Pew’s George Gao writes,
the share of American adults who have never been married is at an historic high. In 2012, one-in-five adults ages 25 and older had never been married. Men are more likely than women to have never been married. And this gender gap has widened since 1960.
This puzzles me a bit. Suppose you have a population with 100 men and 100 women, and that all marriages are heterosexual. The data say that 23 men have never been married and 17 women have never been married. How can that happen? At any given time, the same number of men and women must be married. The only way I can make the arithmetic work is to assume that some of the now-married women are married to men who are married for the second time (and thus the men are not removed from the never-married total), and that some of the formerly-married women are now single, and hence are not included in the never-married total. Apparently, men have an easier time re-marrying.
More interesting data points on a variety of topics at the link.
Another puzzling one:
Brazil and Mexico, which now have a younger population than the U.S., will potentially have an older one than the U.S. by the middle of this century.
I guess that this is a result of our baby boom generation? As we Boomers die off, the age of our population will grow more slowly than that of countries that did not have such large baby booms. Is that the story?
Immigration?
On the first, your argument is certainly correct, though I don’t find it “puzzling” in the usual sense of the word. You could probably confirm this statistically by finding the average number of marriages for men and women who have been married at least once. As for Mexico and Brazil, it is probably a combination of factors- more young people net emigrating than in the US, and probably the birth rate is falling more quickly in both countries than in the US.
Part of the explanation could be life expectancy. There are a lot more widows than widowers, which would affect the proportions of the other categories within each gender.
All of the above. Also, the number of couples who have not been, are not, and will not be married, but still do things like form households that last for decades and raise children, has surely grown since 1960. So the number of “never married” and the number of “don’t participate in normal household formation” don’t match quite as well as they once did.
I would put it divorced men are more desirous of remarriage while divorced women are both less desirous of remarriage and less desirable to men as they usually marry younger.
The latin countries may have a newer larger baby boom, and possibly a larger bust.
Yes, the boom in the latin countries occurred during their demographic transition and was 50-75% more intense than the US while their current birthrates are only slightly higher.
I suspect the gap (and its growth) is partly driven by men marrying at an older age than women. In 1960, the average was 22 for men and 20 for women. Today it’s 29 and 27. An over 25 measure will capture more unmarried men, even though they will ultimately marry – and it captures more of these men today than it did in 1960. If the measure was who in the cohort will ever be married, the gap would be smaller.
Another Pew site—
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/09/24/record-share-of-americans-have-never-married/
—includes the passage:
“Previously married women are much less likely than their male counterparts to say they would like to get married again someday (15% of women compared with 29% of men). Fully 54% of these women say they are not interested in getting remarried (30% of men say the same).”
This suggests that the difference between the sexes in never-been-married percentages is due not to previously-married men’s “having an easier time re-marrying”, as our host conjectures, but to such men’s being more inclined to re-marry.
Assuming that most previously-married people wound up that way as a result of divorce rather than death, this suggests that Oscar Wilde’s assertion—”Women try their luck; men risk theirs”—got it exactly backwards.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frederick-hertz/divorce-marriage-rates-fo_b_1085024.html
“Nearly two-thirds of registered or married same-sex couples are lesbians, and only about a third are gay men.”
I believe that same-sex married couples were counted as unmarried in those ACS releases, so including same-sex marriages would increase that gap very (very) slightly.
Regardless, your arithmetic is a bit dated 😉
The bell curve is flatter for men, as usual. Men are disproportionately represented among those who have never married and those who have married the most. Women, on the other hand, are more clumped toward the center of the distribution with fewer represented at either extreme.
This is also true for … almost everything. In fact, I’m kind of surprised the difference is not larger. Obvious parallels are number of sexual partners and number of offspring which I believe show a similar pattern.
I wonder if the demographic distribution of never married men is similar to what it would look like in countries with polygamy. A man that looks like a good mate due to financial or some other status, still probably looks that way after a divorce. These men are thus kind of “serially polygamist”. They are reducing the pool of available mates for low status males by re-entering the pool of eligible bachelors. Just like polygamy hurts poor men and older women, higher divorce rates may as well.
Herein we see the danger in reasoning from aggregates.