Let’s raise the legal age of marriage in Maryland

Today I sent the following letter to the Maryland House Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled to hold a hearing on these bills tomorrow. Under current law in Maryland, marriage is permitted as young as age 15 with parental consent and evidence of pregnancy or childbirth, and age 16-17 with one or the other, and these exceptions are granted by county clerks rather than judges. By my calculations, from 2008 to 2017, based on the American Community Survey, the annual marriage rate for girls ages 15-16 was 5 per 1000 in Maryland, behind only Hawaii, Nevada, and West Virginia. HB 855 would raise the age at marriage to 18, while HB 1147 would establish an emancipated minor status, requiring review by a judge, under which 17-year-olds could marry. For more on the effort to end child marriage in the U.S., visit the Tahirih Justice Center site.

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March 6, 2019

To the House Judiciary Committee:

I write in support of Maryland House Bill 855, concerning age requirements for marriage; and House Bill 1147, concerning the emancipation of minors.

My relevant background

• I am a Professor of Sociology, and family demographer, at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I have been on the faculty since 2012. I also earned my PhD at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1999, and I live in Silver Spring.
• I have written two books and many peer-reviewed articles on family sociology, including on topics related to marriage and divorce, family structure, gender inequality, health and disability, infant mortality, adoption, race and ethnicity, and the division of labor.
• I have served as a consultant to the U.S. Census Bureau on the measurement of family structure, and testified before Congress on gender discrimination.

My support of the bills

In general, the rise of the age at marriage and childbearing in U.S. have been positive developments for women and children, allowing mothers to devote more years of early adulthood to education and career development, which is beneficial to both adults and their children.

Very early marriage in particular is detrimental to women’s opportunity to finish high school. More urgently, research and service work shows that very early marriage is usually unwanted, coerced, or forced. Very young women should not be expected to protect themselves legally or socially from such impositions, which are usually from older men and dominant family members. Very early marriage often follows statutory rape or other sexual assault, compounding rather than mitigating the harms of these crimes against children. Rather than protect a young woman, very early marriage instead provides protection from scrutiny for her abuser(s), and makes state intervention on her behalf all the more difficult to accomplish in the following years. The privacy and discretion we bestow upon families has benefits, of course, but it also makes the family a dangerous place for the victims of abuse.

Research, including my own, unequivocally shows that very early marriage leads to the highest rates of divorce. I have written several papers on divorce rates in the United States (see references). For illustration, here I used the same method of analysis, and present only the relationship between age at marriage and incidence of divorce. As you can see from the figure, divorce rates are highest by far – estimated at 2.5% per year – for women who married before age 18. This is about twice as high as divorce rates for those who marry in their 30s, for example. (These estimates hold constant other factors; data and code are available here.) The evidence is very strong.

I only reluctantly support increasing state restrictions on women’s freedom with regard to family choices, but in the case of marriage before adulthood I see the restriction as a protection from the exploitative behavior of others, rather than an imposition on young women’s rights.

At present in Maryland, exceptions allowing marriage before age 18 – based on pregnancy and/or parental consent – are granted without adequate legal review. Together, HB 855 and HB 1147 would set the minimum age at marriage in Maryland to 18, with an exception only for court emancipated minors of age 17. This would improve the state’s protection of young women from unwanted, coerced, forced, or ill-advised marriages without unduly restricting the freedom to marry for younger women (age 17), who may be emancipated by a court after a direct application and careful review of circumstances.

I urge your support for these bills. I would be happy to provide further information or testimony at your request.

Sincerely,

Philip N. Cohen

References

Cohen, Philip N. 2015. “Recession and Divorce in the United States, 2008-2011. Population Research and Policy Review 33(5):615-628.

Cohen, Philip N. 2018. “The Coming Divorce Decline.” SocArXiv. November 14. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/h2sk6. To be presented at the Population Association of America meetings, 2019.

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.

A miracle of wrong: Hanna Rosin error reborn in Mark Regnerus book

I’ve been working on my review of Mark Regnerus’s new book, Cheap Sex, in 10-minute power bursts. Here’s one funny thing I noticed: Hanna Rosin’s most prominent error from The End of Men apparently repeated telephone-style by Regnerus.*

In the Atlantic article, which led to her TED Talk and then book (full review), The End of Men, Hanna Rosin’s editor chose two dramatic statements that were wrong to lead with:

That year, 2010, women were not the majority of the workforce, and most managers were not women. And they still aren’t. What was true was that for 10 months women outnumbered men in what the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports as the “nonfarm payroll,” from June 2009 to March 2010. In every month before and since, men have been the majority. Here’s that trend, by month:

The nonfarm payroll number is:

a measure of the number of U.S. workers in the economy that excludes proprietors, private household employees, unpaid volunteers, farm employees, and the unincorporated self-employed. This measure accounts for approximately 80 percent of the workers who contribute to Gross Domestic Product.

It’s not “the workforce,” but it is a good indicator of shocks to the economy — private companies may lay people off immediately, while self-employed people still consider themselves employed even if they’re suddenly losing money.  Anyway, in the BLS’s household survey that asks people if they are working, the Current Population Survey, there were about 10 million more people counted as employed, and men’s majority have never been threatened. This is a reasonably called “the workforce.” Note the time trend here is longer, and it’s annual:

The source of the wrong statement about managers is just Rosin combining managerial and professional specialty jobs into “managers,” which she also did in the TED Talk, which is just wrong. Professionals include a lot of women, like nurses and teachers. The managerial occupations have never been majority-female either. Both are important, but only one fit her narrative.

Anyway, the point of this is that Mark Regnerus picked up this meme — which Rosin popularized but lots of other media repeated — and stated it as current fact in his 2017 book. So powerful (among those not powerfully applying themselves) is the idea of automatic gender progress in one direction, that this is not the kind of thing they think they will ever have to check again. Once women pass a milestone, it’s passed, period. (That’s why Rosin’s full sentence was this: “Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs.” She was misapplying the clickbait concept of “tipping point” to imply that the change will now continue and accelerate in the same direction.)

This is why Regnerus apparently felt no need to recheck his facts when he wrote, “there are now more women than men in the paid labor force.” He didn’t cite Rosin (or anyone) for this fact, but it appears during a passage sandwiched between parts that cite her book, so I assume that’s what he was borrowing from, and maybe just changed “workforce” to “paid labor force” to sound different or sophisticated.

Anyway, Rosin doesn’t feature prominently in the Regnerus review (you’re welcome), but this was an interesting nugget, because for all their differences, there are some similarities between Regnerus’s fanatical religious anti-feminism and Rosin’s sophisticated postfeminist antifeminism. Both think feminism has gone too far, and both see the rise of women as resulting from a technological change — Rosin from deindustrialization and Regnerus from the Pill. Also, they both use facts not to learn from but to demonstrate things they think they already know.

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* To read the whole Regnerus story, follow his tag on the blog, or check out the whole story told in one chapter of my new book, Enduring Bonds: Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else That Makes Families Great and Terrible.

The amazing lack of gender progress in Hollywood, Weinstein and not

With gender and Hollywood in the news because of the Harvey Weinstein revelations, I haven’t seen anyone count up the women who produced his movies. I counted off every tenth movie from his 300 or so producer credits on IMDB, and eyeballed their names (or images) for gender. The result: 23% of 373 producers were women.* (Some have a lot of producers, but if you use movies as the unit of analysis the average is also 23%.)

Here is the breakdown of these 30 movies, by decade:

Weinstein seems to be right in line with the industry on this. (With a range of 5 to 70 producers listed, none had more than 50% female producer teams.) Producer jobs are the most gender integrated of the major behind-the-scenes leadership positions in Hollywood movies, as reported by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. And, like the other major positions, in his movies and in general, there is zero movement toward gender integration in the last two decades.

In turn, Hollywood looks a lot like the economy in general, which also shows basically no progress on integrating women into leadership positions over the last two decades. Here is percent female among those employed in managerial occupations (using the IPUMS occ1990 coding scheme for consistency):

Putting women in top leadership positions is not a panacea for gender inequality. But for the sexual harassment situation I am quite sure it would help a lot. Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes may or may not have been an open secret in Hollywood, but the lack of women in positions across the industry, and the economy, is plain for all to see — and to act on, if they choose.

For other posts on movies, mostly having to do with gender, follow the movie tag.

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* If someone wants to code all of his movies I’ll happily update this. Here’s the list I generated:

	Year	Men	Women	Percent Female
The Burning	1981	5	0	0.00
The Pope Must Diet	1991	7	1	0.13
Pulp Fiction	1994	6	1	0.14
Jane Eyre	1996	6	2	0.25
I’m Crazy About Iris Blond	1996	4	1	0.20
Cop Land	1997	8	2	0.20
Wide Awake	1998	6	2	0.25
Talk of Angels	1998	3	3	0.50
In Too Deep	1999	6	1	0.14
About Adam	2000	4	4	0.50
Backstage	2000	7	3	0.30
Mimic 2	2001	5	1	0.17
Heaven	2002	10	5	0.33
Chicago	2002	8	3	0.27
Bad Santa	2003	7	1	0.13
Finding Neverland	2004	6	3	0.33
The Brothers Grimm	2005	11	0	0.00
Scary Movie 4	2006	5	2	0.29
Death Proof	2007	6	4	0.40
The Great Debaters	2007	6	4	0.40
The Meerkats	2008	7	1	0.13
Halloween II	2009	10	1	0.09
The King’s Speech	2010	14	1	0.07
I Don’t Know How She Does It	2011	5	4	0.44
Escape from Planet Earth	2013	13	3	0.19
Lee Daniels’ The Butler	2013	31	10	0.24
Suite Francais	2014	8	4	0.33
Regression	2015	13	2	0.13
Wild Oats	2016	54	16	0.23
The Upside	2017	7	0	0.00
	Total	288	85	0.23

Women’s Equality Day earnings data stuff and suffrage note

Tomorrow is Women’s Equality Day, which commemorates the day, in 1920, when U.S. women were granted the right to vote. (Asterisk: White women.)

One historical story

Congress finally passed a Constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage in 1918, after decades of activism. The suffrage movement in the end successfully made a few convincing arguments – and one clarification. The most important may have been that White women had proved their patriotism during the war, and so they finally deserved the vote. I wrote in 1996:

“No one thing connected with the war is of more importance at this time than meeting the reasonable demand of millions of patriotic and Christian women of the Nation that the amendment for woman suffrage be submitted to the states,” declared Representative James Cantrill. And, he added, “Right, justice, liberty and democracy have always been, and will always be, safe in the tender care of American womanhood.”

And you know what he meant by “American womanhood” (an image the mainstream suffrage movement encouraged to various degrees over the years):

American Progress, by John Gast (1872)

The important clarification was that women’s suffrage would absolutely not hurt White supremacy in the South. You know how it is when you just need that Southern vote. I went on:

If reluctant congressmen would only believe in the contribution of white women that was waiting to be made, suffrage advocates explained, the political math was irresistible. “There are more white women of voting age in the South to-day than there are negro men and women together,” [Congress’s only woman, Jeannette] Rankin said. Representative Scott Ferris assured them that poll taxes and literacy tests would remain untouched, so that “for every negro woman so enfranchised there will be hundreds and thousands of intelligent white women enfranchised” (Congressional Record 1918, 779). And Representative Thomas Blanton proclaimed, “So far as State rights are concerned, if this amendment sought to take away from any State the right of fixing the qualifications of its voters, I would be against it first, last, and all the time, but such it does not.” Although states should be allowed to set qualifications for voting, he believed, they could not do so at the expense of undermining true republicanism, and, “if you deny the 14,000,000 white women of this country the right to vote, you are interfering with a republican form of government [Applause]” (786). That day, the House passed the amendment with the required two-thirds vote.

Anyway, rights are rights, America is America, history is history (ha ha).

Some pay gap numbers

Back to nowadays. Today’s numbers come from some analysis of the gender earnings gap I did to support the Council on Contemporary Families brief for Women’s Equality Day. One big story is women’s rising education levels, especially BA completion.

In the active labor force as often described (age 25-54, working at least 20 hours per week and 26 weeks in the previous year), women surpassed men in BA completion in 2002:

That’s very good for women with regard to the earnings gap, because at every level of education men earn more than women. Women’s full-time full-year earnings are between 70% and 80% of men’s at all education levels except the highest, where they diverge: men who are doctors and lawyers earn much more than women, while women PhDs are doing relatively well. Here’s the 2015 breakdown by education:

With the education trend and differentials in mind, consider these multivariate model results. Going back to the sample of 25-54-year-old people working at least half-time and half the year, here are two results. The first line, in blue, shows the gender earnings ratio when only age is controlled. It shows women gaining on men from 2000 to 2016, from 77% to 83%. This is not much progress for 25 years, but it’s the slow pace we’ve come to expect during that time. The other line shows result from a more complete model, which adds controls for education, race/ethnicity, marital status, and presence of children; it shows even less progress.

In the full model (orange line) the relative gains for women are not as great. (Note I don’t include occupation in the “full” model although that’s very important; it’s just also an outcome of gender so I let it be in the gender variable for descriptive purposes.)

In the old days, when women had less education than men, controlling for education shrank the gap; now it appears the opposite is true. I haven’t done the whole decomposition to confirm this, but here’s another way to look at it. The next figure shows the same models, but in two separate samples, with and without BA degrees (and no control for education). The figure shows little progress within education groups. This implies it’s the increase in education for women that is driving the progress seen in the previous figure.

In conclusion: there is a substantial gender earnings gap at every level of education. The limited progress toward equality we’ve seen in the past 25 years may be driven by increases in women’s education.

There is a lot of other research on this — especially about segregation, which I didn’t include here — and a lot more to be done.

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This is a little analysis, but if you’d like to do more, or see how I did what I’ve shown here, I posted the Stata code, data from IPUMS.org, codebook, and spreadsheet file on the Open Science Framework site here. You can use any of it for whatever you like, with a citation that looks like this one the OSF generates:

Cohen, P. N. (2017, August 25). Gender wage gap analysis, 1992-2016. Retrieved from osf.io/mhp3z

Kids these days really know how to throw off a narrative on gender and families

The most important thing is that Stephanie Coontz has written another very good, and very important, New York Times essay. It describes a “slippage” in support for gender equality among young people these days, and warns that without improved work-family policies, progress toward egalitarian family arrangements may be imperiled. The piece also announced a package of short papers in a Council on Contemporary Families symposium, which provided the supporting evidence. (This kind of work, incidentally, is why I’m a proud member, and board member, of CCF.) If you haven’t read Stephanie’s essay, I recommend reading it now, and if you forget to come back here that’s fine.

Anyway, an unfortunate confluence of events created some chaos after the piece came out. First, the NYTimes wrote a headline, “Do Millennial Men Want Stay-at-Home Wives?”, that emphasized only one piece of the evidence. It referred to a figure showing General Social Survey data on the trend in very young men and women (ages 18-25) disagreeing with the statement, “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” (That is the classic FEFAM question, to GSS fans, asked since 1977. I’ve used it myself, and it figures in the key analysis of stalled gender progress by Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman.)

This was the figure, showing a marked divergence between men and women:

The second event was the unfortunate timing: between the time Stephanie wrote the piece and the day it appeared, the General Social Survey released its 2016 round of data (it’s been running every two years). The survey is fickle. It’s very good quality and has many great demographic and attitude items running for 40 years, making it the best source for analyzing many social trends. But it’s not that big. In 2014 it had 2,867 respondents, of whom only 141 were ages 18-25. So it wasn’t surprising that the 2016 numbers were different from the 2014 numbers, but the scale of the blip was shocking, as reported independently by Emily Beam and Neal Caren. Here is what the updated trend looks like:

Yikes. As exciting as it is for survey analysts to see such a wild swing, it’s not what anyone wants to see the day after their NYTimes piece drops. We can’t know yet what happened, but on further inspection, at least we can say that it’s not limited to the youngest group and its small sample. Among men ages 26-54, the percentage disagreement with FEFAM also jumped, from 73.7 to 78.3 (women 26-54 were up one point).* In fact, 2014 may have been as big a blip as 2016, you just wouldn’t notice because it continued the trend.

Anyway, back for a minute to the main point. Joanna Pepin, who co-wrote one of the symposium pieces with David Cotter (and who is also an advisee of mine), has pointed out that the divergence between men and women is secondary to the main trend, which is the reversal of progress on FEFAM for both men and women since the mid-1990s. They used the Monitoring the Future survey, and find a big drop in FEFAM disagreement among high school seniors — regardless of gender. Here’s their key figure, with the FEFAM trend shown in green (their full paper is available on SocArXiv):

So that is the most important news: a big reversal among young adults on attitudes toward homemaker-breadwinner family arrangements.

Now, If you’ve now read Stephanie’s piece, and Joanna’s, and you’re back, here’s a little more on the minor kerfuffle that arose over the new data.

When to call a trend a trend

I don’t think Stephanie was wrong to use the GSS trend, although it might have been better to widen the age range, or pool the data over several years. The bigger problem was the headline selling that divergence as the main story, which it wasn’t in the grand scheme. (The fact that so many jumped on the story shows how good they are at headline writing.) But even that wasn’t really wrong, given the information they had. The Op-Ed staff checked the facts, and the facts were the facts. Until yesterday.

To confirm this, I ran some tests on the gender divergence in the data they used (I started with code that Neal shared; it’s at the bottom). I started at 1994, the last peak of the trend, to look for the divergence after that, which is what Stephanie referred to. First, here is what you get if you run a logistic model that controls for race/ethnicity and individual years of age (two things that changed over the last two decades), and enters the years individually in an interaction with gender (those are 95% confidence intervals).

If you stop at 2014, it looks like men are pulling away from women (in the direction of “traditional” attitudes), but it’s not definitive. And obviously 2016 is an issue. To help with the small samples, I ran a linear test of the year trend, that is, entering year as a continuous variable instead of individual years. I did it ended at 2014 and then through 2016. Here are the results:

In the 1994-2014 model, the Male*Year interaction is statistically significant at conventional levels, which in my opinion means it’s legit to say men were pulling away from women. Of course 2016 ruined that; if you had 2016 and didn’t use it, that would be really wrong. There are other ways to slice it, but at some point we have to call a trend a trend and deal with it. It was a reasonable decision. Of course, new data always comes along (until the last trend of all, whatever that is), no trend lasts forever; it’s just a shame when it comes along the next day. In addition, though I’m not showing it because it’s boring, if you didn’t disaggregate the trends by gender, you would also see a significant decline in FEFAM disagreement after 1994, which gets to Joanna’s point.

Anyway, score one for sociology Twitter. People came up with the data, shared code and results, and discussed interpretations. It got back to Stephanie and the NYTimes editors, and within a day they added an addendum to the original piece:

Update: After this article was posted, 2016 data from the General Social Survey became available, adding some nuance to this analysis. The latest numbers show a rebound in young men’s disagreement with the claim that male-breadwinner families are superior. The trend still confirms a rise in traditionalism among high school seniors and 18-to-25-year-olds, but the new data shows that this rise is no longer driven mainly by young men, as it was in the General Social Survey results from 1994 through 2014.

This is pretty much how it’s supposed to work. As the Car Guys used to say, if you never stall you’re wearing out your clutch (sorry, Millennials). If you never overshoot an analysis of trends you’re probably waiting too long to get the information out.

* Note: I originally accidentally described this as “over 25.” 

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You can get the data here. Here’s the STATA code:

/* recodes */

recode fefam (1/2=0) (3/4=1), gen(fefam_d)
gen young=age>=18&age<=25
recode sex (2=0), gen(male)

/* the model for the figure */

logit fefam_d i.year##i.male i.age i.race if year>=1994 & young==1 [pweight = wtssall]
margins year##male
marginsplot

/* the models for the table */

logit fefam_d c.year##i.male i.age i.race if year>=1994 & young==1 & year<=2014 [pweight = wtssall]
logit fefam_d c.year##i.male i.age i.race if year>=1994 & young==1 [pweight = wtssall]

Sex segregation propositions in 140 characters

In response to an annoying conversation on Twitter about this short paper, which felt very familiar, here is an argument about the sex segregation of work, in the form of unsourced propositions of 140 characters or less. You can find most of these in longer form in various posts under the segregation tag. It’s tweetstorm, in one post!

Many studies show men and women have mean differences in personality and preferences, although there is overlap in the distributions; but

Every respondent in any such study was born and raised in a male-dominated society, because all societies are male dominated.

Most people in the debates I see, being elites, act like everyone is a college graduate who chose their job, or “field” of work; but

We know lots of people are in jobs they didn’t freely choose or didn’t get promoted out of, for reasons related to gender (like pregnancy).

No one knows how much segregation results from differences in choices of workers vs. parent/employer/educator pressure or constraints; and

The level of sex segregation varies across social contexts (across space and time), which means it is not all caused by biology; and

Because segregation causes inequality and constrains human freedom, and we have the means to reduce it, the biology theory is harmful; so

Go ahead and study the biology of sex differences, because society is interesting, but don’t use that as an excuse for inequality.