’t have sex less frequently.

I modeled sexual frequency (an interval scale from “not at all” = 0 to “4+ times per week” = 6 as a function of age, age-squared, respondent education, respondent sex, decade, and relative education (wife has lower degree, wife has same degree, wife has higher degree). The result is in this figure. Note the means are between 3 (“2-3 times per month”) and 4 (“weekly”). Stata code for GSS below.

OK, that’s it. Here’s the code (I prettied the figure a little by hand afterwards):

*keep married people
keep if marital==1

* with non-missing own and spouse education
keep if spdeg<4 & degree<4
recode age (18/29=18) (30/39=30) (40/49=40) (50/59=50) (60/109=60), gen(agecat)
recode year (1970/1979=1970) (1980/1989=1980) (1990/1999=1990) (2000/2008=2000) (2010/2016=2010), gen(decade)
gen erosdead = spdeg>degree
gen equal=spdeg==degree

gen eros=0
replace eros=1 if spdeg<degree & sex==1
replace eros=2 if spdeg==degree
replace eros=3 if spdeg>degree & sex==1

replace eros=1 if spdeg>degree & sex==2
replace eros=3 if spdeg<degree & sex==2

label define de 1 "wife less"
label define de 2 "equal", add
label define de 3 "wife more", add
label values eros de

reg sexfreq i.sex i.agecat i.decade i.degree i.eros [weight=wtssall]
reg sexfreq i.sex c.age##c.age i.degree i.eros##i.decade [weight=wtssall]
margins i.eros##i.decade
marginsplot, recast(bar) by(decade)

Note: On 25 Dec 2018 I fixed a coding error and replaced the figure; the results are the same.

New findings: The widening political divide over science

Gordon Gauchat published a paper in American Sociological Review in 2012 (paywalled), reporting that political conservatives in the United States lost confidence in the scientific community from the 1970s to 2010, while political liberals and moderates did not. As a result, a political divide opened up so that by 2010 conservatives had the lowest level of confidence in science.

I’ve written a short working paper that extends the trends through the 2016 General Social Survey. I find that political conservatives, Republicans, and Americans who attend religious services regularly, all demonstrate falling levels of confidence in the scientific community. Further, for the most recent period (2012-2016) educational attainment, for conservatives, is not associated with increased levels of confidence in science, except at the graduate degree level (and even there confidence is lower among conservatives). It’s as if conservative views on science are impervious to education.

I have only a few sentences about politics in the paper, but the gist of it is that this divide is bad, it undermines democracy, and plays into Trump’s authoritarian hands.

Here’s the figure showing the Republicans falling off the trust cliff: the trend in expressing “a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community, with controls, by party identification:

 And here’s the figure from the recent period, showing that conservatives have lower levels of confidence regardless of education level — and education has no relationship to confidence in science for them, up to the level of graduate degree at least.

I welcome your feedback.

The paper is here on SocArXiv, and the Stata code is here.

Wives’ share of couple income update

This is an update of previous reports with some new analysis at the end.

In my book Enduring Bonds I showed the distribution of income within different-sex married couples from 1970 to 2014. Here is the updated trend to 2017:

The change from 2014 is a modest continuation. Here’s the detail from 2017, with the couples reporting exactly-even incomes broken out in the middle:

In 2017, for different-sex couples with wife age 18-64:

• 26% of wives earn more than their husbands (up from 15% in 1990 and 7% in 1970).
• The average wife-who-earns-more takes home 69% of the couple’s earnings. The average for higher-earning husbands is 79%.
• It is 8.3-times more common for a husband to earn all the money than a wife (18.7% versus 2.3%).

In the book I offer the following summary:

Actually, this triplet pattern fits a lot of trends regarding gender inequality: yes, lots of change, but most of it decades ago, and not quite as fundamental as it looks.

New breakdown

At the request of Stephanie Coontz, I ran the 2017 numbers by income bracket (and including all ages).  I broke the couples into the bottom 10% (under $27,000), the 10-25th percentile (to $47,000), the 25th-5th (to $80,000), the 50th-75th (to $130,000), the 75th-90th (to $202,000), and the top 10% ($202,000+). Here is the income distribution within couples for each income bracket, with a few points labeled for clarity:

A key point here is that although wives rarely earn the dominant share of income, most couples rely on the wife’s income to maintain their standard of living. For example, a couple at the median, $80,000, would have to drastically alter their lifestyle without the 40-49% share contributed by the wife’s income. Breadwinning in its 1950s connotation is is distracting from this contemporary reality, and we should probably drop the term.

Family diversity for a marketing audience

I gave an online talk to a marketing audience yesterday. Here is the audio, edited down to 23 minutes.

The first half is a presentation, and the second half is my answers to some of their questions.

You don’t need the slides to follow the talk, but here they are (click to enlarge).

I read dozens of books this year and the resulting list will surprise and delight you

I am wrapping up a 12-month sabbatical leave from my professor job, which means I didn’t teach or go to a lot of meetings on campus, and instead got to spend more time on the other parts of my job (at home, in loungewear), and try some new things as well.

At the beginning of the year I decided to read more books, and used Goodreads to set a reading goal of 42 (one per week, less 10 for slower books). One goal was to improve my Twitter-degraded attention span [just spent 5 minutes randomly flitting around, now I’m back], or at least expose myself to the feeling of having a longer attention span. And honestly, it was great. I hope this made me more of a book reader forever.

So this year, my year-end book post is about books I read, rather than just books that came out this year. Feel free to make suggestions for gift books in the comments (including your own!). Also, feel free to judge me for anything about this list.

Trump Era

I read a series of books processing Trump and Trumpism. I really liked The Death of Truth (2018) by Michiko Kakutani, which I reviewed here:

Kakutani is a great writer, and this little book of 11 chapters in 170 small pages flies by. Since she left the New York Times, where she was book critic for many years, her Twitter feed has been a chronology of political crisis and social decay under Trump; reading it all together induces anxiety at the pace and scale of the descent, but also, surprisingly, some optimism that the situation remains decipherable with the tools of intellectual incision that Kakutani wields so well.

In that review I juxtaposed Kakutani’s intellectual rigor with Jonah Goldberg’s cartoonish simulacrum of erudition in the deeply awful Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy (2018). I reviewed that latter book in some depth in an essay titled “How conservatism makes peace with Trump.” I wrote:

Unfortunately, I found the book to be an extended screed against leftism with but a few pages of anti-Trump material grafted in here and there, which ultimately amounts to blaming leftism and immigration for Trump. And that might sum up the state of the anemic conservative movement. Goldberg’s own weak-kneed position on Trump is not resolved until page 316, when he finally concludes, “As much as I hold Trump in contempt, I am still compelled to admit that, if my vote would have decided the election, I probably would have voted for him” (316). In the end, Goldberg has charted a path toward a détente between his movement and Trump’s.

The Goldberg essay proved quite popular (almost 1200 downloads on SocArXiv) after a Twitter thread listing some of his errors took off:

Here is a list of factual errors in Jonah Goldberg's @JonahNRO book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy. In no particular order: 1/

— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) July 24, 2018

Anyway, Kakutani pairs nicely with another small book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018) by philosopher Jason Stanley. He described 10 features of fascist politics, drawing from Nazi Germany and contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and connecting them to Trumpism. I see Kakutani and Stanley as setting out framing for the moment, in light of history but without facile parallels. Having read these, for example, made Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House (2018), which wasn’t very insightful, more interesting to read.

Semitism: Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump (2018), by Jonathan Weisman, made a good addition to the contemporary fascism collection. It’s a personal reflection and description of alt-Right anti-Semitism, and a call for Jewish solidarity with other groups targeted by Trump and his movement, especially those with fewer institutional defenses. For both me and Weisman, the explosion of anti-Semitism inspired by Trump’s campaign and presidency reinforced our sense of both Jewishness and American otherness. Like me, only much more, Weisman was also the victim of anti-Semitic social media pile-ons when he spoke out against Trump. I never seriously considered myself a minority in America, or applied a consciously Jewish identity to my work, but there are a lot of anti-Semites around, and they think I’m neither White nor American.

In the wake of all this, I found myself staring at this picture from 1920s Poland of my great-great-grandparents, the Patinkins, with their grandaughter, my grandmother’s cousin (later the wife of my grandmother’s brother). And I grew my beard longer.

Anyway, the Trumpism book series was kicked off by We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017), by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which is a brilliant and wrenching retelling of Coates’ own career as a journalist through the arc of Obama’s presidency, the era that made Coates a household name and also, now seemingly inevitably, birthed Trumpism.

The Women’s March, January 21, 2017. PNC photo.

It’s hard to believe I read Coates in the same year as Rebecca Traister’s excellent new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (2018). Although Traister does a good bit of history, especially about women’s suffrage, labor, and civil rights, it’s a post-2016 election book, inspired by the Women’s March in particular. The books is a dense but powerfully written treatise on all the ways women’s anger makes the world better — and its suppression is a mechanism of patriarchy. It was written fast, and you can read it fast, moving back and forth between 1848 and 2018, Trump and #MeToo, with interesting dives into intrafeminist debates about sex, intersectionality, and other topics.

In the category of feminist debates, but no longer about Trumpism, I also liked Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (2017) which was quite polarizing in feminist sociology circles. Even if you don’t buy her account of the excesses of campus feminism and the overreach of Title IX bureaucracy, you have to at least wrestle with it. Kipnis herself overreaches a little, in my view, but I agree that much of the rape-culture talk on campus is disempowering for women — even though rape culture is real. (Incidentally, Kipnis didn’t like Traister’s book, and I didn’t agree with her review.)

Sociology

In April I wrote a review essay titled, “Public engagement and the influence imperative,” for Contemporary Sociology.  The essay covered The Public Professor: How to Use Your Research to Change the World (2016), by M. V. Lee Badgett; The Social Scientist’s Soapbox: Adventures in Writing Public Sociology (2017), by Karen Sternheimer; and Going Public: A Guide for Social Scientists (2017), by Arlene Stein and Jessie Daniels. All three books had good advice for using your research to reach more people and different audiences. In the essay I pressed for more reciprocal engagement, in which our “audiences” help shape the research itself.

In the sociology of population section of the American Sociological Association, I was on the award committee that gave the book prize to The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals about Ourselves, Our History, and the Future (2017), by Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher. The book is excellent as an introduction to contemporary genetic analysis of social traits, which is completely taboo among many social scientists but is still real and not all bullshit. Conley and Fletcher offer compelling explanations of what current techniques can reveal and what they can’t (including race). For the non-expert social scientist, they also offer a review of the history of genetic analysis, from the now-discredited quests for target genes (e.g., the “warrior gene”), to twin studies, to polygenic scores, which use genome-wide analysis to generate propensities for both biological and social traits.

Also on the sociology shelf, I finally read Elizabeth Popp Berman’s 2012 book, Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine. It’s one of those books in sociology where the substance of the research is important an interesting even if you don’t know anything about the theories or disciplinary debates that comprise the immediate context for the book. Why did universities and researchers generally start to pitch themselves as primarily drivers of economic growth? The answer is important, and it’s in this excellent book. (Beth is a friend and colleague in the SocArXiv project.)

I was invited read, for an author-meets-critics session, The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Families: Resources, Employment and Policies to Improve Well-being (2018, also free), edited by Rense Nieuwenhuis and Laurie Maldonado. The book contains a series of comparative demographic studies related to the “triple-bind” experienced by single mothers in many countries: resource disadvantage, inadequate employment, and weak supportive policies. Specialized, but if this is for you, it’s very good.

In response to an invitation to participate in a meeting on Israeli demography and the environment, I read The Land Is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel (2016), by Alon Tal (who organized the symposium). The book is really interesting. I wrote about the whole thing at some length, with graphs and photos from my eye-opening trip, and audio of my talk, here.

Not sociology, but sociological, I rate highly I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street (2017), by Matt Taibbi. It’s an in-depth investigation into the killing of Eric Garner by New York City police, including much of his life and community, in the context of larger processes such as community policing, stop-and-frisk, mass incarceration, and urban redevelopment — and how that all led to the gaping wound of injustice after his death.

Also sociological, and recommended, is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (2018). It’s an irreverent takedown of various wellness fads, but also preventative screenings, and the quest for longevity itself. In the process, she digs back into her microbiology roots to explore the self-destructive tendencies of our own cellular programming, which make an internal mockery of our futile attempts to forestall the inevitable. A very 2018 book.

Finally, in the category of truly terrible sociology, I put Mark Regenerus’s book, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy (2017). From my review:

Cheap Sex is an awful book that no one needs to read. The book is an extended rant on the theme, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” wrapped in a misogynist theory about sexual exchange masquerading as economics, and motivated by the author’s misogynist religious and political views.

Last and not quite least, I read Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016). Parts of it were interesting, but on the whole I just never found the qualities that made it so original or insightful or important as to justify the phenomenon it became. Not worth it.

Fiction

You didn’t make it all this way to read my thoughts on fiction, so I’ll just say that books are a medium, a category of experience, and mixing in fiction affected the quality of the whole project. So I read some classics I never read before, like Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin, and The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger. I read the Dublin Murder Squad series by Tana French, which are on the literary side of murder mysteries; as well as a handful of Michael Connelly novels and the one Carl Hiassen novel I had missed. Lucky Jim, a 1954 academic satire by Kingsley Amis, is great if you like that sort of thing (which I do — ask me about my novel in progress.) Finally, I loved The Humans, by Matt Haig, which is funny and dark and thought-provoking.

Before the end of the year I need to finish Becoming, by Michelle Obama (sigh); Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century, by Tey Meadow; and a couple more novels.

Whew!

Gender segregated sociology today

This updates a series of posts that have addressed gender in academic sociology, starting in 2011 and updated in 2015, along with various tweets (to see random fact tweets from me on Twitter, Google familyunequal “now you know”).

Gender in academic sociology is complicated because the profession is running pretty female these days, with more than half the U.S. PhDs going to women since 1994, and more than 60% overall since 1999. So although there are various kinds of exclusion, it’s not as simple as excluding women from the discipline, and the representation of women’s representation depends on the choice of denominators. For example, a recent report found that, in the top 100 U.S. sociology departments in 2012, women were 60% of the assistant professors, 54% of the associate professors, and 34% of the full professors. This probably reflects a combination of age and tenure, with this year’s full professors representing yesteryear’s hiring, as well as women having lower rates of progression up the hierarchy.

Also, feminists (myself included) cheer the entry of women into formerly male-only professions but bemoan their concentration into female ghettos, but there is no bright line beyond which one process transforms into the other (don’t get me started on “tipping points“).

But however we want to interpret the trends, we have to know the trends. So here are some, starting with updates on previous reports (degrees, sections, elections), and then some new ones (journal articles, peer reviewers).*

Degrees

The National Science Foundation reports the number and gender of PhD recipients by discipline (since 2006, earlier). This is what we get (smoothed with three-year averages): mostly more than 60% female since the late-1990s, with women accounting for most of the growth.

Sections

Sociology is a very broad discipline, including people who specialize in many distinct substantive and methodological areas. Within the American Sociological Association (ASA), we divide into 49 sections, which serve as a mechanism to organize conferences and journals, and to give awards (people can belong to as many as they want, for a small charge). The sections are pretty segregated by gender. Here are the gender compositions of each, from Sex and Gender (86% female) to Mathematical Sociology (22%):

Elections

The ASA leadership is elected in annual balloting by the membership, which is open to anyone who wants to join as long as they claim some affiliation with the discipline (the price ranges from $51 for students to $377 for people with incomes over $150,000). The association elected its first president in 1906, its first woman in 1952 and its second woman in 1973. In the last 10 years 7 of the presidents have been women.

Is the shift toward women presidents because there are more women in the association, or in the hierarchy of the association, or because of the preference of the membership? The president, along with all the other elected officers, are selected for the ballot by a nominations committee. In recent years it has become conventional wisdom that men usually lose to women in these elections because ASA members vote for a woman if they don’t have a strong preference between candidates, but I don’t know how well-founded that perception is.

Here is the gender of candidates for top positions (president, vice president, secretary, and council members), and the gender of the winners, from 2007 to 2018. Note that in the last three years they have nominated fewer women, but except for 2016 the membership has voted for more women (with 2018 being having the widest gap yet):

Papers

I’ve only done a little of this, but here is a quick look at the gender of authors in two of the highest-status sociology journals for the last several years. American Sociological Review (an ASA journal published by Sage), and American Journal of Sociology (an independent journal published by University of Chicago), 35% of authors in the last 11 issues have been women (by my assessment, regular articles only)

Someone could easily do a much more serious assessment of gender in sociology journal authorship.

Reviewers

For the last few months I have been working on peer review in sociology and the social sciences — how it works, how it doesn’t, and how it might be improved. (Here are slides from a talk I gave, with Micah Altman at MIT). One of my concerns about peer review is its general lack of accountability; no one supervises the process, generally, as the only person who knows everything at a journal is the editor, and the only thing the public sees is the published outcome. And yet publication peer review determines all manner of statuses in academia.

Looking for externally accessible data that might shine a light on the process, I checked for reviewer acknowledgement lists, which some journals publish at the end of a volume (lots of journals don’t apparently, including Social Forces, Sociological Methods and Research, Social Science Research, Sociological Forum, Sociological Theory, Work & Occupations, Social Currents, and Mobilization.) I used the genderize.io API to count the genders of the reviewers, using 80% confidence for the first pass, and then personally checking or Googling other names (I didn’t do all the names, but almost).

The reviewer gender shares are a little higher for ASR and AJS than they were for authors, with the former having somewhat more women. Publication in one of these two journals is the probably most important gatekeeping mechanism to the upper echelons of the discipline. The methods journal has the lowest representation of women, the gender journal as the highest. Unknown here is the proportion of women among the pool of reviewers solicited by the editors.

So, that’s my report.

* These data all treat gender as sex as binary, either because the data were reported that way, or because I coded them from names. I don’t address race, ethnicity, or other traits for the same reason.

Decadally-biased marriage recall in the American Community Survey

Do people forget when they got married?

In demography, there is a well-known phenomenon known as age-heaping, in which people round off their ages, or misremember them, and report them as numbers ending in 0 or 5. We have a measure, known as Whipple’s index, that estimates the extent to which this is occurring in a given dataset. To calculate this you take the number of people between ages 23 and 62 (inclusive), and compare it to five-times the number of those whose ages end in 0 or 5 (25, 30 … 60), so there are five-times as many total years as 0 and 5 years.

If the ratio of 0/5s to the total is less than 105, that’s “highly accurate” by the United Nations standard, a ratio 105 to 110 is “fairly accurate,” and in the range 110 to 125 age data should be considered “approximate.”

I previously showed that the American Community Survey’s (ACS) public use file has a Whipple index of 104, which is not so good for a major government survey in a rich country. The heaping in ACS apparently came from people who didn’t respond to email or mail questionnaires and had to be interviewed by Census Bureau staff by phone or in person. I’m not sure what you can do about that.

What about marriage?

The ACS has a great data on marriage and marital events, which I have used to analyze divorce trends, among other things. Key to the analysis of divorce patterns is the question, “When was this person last married?” (YRMARR) Recorded as a year date, this allows the analyst to take into account the duration of marriage preceding divorce or widowhood, the birth of children, and so on. It’s very important and useful information.

Unfortunately, it may also have an accuracy problem.

I used the ACS public use files made available by IPUMS.org, combining all years 2008-2017, the years they have included the variable YRMARR. The figure shows the number of people reported to have last married in each year from 1936 to 2015. The decadal years are highlighted in black. (The dropoff at the end is because I included surveys earlier than those years.)

Yikes! That looks like some decadal marriage year heaping. Note I didn’t highlight the years ending in 5, because those didn’t seem to be heaped upon.

To describe this phenomenon, I hereby invent the Decadally-Biased Marriage Recall index, or DBMR. This is 10-times the number of people married in years ending in 0, divided by the number of people married in all years (starting with a 6-year and ending with a 5-year). The ratio is multiplied by 100 to make it comparable to the Whipple index.

The DBMR for this figure (years 1936-2015) is 110.8. So there are 1.108-times as many people in those decadal years as you would expect from a continuous year function.

Maybe people really do get married more in decadal years. I was surprised to see a large heap at 2000, which is very recent so you might think there was good recall for those weddings. Maybe people got married that year because of the millennium hoopla. When you end the series at 1995, however, the DBMR is still 110.6. So maybe some people who would have gotten married at the end of 1999 waited till New Years day or something, or rushed to marry on New Year’s Eve 2000, but that’s not the issue.

Maybe this has to do with who is answering the survey. Do you know what year your parents got married? If you answered the survey for your household, and someone else lives with you, you might round off. This is worth pursuing. I restricted the sample to just those who were householders (the person in whose name the home is owned or rented), and still got a DBMR of 110.7. But that might not be the best test.

Another possibility is that people who started living together before they were married — which is most Americans these days — don’t answer YRMARR with their legal marriage date, but some rounded-off cohabitation date. I don’t know how to test that.

Anyway, something to think about.