Both from Quillette, which is what you should read instead of Twitter or Facebook.
1. Branko Milanovic summarizes a variety of findings, including
high-earning young American men who in the 1970s were just as likely to marry high-earning as low-earning young women now display an almost three-to- one preference in favor of high-earning women. An even more dramatic change happened for women: the percentage of young high-earning women marrying young high-earning men increased from just under 13 percent to 26.4 percent, while the percentage of rich young women marrying poor young men halved. From having no preference between rich and poor men in the 1970s, women currently prefer rich men by a ratio of almost five to one.
Read the whole essay.
A spot-check of a few dozen elite and selective schools suggests that there is near gender parity at the most elite private universities, and perhaps a slight tilt toward women among selective private schools and public flagships, but not one nearly as dramatic as the nationwide numbers would lead you to believe.
…In fact, it is the least selective schools that are driving the national gender gap in bachelor’s degrees. For example, at for-profit colleges, most of which have very low admissions standards, 63 percent of students are female.
He argues that the least selective schools do not confer such high status. He claims that a woman who graduates with a nursing degree or a teaching degree is not higher status than a man who becomes an electrician without a college degree. In terms of income, this may be true. But will the teacher be willing to marry the electrician?
In any case, I don’t think Friedman’s analysis is inconsistent with Milanovic’s data.
The problem with the Quillette charts/numbers is that they imply the assortative mating divergence is fully due to status selection rather than being the natural outcome of increasing workforce participation by women.
The teacher/electrician marriage problem may also be a matching problem in addition to a status perception problem. Proximity remains important in dating; electrician apprentices and teacher college students do not naturally cross paths. The question is whether Kling’s Homo Appien will successfully use technology to compliment traditional proximity matching.
One of the variables that we don’t discuss is sexual maturity rates. Women mature faster than men and each gender has early bloomers and late bloomers. Maybe one area of research could involve reducing the age at which some people enter the workforce. The current system seems geared towards University degrees with age specific educational milestones along the way.
But will the teacher be willing to marry the electrician?
In my experience, yes — K12 public school teacher is not inherently a high-status occupation. Lots of teachers (along with nurses, therapists, etc) come from middle-to-lower middle class families. I think K12 is really a mixed status occupation, with a class divide within it (you’ll find some women teachers married to physicians and others to plumbers).
+1…Actually at my school this is very true and conservatives are exaggerating this teacher impact.
I wonder what the divorce rates from 1950-1990 were for people who were assorted mated versus those who were unassorted. Perhaps there was a greater probability of divorce when levels of education or income or status were very different within the couple.
I think that Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers looked into this and found what you hypothesized. A spike in divorce when people who had married under the “old rules” (man works in office, woman cleans house) saw that they weren’t a good marriage under the new rules (shared tastes as imparted by cultural background)
I have long held the core of the divorce revolution was the low age of marriage in 1960 in which people were getting married
1) In the modern world people personality, careers and goals are not set until they are past 25. So the 1970s divorces were a lot more ‘Charles Murray’ divorce occurred (middle class, grew apart, etc.) and the lower divorce rates is caused by later marriage. If I married the women I dated at 24, it would have ended divorce. (Where a lot of middle class gets over the career humps and personality & goals are solidified by the time of meeting their marriage partner.) This is not say all young marriages fail, as ~45% succeed, it is lower than 29 year marriage where it is 65% succeed.
For profit colleges have the 63/37 F/M split, but total enrollment in those schools are so low that very little of the total gap is due to the profit colleges.
I would think that the nurses would be likelier to marry higher earning men, as nurses with a college degree should be earning a fairly high wage themselves. And my impression is that college nursing programs aren’t easy, so the young women coming out of those programs tend to be more conscientious, intelligent, and not to have severe problems with substance abuse or mental health issues.
Also, nurses spend a lot of time around doctors – who are higher earning and often men.
Opportunity counts for a lot. CPA firms have long known that attractive women do well in tax accounting. Not because they’re smarter than men or dumpy women on average, but because male clients are a lot less likely to argue about the bill with a pretty woman. And young women rarely mind being introduced to a clientele of wealthy men.
+1
The self-selection aspect of successful education and career is vastly under-rated by everybody. The aspects of building a successful career would easily transfer to creating a successful marriage.
Also, we have a few decades where we have been telling everyone that they need to go to college. So college acts as a kind of signal; most people who have graduated have both at least some amount of intelligence and some ability to make a plan and stick with the plan. For people without a college degree, it would seem that there would be more variability in those characteristics.
One thing I wonder is how much a college degree is just a proxy for “doesn’t have kids from a previous relationship”?
Interesting observation. Large organizations are not supposed to ask questions like that. Or if you smoke.
I find the biggest issue of any assortative mating analysis is we are comparing apples and oranges in terms of how women raised in the culture, and the ability to earn equal wages. So even 1970, any definition of where women in the workforce misses the reality that most Silent/Boomer women were not raised to participate in the competitive workforce. If a girl in 1960 wanted a career, it was automatically assumed they would be a teacher or nurse. (I would suggest this culturally raising effected this workplace realities until 1990 or so.) We also forgot how boys were raised in 1960 as well.
So I find this evidence to be completely conditioned on the culture and any findings of less assortative marriage of some glorious past have is limited value. Also, most of history we see assortative marriage as the norm. And can we also say the Post-WW2 was the historical outlier in terms of economic mobility, shared economic growth, etc.
The quality of the poor men today probably doesn’t match that of yesteryear.