Assortative Mating/Marriage and Caste in America - 11/19/06

[Smartmarriages]

- NO MORE "PRETTY WOMEN" MARRYING UP

Amazing article.  Also amazing that they don't reference the new book by Kay
Hymowitz "Marriage and Caste in America" which I again want to recommend
that you read. Hymowitz explores this phenomenon in depth - how our marriage
patterns (and our failure-to-marry patterns) are "sorting" the population
and creating rigid caste lines that are becoming more and more difficult for
our children to cross. For earlier post about the book:
http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/smartmarriages/2006-November/003195.html

The New York Times Sunday Magazine
November 19, 2006
Idea Lab
The Real Marriage Penalty
By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL

³Some of usare becoming the men we wanted to marry,² Gloria Steinem
proclaimed 25 years ago. She meant, of course, that women in large numbers
were seizing the places in higher education and the professions that had
formerly been closed to them, becoming the doctors, lawyers and executives
that they once hoped only to wed. Over the past generation, the liberal
notion of egalitarian marriage ‹ in which wives are in every sense their
husbands¹ peers ‹ has gone from pie-in-the-sky ideal to unremarkable
reality. But this apparently progressive shift has been shadowed by another
development: America¹s growing gap between rich and poor. Even as husbands
and wives have moved closer together on measures of education and income,
the divide between well-educated, well-paid couples and their
less-privileged counterparts has widened, raising an awkward possibility:
are we achieving more egalitarian marriages at the cost of a more
egalitarian society?

Once, it was commonplace for doctors to marry nurses and executives to marry
secretaries. Now the wedding pages are stocked with matched sets, men and
women who share a tax bracket and even an alma mater. People, like other
members of the animal kingdom, have always been prone to ³assortative
mating,² or choosing to have babies with a reassuringly similar partner. But
observers like Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the
University of New Mexico and author of ³The Mating Mind,² suggest that the
innovations of modern society ‹ from greater geographic mobility to
specialized work environments to Internet dating ‹ have made this matching
process much more efficient. ³Assortative mating is driven by our personal
preferences, but also by whom we meet, and these days we have many more
opportunities to meet others like ourselves,² he says. (As with most
contemporary sociological phenomena, ³Seinfeld² was there first: a 1996
episode featured the comedian finding ³the female Jerry.²)

In particular, Americans are increasingly pairing off by education level,
according to the sociologists Christine Schwartz and Robert Mare. In an
article published last year in the journal Demography, they reported that
the odds of a high-school graduate marrying someone with a college degree
declined by 43 percent between 1940 and the late 1970s. In our current
decade, the researchers wrote, the percentage of couples who are
³educationally homogamous² ‹ that is, share the same level of schooling ‹
reached its highest point in 40 years. Assortative mating by income also
seems to be on the rise. In a 2004 study of couples wed in the 1970s through
the early 1990s, the researchers Megan Sweeney and Maria Cancian found an
increasingly strong association between women¹s wages before marriage and
the occupational status and future earnings prospects of the men they
married.

Why is this happening? For one thing, more couples are meeting in college
and other educational settings, where prospective mates come prescreened by
admissions committees as discerning as any yenta. Husbands and wives who
begin their relationships during their school years are more likely to have
comparable education (and, presumably, income) levels. Secondly, men and
women have become more alike in what they want from a marriage partner. This
convergence is both cultural ‹ co-ed gyms and bars have replaced single-sex
sewing circles and Elks clubs ‹ and economic. Just as women have long sought
to marry a good breadwinner, men, too, now find earning potential sexy.
³There are fewer Cinderella marriages these days,² says Stephanie Coontz,
author of ³Marriage, a History.² ³Men are less interested in rescuing a
woman from poverty. They want to find someone who will pull her weight.² For
this reason, the ³marriage penalty² once paid by highly educated women has
all but disappeared: among women born after 1960, a college graduate is more
likely to marry than her less-educated counterpart. And finally, there¹s
what Schwartz calls the growing ³social and economic distance² between the
well educated and the less so, a gulf even ardent romantics may find
difficult to bridge.

This last theory holds that disparities in wealth influence whom we marry,
but there¹s reason to think that our mating patterns could be producing
economic inequality as well as reflecting it. A model constructed by the
economists Raquel Fernández and Richard Rogerson, published in 2001 in The
Quarterly Journal of Economics, led them to conclude that ³increased marital
sorting² ‹ high earners marrying high earners and low earners marrying low
earners ‹ ³will significantly increase income inequality.² A 2003 analysis
by Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, found that a
rising correlation of husband-and-wife earnings accounted for 13 percent of
the considerable growth in economic inequality between 1979 and 1996.

Burtless himself does not think that assortative mating is necessarily
becoming more prevalent. In fact, he says he believes that ³the tendency of
like to marry like has remained roughly unchanged over time. What have
changed are the labor-market opportunities and behavior of women.² In this
conception, men have always married women of their own social class, but
such stratification was obscured by the fact that the female halves of these
couples often did not work or pursue advanced degrees. Now that women who
are in a position to do so are attending college and graduate school and
joining the professions, the economic consequences of Americans¹ assortative
mating habits are becoming clearer.

If assortative mating does contribute to our growing gap between rich and
poor, does that matter? Few people would question any individual¹s romantic
preferences. And yet as the current clash over gay marriage demonstrates,
private choices about whom we marry ‹ or don¹t marry, or can¹t marry ‹ can
have loud public reverberations. Not long ago, the marriages of whites and
blacks, and the lifting of laws that once prohibited such unions, revealed a
nation beginning to open its mind on matters of race; likewise, rates of
marriage across lines of education and income provide an index of social
mobility. If there are fewer such marriages, then there are ³fewer sources
of intimate ties² between groups, Schwartz says, making marriage one more
brick in the wall that separates America¹s haves and have-nots.

Of course, men and women don¹t choose each other on the basis of education
and income alone. Putting love aside, as men¹s and women¹s roles continue to
shift, other standards for selecting a partner may come to the fore. Indeed,
the sociologist Julie Press recently offered what she called ³a gynocentric
theory of assortative mating,² moving the focus from what men now desire in
a marriage partner to the evolving preferences of women. What would-be wives
may be seeking now, she proposed in The Journal of Marriage and Family, is
³cute butts and housework² ‹ that is, a man with an appealing physique and a
willingness to wash dishes. Could this be a feminist slogan for our time?

Annie Murphy Paul is the author of "The Cult of Personality: How Personality
Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies and
Misunderstand Ourselves."


 
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