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As the number of highly educated women has increased in recent decades, the chances of "marrying up" have increased significantly for men and decreased for women, according to a new study led by a University of Kansas sociologist.
"The pattern of marriage and its economic consequences have changed over time," said lead author ChangHwan Kim, associate professor of sociology. "Now women are more likely to get married to a less-educated man. What is the consequence of this?"
Kim's co-authored the study with Arthur Sakamoto of Texas A&M University, and the journal Demography recently published their findings. They examined gender-specific changes in the total financial return to education among people of prime working ages, 35 to 44 years old, using U.S. Census data from 1990 and 2000 and the 2009-2011 American Community Survey.
Your dreams of finding a Sugar Momma may finally come true.
ChangHwan Kim, Arthur Sakamoto. Women's Progress for Men's Gain? Gender-Specific Changes in the Return to Education as Measured by Family Standard of Living, 1990 to 2009–2011. Demography, 2017; DOI: 10.1007/s13524-017-0601-3
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 30 2017, @07:42PM (13 children)
I think it's a little more complex than that.
First, there's a bunch of women now who actually don't want kids. You'll find a lot of urban women like this. But they seem to usually want a man who makes more money than them, mainly so they can afford to go on expensive international vacations every couple months it seems.
But ignoring them for now, I think a lot of men are figuring out that marriage really isn't all it's cracked up to be. There's no financial benefit to it if your partner makes anywhere near the same salary you do, and in fact there's an outright "marriage penalty" if your incomes are roughly close. Thanks, IRS and Republicans. And given the high divorce rate, your chances of long-term success are not very good if you enter into one. Divorce is well-known to be messy and very expensive, usually more for the man, despite women making a lot of money these days. And with modern contraceptives, women don't have the pressure to avoid sex before marriage that they had 50+ years ago since the risk is mostly gone, so unlike in 1940, a man doesn't need to commit to a marriage to have sex. Finally, with people living so long now, people tend to grow apart over time, plus the social pressure to stay married even when you're miserable is much less. Now throw in all those people not even having kids, and what's the point to marriage?
AFAICT, the only good reason to get married is because one partner doesn't work (i.e., tax benefit) or has a much lower-paying job, and the two are going to have kids together and want to provide that veneer of stability. (The other reason, but not a good one, is because of religion and associated social pressure, but this only applies to people in those social circles.)
In the far past, marriage was a way to mostly guarantee social stability. It paired people up so they'd have kids (necessary for society's survival and economic growth), and force them to stay together through social pressure so that men wouldn't impregnate other women and have out-of-wedlock kids being raised in poverty. The price was happiness and freedom. Many people got stuck with partners they didn't get along with or didn't like and couldn't get away from, women were routinely abused, kids grew up in abusive households, etc. Even without the abuse part, women were consigned to being second-class citizens and couldn't hold most jobs, and didn't have much economic freedom. The gender roles were clear: men were to provide economically for the family, women were to be baby factories and unpaid domestic labor to make the family function. It was basically collectivism vs. individuality, with collectivism winning out (ironic, coming from a society that eschewed socialism and communism): the needs of society were deemed to be more important than the individual happiness of its citizens, and marriage with kids was seen as the proper way to ensure society's healthy functioning. (Not so different from authoritarian socialism when you think about it, huh? The main difference was that the enforcement mostly came from peers and churches rather than a central government, though the government did play a part through the tax code, marriage laws, and the functioning of the court systems.) Now, things are different: churches don't have much power any more, lots of society is irreligious, contraception is commonplace and reliable, sex before marriage isn't scandalous, and people aren't having kids like they used to, so the institution of marriage is falling apart as a consequence. And good riddance.
So now, women who want kids are finding there aren't so many men who honestly want them, so they have to find low-income guys who are willing to make the trade-off: get married "up" to a higher-earning woman, be a sperm donor, and be unpaid domestic labor, in exchange for a nice "set up" and better economic security, just like the bargain women had to make 50+ years ago. High-income men don't have to bother with this, and don't as much, so there's a shortage of them and more women are turning to the low-income men.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday August 30 2017, @07:45PM (11 children)
50+ years? Don't you mean since the dawn of Man. Has it ever been anything but that deal. Now is probably the first time in history we are about to see the reverse on a large scale. At least in the western world.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 30 2017, @07:59PM (10 children)
No, I don't mean that at all. Monogamy is a relatively recent social trend, which likely only started with the adoption of agriculture. Modern humans (meaning homo sapiens sapiens) have been around for about 2 million years, while agricultural societies only about 10-12k. Hunter-gatherer tribes were not monogamous and had no such bargain; they really functioned more like free-love communes.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 30 2017, @08:05PM (5 children)
(This site should let me edit comments within a few minutes of posting...)
Now, if you mean "since the early days of civilization", I'd say that's mostly correct. I wrote "50+" for a reason, because western civilization has been like that until only very recently, and the way humans lived shortly after the "dawn of Man" is really irrelevant to how people have been living for the past couple thousand of years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 30 2017, @08:29PM (4 children)
Wait 15 minutes after the story is posted. Put a reasonable comment. Have the prepared troll comment ready. Switch it at 4 minutes and 45 seconds to account for lag. Watch some people reply or up mod your reasonable comment which is now gone.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Wednesday August 30 2017, @08:37PM
Just have the old Green Site "are you sure you want to comment; doing this will undo moderation?" check, but for editing your comments. If you've already been modded, editing wipes mods.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 30 2017, @08:37PM (2 children)
1) Sites like Reddit allow editing, and don't seem to have that much trouble with this.
2) You could make it so the original comment cannot be removed or edited, and instead you can only append to it (which is all I wanted to do in my comment above).
3) You could also have a "flag" option to flag people doing this, and then the moderators can look into the edit history and ban anyone who does this.
Personally I think #2 would be the simplest answer. On other sites like Reddit, people already do just this even though they could do much more; they put "EDIT: blah blah blah" at the end of the comment to show the comment has been changed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @09:39AM (1 child)
4) You could take your time, preview your comment, and add supporting information once you see it lacking some upon preview.
(And then end up on the second page of comments with no views, mods, or replies.)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday September 01 2017, @04:16AM
Sure, I'll do that just as soon as everyone removes the Backspace key from their keyboards, and changes all their software so that there's no "undo" function anywhere.
You're right about the timing issue too, but honestly I think the idea of not being able to edit things runs counter to one of the major reasons we switched from using typewriters and such to using computers in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 30 2017, @10:48PM (3 children)
"Free Love" for the women at least. I read somewhere that genetic evidence suggests that most men never produced viable offspring.
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:49AM (2 children)
I hardly believe that nonsense, I would say if that was the case the evolutionary pressure on men would be extreme and we would all be super athletic 7 feet tall muscle hunks with a jaw-line chiseled in stone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @07:54AM (1 child)
Only if DNA had a male half and a female half. It doesn't. Apart from the very small (compared to the rest) Y chromosome, everything is shared among men and women. Your claim would likely also result in women being "super athletic 7 feet tall muscle hunks with a jaw-line chiseled in stone", and the selection pressure is more likely to be AGAINST that.
Which, btw, may also be why the whole "homosexuality must be a choice, if it wasn't, natural selection would have gotten rid of it" falls on its face. If we assume that gay men are simply men with genes for "extra feminine" (and vice versa for lesbians), we have selection pressure FOR extra feminine women, and those women will have a 50% chance of passing that gene onto their sons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @03:16PM
Yes, but same genes express differently in men and women (the horrors!). For example if I look at (most) men I do not know if they carry the genes for supple or saggy tits.
So in the end the reasoning would rather be that reproducing success was more of a factor of luck for the men, which I could buy due to nature of ancient warfare. This would mean that roughly random distribution of genes would be passed on, rather than specific genes for handsomeness and muscle tone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @03:37PM
And yet it is an was mostly women that controlled the spending in families.
The women staying home, and men working is nothing more then simple division of labour, it wasn't oppression, that's purely a fictional reframing by the feminist movement.
What changed is mostly the invention and widespread availability of devices like the washing machine and vacuum cleaner that changed keeping a house in order from a fulltime job to something that only takes a couple of hours a week. order was a fulltime job.