Ok, I can see the lopsided lawyers marrying lawyers, but how is it that software developers are so lopsidedly marrying other software developers when something like 90% of them are male?
I guess pretty much every female software developer marries a male software developer which works out to the 12% number?
Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex. aka "male software developer has a 6% chance of marrying a software developer vs female software developer which has a 95% chance of marrying another software developer."
OTOH, its not as pronounced with nurses which have a similar problem in reverse.
(M)y SO is a female QA engineer. I dont know why but there is a lot of girl there. On the SWE side we really need to alter the industry to improve diversity.
That's what i thought as well, from anecdata it seems to me the overwhelming majority of females and gay males in software development or IT live with males or females from the same industry.
I wonder if one day the industry is more evenly distributed if we'd see a similar percentage as for lawyers.
For example it says that while lesbian software developers often marry each other, gay male software developers often marry "recreation and fitness workers". Straight male software engineers often marry within the profession, but also marry nurses, teachers and accountants.
This is presumably US data given it is from the "American Community Survey". The 90% male ratio is true globally, however in the US, 25% of software developers are female.
I think that's a good point. Another US bias may be that it seems fairly common to date or marry co-workers, which is not the case everywhere.
In some (maybe most) countries in Europe, most people do not move far away from their initial place of birth. Could be for cultural reasons or just because distances are smaller. As such, by the time they are of a dating age, they already have a rich and extended social life. They don't necessarily require the work place as an important source of meeting a partner. In a way, this affords the luxury of keeping work and social separate.
> Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex. aka "male software developer has a 6% chance of marrying a software developer
But this data is specifically "among married couples". The male software developer's chances of marrying a software developer are much, much higher if we just assume he's married in the first place.
I don't get it. Wouldn't anyone's chances of marrying any group be higher if we assume they are married at all? Because "being married" is a super set of "being married to a person from X group"?
I think an extreme example might help: if there are 100 software developers but 98 are single, and 2 are married to each other, then 100% of software developers(that are married couples) have married software developers, even if only 2% of all software developers are married at all.
Because "being married" is a smaller superset of "being married to a software developer" than "being alive" is.
It's the same reason there's a higher rate of being married to software developers among people who are married to software developers than there is among the general population.
CS programs at most schools in the US keep getting larger and larger, so that doesn't really surprise me if you assume the age distribution of software engineers resembles a pyramid.
The program I went to tripled in size over the course of my time there.
Given women almost always marry up (i.e. they marry men who earn more than themselves), if you break this up by sex I am pretty sure the numbers will look very different.
In Sweden highly educated women are marrying down. Just goes to show there's no reason not to break this sort of data analysis up per country and sex, it's not hard to do and will give much more relevant numbers to whomsoever it concerns.
>In Sweden highly educated women are marrying down.
It's certainly happening in Sweden, but it's far from common. An almost universal constant in research of this nature is that women highly value a partner who earns similarly or more than them.
Just a nitpick, but it doesn't matter what you value if you can't find it. Else the data would look quite different, e.g. all incels would be married. So what matters is what women find, not what they value.
> it doesn't matter what you value if you can't find it
Sure does, you just don't marry if you don't find anyone you want to marry. It is that simple.
For example, we can see that even in Sweden women who earn less are more likely to marry and men who earn more are more likely to marry. Women who earn a lot are less likely to find a partner they like as you say.
Dating and marrying are two hugely different things. Stereotypically, dating unemployed musicians and artists few years before marrying a white collar worker from your own social background is almost a rite of passage.
My wife and I are too. Though we had our first child last week. She said earlier in the pregnancy that she would like to keep in the workforce. But as each day passes with the baby it feels more likely she'll decide to be a full-time mom. Either decision is fine in my book :)
Congrats :-) me and my wife are both software developers too, and well, our 6 month old is sitting right next to me now :-) but I think she will want to go back to work - well, there's another 6 months of maternity leave ahead so plenty of time to decide.
Congrats!
My wife went back to work for like 3 weeks after 3 months off with our first. Then she just decided to no longer have a job that gives a paycheck. She works, harder than I, and of more import. She just doesn’t get a paycheck.
Though... she went back to Starbucks and service industry != tech industry by a long shot so....
I can see both sides, but one thing to think about is that coming back to software engineering after 5-10 years away would be brutal. It’s also a place it’s famously easy to coast and take it easy for a while.
But if I went through a pregnancy I would need a big rest and enjoy the rewards afterwards :-)
Judging from my social group, the gay male software engineers are more likely to be married than the straight ones (and I don’t think I could say that about any other profession), and also more likely to be married to another engineer. If I’m right about that, and the effect is strong enough, it could affect the numbers.
In my social group nearly all of the software developers I know are married to stay at home moms (self included). So it probably is just your social group.
I would suggest that in a field that is mostly male, including same sex couples changes the results disproportionately compared to more mixed industries.
I would assume it’s partly because software devs tend to work longer hours and do less stuff socially outside of work than average. As an adult I’ve only dated people long term I either met through work or online games.
I feel like both could seem true depending on the lens of the observer. I've had projects where I feel like I'm cruising to the point of boredom and other projects where it does feel like long work hours. I don't know if I agree with the less social part either, a lot of devs I know are quite social in distinct ways(board games, video games, technical groups, etc...)!
Depends on the job and the industry I guess. I’ve normally had to do 50-60 hours on a salary unless I’ve ran out of upward mobility at a company & just want to coast for a few months until I find something else
It's not all that surprising if you think about it. Let's say you go right to college after HS, and take a year off between college and med school (due to the competitiveness this is becoming very common, maybe even more common than direct admits). You'll enter medical school around age 23 and will be there until around age 27. You'll be a resident until at least 30, but maybe as late as 33 or 34 depending on the specialty - family med is only 3 years but some of the more intense surgical residencies can be 5-6 years. Fellowship is optionally another 1-4 years on top of that. With a few notable exceptions, the most lucrative specialties have you not drawing more than a token paycheck until your late 30's, best case.
Combine that 23ish-30ish age range with the fact that many (probably most) residents will work above the ACGME-mandated 80 hours a week for at least the first half of their residency, and I'm honestly shocked it's only ~21% of physicians that marry other physicians. Not to mention the fact that the income bump is substantial.
My fiancé is a physician and we met when she was a resident, and I'd say about 40% of all the residents I met during her residency who were in relationships were in a relationship with another physician.
It's insane how much worse med school is now. When my dad went in the 70s he got in straight out of undergrad, spent one year in an internship and 3 years in Ophthalmology residency before getting his first real paychecks around 30. Everything I hear about med school today makes me think he would have never made it nowadays.
So basically, if you happen to wonder outside long enough you could (theoretically) meet and marry someone that is not a physician - but you'll still never really get to see them?
I'm a sysadmin (though these days I get called a "cloud engineer", or "devops". ugh) married to a doctor.
That said I'm a university dropout, and she did a degree in computer science, before switching to become a physician.
I know a lot of CS people locally who are married to dentists and doctors. There are a lot of encounters between doctors, but my personal experience is that doctors marrying doctors (or other medical specialists) seem to get divorced quite frequently.
Could just be that since you see a lot of physicians marrying physicians, you also see a lot of physicians divorcing physicians. Without actual data, it's probably very hard to quantify the real divorce rate.
Yeah, I think a relative difference would be more helpful than the absolute number. There are lots of admin people so lots of jobs are likely to end up marrying one.
50% sounds crazy (and unsustainable). The women I've met in tech tend to, on average, have the same ambitions as their male counterparts - they chose this as a job/career, as opposed to having an actual passion for IT. A far cry from "my group of people" who grew up with BBS's, modems, demoscene, internet in the 90's. And I still try to hire only people who have a generic interest in computing and throw graduate resumes in the bin. Even if you discard the "passionate" ones from the equation you should end up with a ton more men, simply because of generic interest in STEM fields. Perhaps it's due to government incentives or something?
Sure, I appreciate a healthy mix as well. Just saying it's unrealistic to expect a 50/50 distribution of anything, in any field, expecially so in software development.
Curious as you mentioned degrees, do you know if the same ratio transfers over to actual work life?
US software developers are 19.4% female. Also, a same profession couple counts twice, so only roughly 1/3 off the female population is required to marry 6% of the female population and get to an aggregate of 12%. Same sex couples complicate this math, but I think the overall proportions would hold true.
If you want a REALLY crazy number, look at physicians marrying physicians, it’s like 45%
I’d imagine around 50% of married software engineers are women, so I guess the takeaway here is that male devs are doomed unless they can find a nice dev to marry?
If 10% of developers are female, there's a potential for 20% of all developers to be in male-female marriages. The data shown here had just 12% which could represent 60% of female software developers marrying male software developers (staggeringly high but not mathematically impossible).
I think there's two problems with that premise: (1) a large slice of that marriage number could be male-male or other marriages. (2) the figure "10% of developers are female" is true only if you're looking at global numbers. It's higher in the U.S. where these marriage figures originate.
Many anecdotal guesses are validated by this data. Doctors and agricultural workers are the obvious standouts, but I see a few more too.
Us programmers stick together. Quite a high rate of marrying within the community. Lawyers show a similarly high number.
A criticism of the study, is that it does not normalize by how many of these professions are in the general population. So, it appears as though software analysts don't like intermarrying. However, the truth is that there simply aren't enough of them around, they are simply more likely to run into software engineers, so that's whom they marry most.
IE. This study captures P(running into a profession) x P(preference for that profession). I would love to them model P(running into a profession), so that we could get the much juicer preferences of each group for various professions.
Except many couples meet in school, where they'd be exposed to a disproportionate number of potential spouses within their own field of study, and maybe to a lesser extent others in related programs within the same college.
Which would also be skewed by things like length of study and personality types attracted to particular interests.
Eg, Doctors and lawyers often don't want to get married until after school, at which point they've primarily been around other doctors and lawyers for the previous 3-7 years.
There's the gender gap, which you mentioned, as well as the economic aspect, but I wouldn't discount the fact (or at least perception?) that people who choose to work with children are more likely to act in a caring and maternal way towards your typical aspie engineer (as opposed to the more common judgemental and standoffish approach).
I’ve read that one reason wealth inequality is worse today is because high-education-high-income individuals want to marry other HEHI individuals whereas in the past this wasn’t the case. If the claim about the past is true, it seems to undermine your point
Men generally do not care about the income of their wife, as that's not what they're innately attracted to.
Hypergamy is characteristic of women and hence they want to marry up, and won't settle for someone who makes less than them.
The latter is a reason for why there are so many educated but unmarried women today in their 30s and 40s.
> women are attracted to money and status! Not men!!!
Professionals I know in the 20-35 cohort only want to date other professionals. The ones that don’t want some weird stay at home trophy wife dynamic.
There’s nothing provably innate about some men preferring trophy wives. There is a lot of availability due to cultural baggage. The phenomenon that you’re talking about is culturally bound.
Anecdotally my wife makes ~150k more per year than me. She’s made more than me for like 80% of our relationship. I’ve stayed at home with our son.
It’s not a weird dynamic. There is a threshold where if your partner isn’t making some meaningful amount of money relative to you, it’s better for them to just not work at all than spend 40 hours a week toiling away for a pittance of a paycheck. What is there to gain from having a wife work as a cashier when you make 10x as much as her?
You either want to be a power couple or just get the best partner you can and offer them a comfortable life. The relationships that are an exception to this are usually ones where both people started off equally and then one of them suddenly became massively successful but they still remain in love.
Trophy wife is not just about being stay at home. The term expresses lack of respect toward that wife, whose role is to look pretty and is not expected to contribute, to be knowledgeable nor have skills.
Second, men who earn a lot don't marry cashiers all that often. They want to marry within the same social class. They marry educated women whose earning potential is better then minimum wage.
Third, being stay at home partner comes with price and nowdays people really do it overwhelmingly because of children. The childless stay at home woman is mostly a rarity.
Partly because being dependent and fully paid by him comes with resentment and expectations on his side. The "I am working and you are just spending my money" feeling is one argument away. And partly because being bored, lonely and feeling useless most of time causes issues with her. Their interests and needs become different, so they diverge.
Unfortunately there is no guarantee that a woman with desirable genetic traits is also a high income earner, so in practice men must choose to concede some qualities if they are to have a good chance of finding a wife.
Usually, this means choosing beauty over earning potential, as beauty is much harder to find and then the value of money decreases as you earn more of it.
Seen from another culture: here in divorce assets are split, but not pensions, and there's no alimony. Stay-at-home divorced spouse could easily face financial hardships later in life.
Stay-at-home is not really a concept here beyond maybe a couple of years with a small child, otherwise it's just unemployment.
My limited observation is that women use HEHI as signal and as a filtering mechanism, otherwise non-HEHI men that could otherwise be candidates end up providing signal circumstantially through introductions, or a common environment that provides opportunities for serendipitous bonding to occur.
Men use it as a filter too, in my cohort (mid 30s, coastal US cities). A second six figure income in the partnership provides a lot of ease of mind, and is almost required if your goal is to live in certain neighborhoods.
I would say it is probably true that a smaller proportion of men use it as strong of a signal as women do, but that makes sense to me considering women have a decent risk of not being able to earn income due to childbirth and child rearing.
A wife who stays at home, manages the household and takes care of children is a "trophy wife" now? What has happened to society? Since when have traditionally feminine contributions been so devalued?
There's nothing wrong with earning money but there's nothing wrong with staying at home either. Some things money just can't buy.
What is the second claimed drawing from? It would seem like a stay at home parent was more common in the past, considering there were historically more single income families with children.
“The percentage of dual-income households with children under age 18 has been on the rise since the 1960s”
I don’t know whether it is innate, but it is cross-cultural: see Buss, D.M., 1989. Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and brain sciences, 12(1), pp.1-14.
“Hypergamy” was not a term I was familiar with so I had to look it up. In doing so, there are some references that indicate that it is not actually innate, but a product of culturally reinforced gender roles [1].
For example, if a woman is in a culture that limits her ability to be successful financially, it would follow that she values the ability to make money in a mate to overcome those societal constraints. The cursory look into the research showed that as gender roles in a society became less rigid, the effect of hypergamy was reduced. If it were truly innate, I would expect there to be no reduction in hypergamy as societal norms change.
[1] Hadfield, Elaine (1995). Men's and Women's Preferences in Marital Partners in the United States, Russia, and Japan (PDF). Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology Vol. 26 No. 6, Western Washington University. pp. 728–750.
I'd add that when you're in your 30s or 40s, you're simply too late. The good men are already taken.
There may still be plenty of men in the same age group, single and good earners, but almost by definition they won't meet the highest of standards. Because if they did, they wouldn't be single.
This reminds me of the classical efficient market economists perspective that it’s a waste of time to pick up a $100 bill from the sidewalk. Because if it were a real $100 bill somebody else would have obviously picked it up already.
I don’t know that you can make the claim that the mating market is completely efficient.
The reason that joke is funny is that the economists are ignoring the fact that someone has to be the first person to come across that $100 bill. One is not likely be the first woman to 'come across' a single man in his 30s-40s, who has presumably been 'on the sidewalk' for 10-20+ years.
From the classical economist perspective, there's no point in trying to beat the market because if it were possible, somebody would have already discovered and exploited it, leaving you unable to do so similarly.
Just like the dating claim that if somebody was desirable, they would have already been taken.
My claim is that both perspectives are wrong because neither market is perfectly efficient. Ironically, taking the approach that they are efficient makes it harder to accomplish either end of beating the market or finding a mate.
I'd guess it depends on how narrow or wide you define the "desirable" group. Research from dating sites often conclude that women select for the top 20% of men whilst largely ignoring everybody else.
I imagine such a "top" man to be handsome, sociable, strong, economically successful or at least stable, funny, and whatever other quality women select for.
The chance for such men to go unnoticed and unclaimed until they are 30-40 y/o has to be close to zero. Almost all female attention is channeled to them, and they're unlikely to be passive themselves. The market should be efficient here. Do you know of any hot successful men that are single due to not being discovered?
If you widen the selection criteria to the best 50% of men, you're likely right that some of them in their 30s go "undiscovered". Yet it's questionable whether this is so in large numbers as time still matters:
In the age group of 30-49, 27% of men are single. Half of them want to be single and are not on the market, so that leaves 13.5% of remaining "supply".
So a single woman in this same age group looking for a man finds 86.5% of men unavailable or not interested. Did the market perfectly select the "best" 86.5% already? No, human affairs are complex, but we also should not look away from basic dynamics. Nature finds a way, whether we like it or not.
In my country (Netherlands) already from age 20, only 20% of men is single. It's unlikely that all remain with this same partner for life, but this is to point out that selection start early, and almost all "supply" is immediately taken. I don't know if the market is efficient, but it sure is fast. When trying to find your first partner in your 30s, you're a decade too late if you have high standards. In your 40s, most people have a family with kids that might be up to 10 years old, so "late" doesn't even begin to express it.
>The chance for [handsome, sociable, strong, economically successful or at least stable, funny] men to go unnoticed and unclaimed until they are 30-40 y/o has to be close to zero.
No doubt it's a smaller pool, but close to zero? I would be skeptical about such an absolute claim unless there's actual data. The pew research article doesn't speak to this point specifically, and I'm not such how one would quantify it.
>So a single woman in this same age group looking for a man finds 86.5% of men unavailable or not interested
This is based on the assumption that the entire pool should be the denominator. I don't think it should, and the single men looking for a desirable mate are in the a similar situation, where over 60% of women are unavailable. If one was a highly desirable female, it would seem to they can still align with a highly desirable male because both pools are dwindling. It's not like every single female is competing with every other female. As the number of available mates goes down, so does the number of competitors, albeit at differing rates. I would expect those different rates to have an impact, but not so much that the effective ability to find a comparable mate to be driven to zero, at least not for someone in their 30s-40s.
To circle back to the economist train of thought, if alignment isn't happening it could be attributed to inefficiencies (e.g., there isn't a market that allows for relatively frictionless meeting between players) or there is a misalignment of expectations that prevents agreement between players (e.g., I can't get junk bond returns at AAA bond prices/risk).
I'm not going to be able to provide a scientific justification for the "close to zero" remark, I'm basing this on common sense. Handsome men stand out. They are desirable and attract attention wherever they go. As such, they can't be overlooked. If you then combine this favorable quality with great social skills, not only will they be discovered, it may be that man doing the discovery. If said man is also successful, not only will he be even more attractive, success is often visible, so the chance of being overlooked becomes practically impossible. But I'm sure it's not an absolute zero chance, I accept it to not be hard science.
You're absolutely right that using the entire pool is a simplification. In NYC, at age 30-40 there may be plenty of attractive mates left, as there's simply a lot of people in a small place and the career life style is the norm. Meanwhile, in the small rural town there may be no mate at all, or very few.
In the original example, highly educated women in their 30s-40s being single, I think it's a case of mismatch. Being both late and demanding (if we are to follow the stereotype) whilst supply is both low and low quality. Again, local exceptions can apply.
I do believe another complexity or nuance is the massive difference between being in your 30s or 40s. This decade is the time frame where almost everybody settles, many already in their mid twenties. Early 30s you may still stand a chance, in your 40s...really not the same thing. You're middle-aged and still have to start "life". Family planning may start to become an issue.
>This decade is the time frame where almost everybody settles
I think this gets to the heart of it. Nobody wants to "settle", meaning there is a mismatch between expectations between two parties.
To extend your original phrasing (which I disagree with), a desirable man would not be single in his 30s or 40s. But by the same logic, neither would a desirable female. The latter point being underscored by the stereotypical premium put on youth and biological pressure due to age.
So that analogy (which I disagree with) leaves you with a less desirable single female expecting to land a highly desirable male. Of course, this will lead to frustration and they will be, as you say (which I disagree with), forced to settle. I would argue they will be forced to make sure their expectations match reality. If your hypothesis holds, they wouldn't be single if they were truly highly desirable. I don't agree with that but I don't see why that same logic doesn't apply to both sexes, outside of market inefficiencies (which technology has heavily eroded).
Is there a particular reason why your original comment focused only on men? If anything, the reduced pressure to settle down due to a lower threshold of biological constraints seems to provide a basis for it to be less applicable to men, not more.
I didn't focus specifically on these women to imply it only applies to women, I merely responded to somebody far up the thread that singled out that demographic.
I think it's important to be precise about the group. I'm assuming a subset of women that have delayed relationships or family planning for 1-2 decades due to their full dedication to their careers. Most educated women would not fall in this group. They would have found some balance between the two, and start earlier with the social aspect of life. So the group is highly specific, to a degree extreme.
I do not believe that men and women look for the exact same qualities in each other. The thing these women optimized for (professional status) is not necessarily high on the list of all men. And even if it was, (many/most) men would settle for "less" in the meanwhile, indicating that again time is the selector. These women have desirable qualities, but they don't matter if they're not on the market when it matters.
The opposite situation is not the same. Whether it is biological or cultural, men fully dedicated to their career do tend to find partners accepting this imbalance, thus they don't wait until 40 years old to start a relationship or family. It doesn't even have to be a harmful stereotype if its fully consensual.
So I agree that this dynamic is less applicable to men. And indeed, said women have to adjust expectations.
Again I could sum it up as this: start in your twenties if you're picky.
I don't think the situations are at all similar. If you come across a $100 bill, chances are you are in fact the first person to come across it. You've already beaten the odds.
If you come across a man in his 30s-40s who has always been single, chances are he is not a '$100 bill' man. It's possible that he is, but it's very unlikely. This is not the same as saying that there are no such thing as older '$100 bill' men, just like $100 bills do sometimes (but very rarely) end up on sidewalks.
I think you’re missing the entire point of the joke.
>If you come across a $100 bill, chances are you are in fact the first person to come across it.
The economist assumes you won’t be the first person because of market efficiency. Your assumption above disregards this. It seems like you are having a hard time reconciling that with the imagined scenario of seeing the bill, because the assumption is someone who noticed it previously would have picked it up. The fact that those two don’t reconcile is the whole point.
The equivalent would be if someone were saying "Oh I met this handsome, rich, kind, unmarried 45-year-old man last night, but there must be something wrong with him, or else someone would have married him already." But I'm not saying that and I don't think the originator of this sub-thread is either. We're saying "Only a small portion of the available older men will actually be attractive mates (on whatever dimensions) because those who are attractive will have mostly been taken already."
It's like an economist saying "It's not a good use of your time to go outside scouring the sidewalks for $100 bills." That's not funny, it's just accurate.
>The equivalent would be if someone were saying "Oh I met this handsome, rich, kind, unmarried 45-year-old man last night, but there must be something wrong with him, or else someone would have married him already."
We may be reading it differently but to my eyes, GP said essentially the same thing with
"by definition they won't meet the highest of standards. Because if they did, they wouldn't be single."
In other words, that rich, kind, high standard unmarried 45 year old must have something wrong with him or he wouldn't be single. I didn't take them to mean "there's a smaller pool to select from" because that's trivially apparent as more people get married, but it also cuts down on the competition as well.
I don't think anyone would argue that the longer a buffet table is open, the less chance there is to get the best choices. But the economist was saying "That cake still on the buffet line can't be good because if it were, it wouldn't be there." That's much more aligned with the GP's statement.
No, not at all. I think from this context you'd understand that "good" means most attractive or most desired within the scope of selecting a partner. It doesn't mean you're a good or bad person in general.
And of course, some attractive ones are returned to the pool. But most are not, so the bigger issue of low supply remains.
Social class seems to have always played an important role in marriage (e.g. Jane Austen as a primer on 19th-century upperclass British society), so I'm not sure it's fair to say that this is change from the past. But I think it's fair to say that it is a factor in concentrating wealth.
Can you elaborate on why high achieving women are less likely to get married? I think the research shows the opposite and the marriages tend to last longer
At the individual level, yes, there will probably always be a man outcompeting any woman at the top of a competitive field. But on a population level, the instability [0] of matches where the woman out-earns the man means that the pattern of women outnumbering men in ever-more prestigious fields is going to leave some very successful women without good matches. And foregoing that weaker match has increasingly little apparent downside when you're finding some career satisfaction and materially very comfortable.
I think you're referring to the fact that successful marriages are largely becoming a luxury good, but these can both be true for a couple of reasons. First, using education as a proxy for attainment (please give me something better, because I haven't found it) I struggle to find statistics going past four year degrees to really talk about the top or competitive fields, and that isn't sufficient. Second, it seems reasonable to me that the women (and men) excelling professionally would have, on average, better chances of making a marriage work; it may be that a strong correlation between women's propensity for success in career and success in marriage is obscuring a negative effect of outlier-achievement on rates of getting and staying married that is also coming into play.
Besides all this, it's consistent with what I encounter in my daily life.
>women outnumbering men in ever-more prestigious fields is going to leave some very successful women without good matches.
I agree with your post but the quote above speaks to my original point further up the thread. The fact that this assumes that the only suitable mate is one of the same career status is part of what drivers income inequality.
Other than that, the only other proxy for attainment is income but it’s still the same story
>The fact that this assumes that the only suitable mate is one of the same career status is part of what drivers income inequality.
Absolutely. The proliferation of two-income families is a huge and well-documented driver of inequality. But the fact is that human woman tend not to marry below themselves in terms of some combination of status markers that they judge as important. And human men who don't feel like their contributions are important to the family (primary earner, mostly) tend to make their relationships less stable.
>the fact is that human woman tend not to marry below themselves in terms of some combination of status markers
I think this point to what people have an issue with. In many western cultures people are told marriage/mating is based on love, yet more than a trivial amount of what people see is largely based on status. They may not be mutually exclusive, but not weighted in the proportion that is commonly spoken about
Once again, I am in almost complete agreement; I am the last person to defend popular US American messaging about love and match-making. It is mostly fanciful lies, and telling young people how you wish things were does not prepare them for life.
IIRC it was the book The Meritocracy Trap that detailed the change from past generations, but I don’t know the numbers or underlying sources off the top of my head
Thanks for bringing up the source; if you do end up finding the data I'd love to see it. It's also fascinating to think about the relationship between social changes like this one and some of the economic/political drivers of inequality (less progressive taxation/inegalitarian investments in education/globalization). I suspect that the rise of tertiary education over the past 40-50 years which has further stratified educational attainment along class lines may be a relevant factor.
>I suspect that the rise of tertiary education over the past 40-50 years which has further stratified educational attainment along class lines may be a relevant factor.
This was a central point to the aforementioned book. The gist being elites invest in education, skill investment, and long hours that leads to more money that they can use to invest in more education and skill development in their children to repeat the cycle. The irony being that, while education and skill development work to gain material success, the long hours required to stay at the top of the competitive heap also makes the meritocratic winners miserable.
I guess it depends on how you define winner. If you measure winning primarily by social status or money, sure. But one of the main points of the book is to illustrating the costs of all that "winning".
There was one quote from the book of a high-achieving mother who, due to long hours, only got to spend 20 minutes a day with her child but "wouldn't give up those 20 minutes for the world."
If you're someone who values close human relationships, I don't know if I'd call that "winning".
I think this is a valid point in the United States (to a certain extent, of course: I don't think "working too hard and not seeing your kids enough" is really comparable to "living paycheck to paycheck", although I understand that they're directionally the same). Does the author address other countries, though? The logic of meritocracy has been used to justify huge increases in inequality in countries where people work significantly less hard (e.g. France, India, Sweden).
Why? In the past (pre 1960s/70s/80s) spouses largely didn't meet in college/university level education or at the workplace, or if they did, it wasn't as peers.
But my point isn't so much that people meet in college, so much as there isn't really a good way to adjust statistical measurements to account for the popularity of a particular field/job, as was suggested up thread.
There are way too many related, interdependent, conflicting variables, with common field of study being a major one, even for the smaller disciplines.
Out of curiosity, makes you think they didn’t? I mean, it was prevalent enough to coin a derogatory term for women who attended college for the explicit intent to be a wife [1]. I not sure I agree there isn’t a way to adjust for other variables, but I will concede it doesn’t seem like the data went that far.
Do you have a link to this article/study? I'd like to explore this concept more. I don't know if it's true but it certainly seems within the realm of possibility
I brought it up in another comment, but I believe it came from the book The Meritocracy Trap. Although, since I don't know the exact quote or underlying sources from memory, I could be mis-remembering
> This study captures P(running into a profession) x P(preference for that profession). I would love to them model P(running into a profession), so that we could get the much juicer preferences of each group for various professions.
The page links to a different visualization of the same data, [0] which attempts to control for the prevalence of a job within the population.
Maybe it doesn't go far enough for you but that's a pretty big first step in that model.
> so that we could get the much juicer preferences of each group for various professions.
You'd probably just get a bunch of data that tells you the more female a profession is the more it wants to marry up and the more male a profession is the more it wants to marry toward a profession with a lot of young women.
This is us only though.
In my country, most programmers end up with psychologists, but because there are so many women psychologists and not a lot of female programmers.
> But the real explanation is that realistically 90% of people meet their spouses in university.
I believe in the last census it was found that something like 48% of American adults had an associates degree or higher educational attainment. It seems that that fact, on its face, makes your assertion nearly impossible.
Once you’re in that crowd you continue to run with that crowd- there is no hurry to get hitched at that age, the opportunities to find a match after you’re established professionally will still be there.
On the topic of analysts, I've been wondering for a long time about "systems analyst" which used to be the cool job in computing in the 1980s but then essentially vanished. I was never quite sure what systems analysts did.
Getting back to the data visualization, a lot of it seems to be that male-dominated jobs pair with female-dominated jobs, which isn't particularly surprising.
From my viewpoint, the role got split. The technical responsibilities got pushed to an engineer's job with the architect role, the business responsibilities got pushed to the product manager role.
> Doctors and agricultural workers are the obvious standouts
Doctor is one of the few profession that's available in the countryside, where 90% of the jobs will be in the agricultural sector.
> So, it appears as though software analysts don't like intermarrying. However, the truth is that there simply aren't enough of them around, they are simply more likely to run into software engineers, so that's whom they marry most.
They also broke down Software Engineers into a few different professional tittles. Computer Analyst Specialist sounds very... East Coast 90's.
The data shows physicians predominantly marry other physicians and ag workers tend to marry other ag workers. Not that physicians and agricultural workers inter-marry
Even in rural areas, I doubt 90% ag workers is to be found in the United States. It takes shockingly few people to run a modern farm and the majority are owner-operated with zero employees. These areas will still have substantial rates of doctors, teachers, truckers, and service workers, among others.
I think you'd see a lot of professions of people who culturally value a homemaker, not anything about the highest paying careers. My guess is that the list you describe would be dominated by the trades, trucking, and small business ownership.
The Pastors I've known in my life have been dual-income households, and Megachurches are infamous for using that set-up. Though I grew up in a small town with a decent mix of residential incomes, so there was no particularly poor churches in town.
This is true, I'm in a community that values having a parent at home with the kids. Many are on wages most would expect make it impossible but they live good lives.
Some very small business owners, charity works (earning very little) and a few high paid professionals.
Stay-at-home parents do a lot of financially valuable but unaccounted work that can come quite close to improving the family finances almost as much as if they had a job near the median salary.
You're making a lot of assumptions there. Is it "blue collar" to only have one working parent while the other takes care of the family? I would think most people would prefer that if they can make it work. I am a fairly well compensated software engineer and my wife stays home to take care of the kids because we can afford it, and many others that I work with do the same. It seems a bit silly to have her work just so that we can pay someone else to raise our children for us.
Are there people who don't value a homemaker? You don't value good home-cooked food? A clean house? Clean clothes? Children clothed and fed? Everything else your mother did for you?
I'll throw in an anecdote: I didn't know stay-at-home parents were a thing until embarrassingly late. Like mid- to late-teens. Both my parents worked, all _their_ parents worked, and all my friends parents worked. The only exposure I had to the concept of homemakers was very tangentially on tv, where I assumed the mothers were home because they took the day off. The general attitude of everyone involved in my life was that anyone who stayed at home after the children were old enough to attend school was lazy and mooching off their spouse. Not that that is true, but to directly answer your question: yes, there are people who don't value homemakers.
If an adult child said they want to stay home, cook for you and clean the house, and maybe look after younger siblings, most people would say they need to grow up and get a job.
Can you really not see the difference here? You do know children generally outlive their parents, right?
But the more general difference is a home maker is not a maid. A home maker owns the home. That's a very big difference. Somehow people have been convinced that it's better to work to build/maintain someone else's property instead of your own.
> Somehow people have been convinced that it's better to work to build/maintain someone else's property instead of your own.
It is a bit strange, isn't it?
We've transitioned to having both parents work, but then we pay a large percentage of the extra income on child care, house upkeep (cleaning, repairs, improvements, etc), prepared food, etc. -- things that one parent could do if they were at home instead of working for someone else. It seems worse for the kids too, to have both parents working.
It doesn't have to be the mother by the way. But I also don't think the idea of a stay-at-home mom should be as condemned as it is, at least in certain circles. Women should absolutely have the choice to not be a stay-at-home mom, but it should be a choice without stigma attached either way.
I once dated a lovely beautiful nerdy funny intelligent successful software engineer.
Our first five dates were awesome. So much agreement and joy and commonality. Instant connection and camaraderie.
Further on we realized we didn't bring enough to relationship. We didn't want the"gender I'm attracted version of myself". We each wanted somebody to bring new perspectives, challenge us in ways that work and nerdy friends don't, to talk about not work after work, or at least different work, etc. Ultimately even somebody to disagree with us.
After a few similar experiences, it's not that I ever actively avoided a software engineer partner, it's just that they never seemed to last long. Love of my life is English major with career in retail and home depot / Canadian tire store manager. She brings softer , more emotionally intelligent, people oriented side to our family. I'm the annoying pedantic literal obsessive nerdy one :-D. Works well!
Edit : All of my close developer friends are similarly married to arts major types. Interestingly, I now realize, great many of my acquaintance developer friends have nerdy or techu partners. Wonder what variables are at place but definitely to each their own!
I had a similar experience dating someone in the field, though it went on a bit longer. for me it was just kinda rough to come home from a day of working on software to talk to my SO about their problems with software. great person, but it was an exhausting relationship.
on the other hand, most of my friends also do software stuff and we enjoy complaining to each other about work. I guess maybe the difference is you can say "not now" to a friend more easily than a partner.
I'm in this situation now. I'll have a bad day, then my partner comes home and dumps her bad day on top of mine. I don't know to handle it, because if I ask her to stop she sulks. It means I don't care about her bad day.
Oh, THAT part has little to do with profession; my spouse's and my jobs were completely different (or so we thought!), but if your relationship works and you are "each other's 'person'", ranting about work is part of the SLA :->
FWIW, my experience:
- Key is to look at sum balance. Yes, absolutely, somebody else unwinding will increase your stress level; but IF unwinding reduces their stress level more than it increases yours (and vice verse when the tables are turned), it's a net win. And it goes beyond work rants; any intimate opening, sharing of concern or anxiety or even admitting past wrongs etc, will impose a burden on the listener. But if you believe or can work it out so that, e.g. "this increased my burden by +10 but reduced your burden by -70, so it's a good thing we did it", it'll help build mutual understanding and trust.
- Show empathy, don't try to solve. Cliche, stereotypical, but a person will tell you when they need active considered advice, as opposed to sympathy and ear. HARD for any of the IT problem solving personalities :)
- As a natural result of first two, you'll figure out who's had a worse day and gets priority; and you'll also figure out how to take some of their burden without becoming overwhelmed with it. Again, if their ask is sympathy not resolution, it's actually a lot less burden upon you than it may feel; or rather, us problem solvers impose burden on us that's not actually there :)
- More personal, but, FWIW... my spouse shared bad stories and rants about their work as a store manager, the drama of customers and supervisors and workers and people and policies etc, for 3 or 4 years. I listened patiently, tried to show support... didn't even realize how much I ingested & learned from it. When I transformed from sysadmin to people manager, after a year I realized that I've been implementing all the hard earned experience, lessons learned, approaches and thoughts she shared. One day, all my work problems were her problems of 3 years ago and it allowed me to succeed in that unforeseen (and somewhat unsought:P) transformation. So as we awkwardly say in my language, you never know what's good for what :)
>Key is to look at sum balance. Yes, absolutely, somebody else unwinding will increase your stress level; but IF unwinding reduces their stress level more than it increases yours (and vice verse when the tables are turned), it's a net win
Disagree here. If the other person is always or even is just mostly doing the unloading that's not fair and you just end up sacrificing yourself to the utility monster following this advice. This isn't to say don't ever be empathetic, but also don't let yourself be victim to an "empathy vampire"
It's unlikely a couple will be able to fully equalize this aspect depending on granularity of time slice: on any given day/week/month, one of you may be in better or trickier or happier or more stressful place at work, with friends, in general.
I agree that if through the entirety of relationship support is strictly one-way, that is explicitly not the way I want my relationship to work (though there are others who do seek a one-way relationship from both perspectives).
FWIW my wife is not in software (urban planner) and when she has a bad day at work it is draining and tough. It has nothing to do with working in the same industry. It is just hard work to be there for your partner and support them. Good luck.
That will not change if you were dating someone who is not a software developer. They will just be talking about how their day organic farming was shitty instead of how their day writing code was shitty.
maybe this is shitty of me but i'm really sensitive to negativity. my wife tends to have moments of complaining a lot, and i've found repetitive but sympathetic responses to complaints helps her realize how much she's complaining and makes her stop without me having to actually ask her to stop. she's even commented some days that it feels like i've said "sorry to hear that baby" about a thousand times. and she's right, I do have days where is say it a ton because she's complaining a ton
I'm in the same boat; my household is certainly much more resilient and effective with a technically-focused, detail-oriented engineer and an emotionally intelligent human-oriented teacher in it than it would be with two of me (we certainly have better relationships with our neighbors and community this way, at the very least).
Could be something to do with a tech-literate person is _more_ valuable to an arts person than to another tech person. E.g. arts person wants their small plumbing jobs done, their offspring taught math properly, and so on, but other tech person doesn't need that because they do those things themselves.
Maybe, but FWIW... yes I'm in charge of networking setup at home, oil changes and such and all the tools are at least ostensibly "mine", but she's VERY DEFINITELY in charge of plumbing and house infra :-D.
[not to mention, she can easily pay somebody to take care of house infra; whereas I cannot afford the full-time mentorship services of a socially aware and emotionally intelligent coach :P ]
So both me and my wife are software developers, but it's interesting because I'm a game dev(predominantly C++) but she is a full stack web dev - we have pretty much nothing in common when it comes to work. I have zero clue about web development, and similarily, she's not interested in games development/C++ programming.
So we still share loads of general interests as similarly geeky people, but one thing we don't do is we don't talk about work at home - outside of like office gossip and the like.
No, we're also super compatible as well. There's more to it than money.
I just think that a lot of couples have problems and disputes that would not exist if they had money to throw at the problem to make it go away. Like a lot of stressful problems in life, marriage or otherwise.
To steal a line from comedian Daniel Tosh: "Money doesn't buy happiness. Isn't that what people say? Money doesn't buy happiness? I dunno if that's true or not- I don't have any money. I'll tell you what I have learned. Poverty doesn't buy happiness. That I'm positive of."[0]
It's also important to me that my wife is not dependent on me. She makes enough money that if I were an asshole she could walk out the door and never once worry about how she'll get by. Which means she is in this relationship because she wants to be.
Having been in one of those, and seen some others blow up?
It’s great until someone stops making so much money, or you get kids and some of lifes harder issues (or mental illness) come up and the friction points aren’t something you can just spend your way out of anymore.
Then the money can get used as a weapon to maximize suffering, and yikes.
People are really stereotyping in this thread. There can still be a lot of variance in engineering. Furthermore engineers aren’t robots; my engineer-partner does-pottery, and engineer-me has a liberal arts degree.
There are still struggles, but the money part has a material impact. IVF (it took us 7 rounds) is very emotionally draining... but it's likely an order of magnitude less so when money is not a factor.
Funny enough, my anecdata has been the inverse. Thats is being a software engineer has been sufficient evidence for people to walk away without even getting to know me. Which is definitely interesting because I've had people say "I cant believe you're an engineer, you're nothing like the other engineers I know" outside my work context.
Wow - that is still happening? The initial interest followed by that sudden glazed disinterest as soon as they find out your job. Or is it location based where they have formed a stereotype from previous encounters? I had thought a well paying job would be a good start to a relationship (enough money does prevent a lot of problems). Personally I don’t like judgmental people (I’m meta-judgemental) so it usually has been no great issue to be ignored.
Happened to me when I was in college, ~a decade ago. As soon as the major was known, disinterest. Was judged by the cover.
People still even assume that I must wear contacts, because I guess nerd == glasses, and they don't see glasses, ergo contacts? Like, nope… I just don't require those.
Not dating since a few years, but living near a tech hub, the 20-30 year old population was 1.4:1 men to women. You could imagine it was tough, but most single men in that age bracket were stereotypical socially unaware software engineers. Just don't talk anything nerdy and you're golden.
"I can't believe you work at BigTech!"
I don't think that's changed. +30yo is a different subject, though, most stereotypes are ironed out by then.
This was one of the reasons I moved to NYC many years ago over Silicon Valley. No doubt the career opportunities in SV would have been greater but the diversity in company (both friendly and romantic) has a lot going for it.
When I first became interested in having a girlfriend I thought I wanted to find a girl who was just like me but in a female body. I would become infatuated with any girl who was remotely attractive and showed similar interests to me, like programming, cycling, gaming etc. I've since realised there is not a single woman in the world who is into things like I'm into them, and it's better that way because I value more than just their body.
I have just learned I'm the same way. I had actually never thought about it, but I had an unexpected physical negative reaction when I saw the stats on software developers so often pairing with other software developers.
Just something about it turns my stomach. I hope its not some internalised misogyny, as I have no similar response to idea of a partner in any other high skilled job, such as physician, or barrister, or researcher, etc.
I definitely wouldn't want to date me, and I'm a pretty generic SWE. I think many of us are low in empathy, and seek out partners who have more empathy. A natural balance, so to speak.
Yeah, this vis needs to filter out teachers and nurses since they are top results for anybody, and/or professions need to be color coded by category so I can glance at a list of 15 items and see that ${medicalprofessional} surprisingly marries educators.
I'm also curious what percentage of people married to people in their career field is due to meeting on the job. Are you more likely to marry someone in your profession? Or is "working together" just a very common way to meet your spouse?
The coupling trends that seem interesting to me would be hard to study.
In the gay community it used to be really common for white collar and blue collar guys to get together and that really helped form a power couple as one could handle the rough stuff and repairs and the other could handle the money and the paperwork. Nowadays that still happens, but it is rare because there is so much social conflict that the blue collar gays are more likely to just marry women and have men on the side because that is so much easier and the white collar gays stick to themselves.
Among straight people in the San Francisco Bay Area I have noticed a trend of wealthy techies, mostly but not exclusively men, getting hitched to ordinary folks like teachers and mechanics. It seems to mostly work out well as a way of dealing with the housing crisis, but at a basic level it seems like a deeply unbalanced and unhealthy situation.
Just some potentially related anecdata. Mileage will vary.
A few years ago I read a study which analysed this but I can't find the link. All I remember was among the occupations considered, actuaries were the least likely to divorce, especially to other actuaries. I think this is simply a consequence of the intellectual statifiction of society.
Thanks for linking this, this is as interesting as the main post imo. It's funny how most of the results are as expected,
actuaries as the occupation with the lowest divorce rate, while jobs as bartenders and flight attendants sport the highest ones.
What's up with gaming related jobs being at the top though? Gaming managers and gaming services workers especially.
> What's up with gaming related jobs being at the top though
If I had to stereotype based on US gaming companies:
-Long hours
-Relatively low pay
-Typically located around urban centers (so a higher CoL)
-If the controversies at Riot, Activision Blizzard, and Ubisoft are any indication then many game related employees are emotionally stunted and immature.
Pay divided by days at home. The list will be topped by airline pilot, trucker, etc, paired with whatever the most common professions for those professions to marry are.
When I was at university, Engineering and Psychology used to have parties together. But that might also have been because Engineering was 80% men and Psychology 80% women.
I do wonder if an unspoken part of the drive (even if a small part) to get more women in tech is to get more male engineers coupled up.
There are tons of single males in STEM making buckets of money, spending very little, and retiring early. Not only does that mean the profession loses a ton of people before they become senior and have time to train up the next generation, but it reduces supply of engineers and forces employers to keep salaries high.
I imagine that would be worse with more Dual STEM marriages. I made buckets of money and retired early, but it could have been earlier if my spouse also made buckets of money instead of working in a field where the pay didn't justify the agrivation.
In that case, there would have been two senior STEMers leaving the field early.
I gradumated from there... This is like the first time seeing its name here.
I'm not sure I saw any nursing students while there. All of the students I knew were in the engineering program, or had started there and moved to the business program (often as an intermediate step before dropping out)
Biomedical engineering seemed to have the least skewed ratio when I attended... But it's also really fing hard.
Unfortunately, the statistician or data scientist that put this visualization together neglected to include statisticians and data scientists in the list of searchable jobs.
I would be interested in seeing this data by age so we can see any changes in the past few decades. Perhaps profession on marriage date. I do not expect there to be decent data available for this though.
There was some really similar research done in Finland, and they concluded that many of the correlations were because students of certain fields used to go to the same parties / events.
E.g. Computer Science students had a lot of parties with nurses, and this then caused a correlation in marriages between those groups as well
I find it funny that for "Software quality assurance analysts and testers" by far most common partner is "Software developer". However "Software quality assurance analysts and tester" isn't even in the list for "Software developers"
*Clears threat*. Did anyone perhaps inquire about Bayesianism?
See, it can be explained by Bayes theorem. P(A | B) = P(B | A) * P(A) / P(B)
Look at all ordered pairs of people in a couple. Let A be the proposition that the first person is a Dev, and B be the proposition that that the second person is QA.
P(A | B) now expresses how common it is for QA people to have a Dev partner. And P(B | A) expresses how common it is for devs to have a QA partner.
What the theorem tells us that the difference is simply explained by P(A) / P(B), that is the relative commonness of the professions. Or to be precise the commonness of the professions in the subset of people who have a partner.
Yes, same for "Interpreters and translators" marry software developers at about 2%, but software developers don't marry "interpreters and translators" - not even on the list
They used to be separate occupation codes, but they were merged in 2005 (https://usa.ipums.org/usa/volii/c2ssoccup.shtml). Perhaps because there weren't enough legislators to justify getting their own category, so they got lumped in with the closest other profession?
My girlfriend is a neurologist and I'm a software engineer. While both of our professions tend to marry within their communities, we got together because of a shared interest in brains. My day job involves artificial neural networks, so there's a lot of matches there.
One thing that is particularly nice is that I can discuss my work with her and vice versa, so she's actually been really helpful with answering some tough questions, it makes for an interesting dynamic.
Oh, and she earns twice what I do, it's crazy how much money neurologists make.
I’m a big believer in the engineer (logical) and helping professions (emotional). match. If you look at the category of ‘software developers’ and add up all the helping professions like teachers and nurses and others it is the #1 pairing. This software engineer has been married to his teacher wife for 29 years and going strong …
FYI virtually all of the professions have elementary teacher within top 3 professions... probably over-represented in data set since it would be reported through government channels more often.
No opinion on your main point though - you may be right :)
Definitely with you on this one. Not married (yet), but my partner is a nurse (by education) and I am a data scientist. Among her (ex-)colleagues, the proportion of marrying to engineers/IT guys/... was significant.
Totally with you. I can't imagine being married to "another one of me" - either there's not much you add to each other, or you're competing.
Like you, my wife doesn't just work in another field but is very much more driven by care and emotion and logic and "justice" that matter to me. Sometimes this makes it hard to co-exist since we literally look at problems from a totally different perspective, but the resolution of that conflict (or figuring out how to coexist despite the difference) is incredibly enriching, I'd not get to grow this way with someone else.
Software developers often marry other software developers, and computer programmers often marry computer programmers, but it is apparently rare for a software developer to marry a computer programmer.
(Also, apparently mathematician isn't a real job.)
I would guess that mostly comes down to age. "Computer programmers" is kind of an old-fashioned job classification, so it's going to skew much older than "software developers".
Teacher's a great pairing for any profession that might involve moving around quite a bit. Teaching jobs are available everywhere and you're probably not going to miss out on big bucks by being in one place versus another. Higher pay here, lower pay there, sure, but after CoL it mostly evens out.
It's also damn near the only career in the US that provides roughly European levels of time off, and, crucially, pretty good (by US standards) parental leave. Time it right and you can be off for four months or so with your newborn, which is a very rare benefit in the US (yeah, I know, some super-rich tech companies offer such perks, but those are uncommon jobs).
Teacher's schedule also means that parent can usually handle afternoon-but-before-5 kid stuff, if the other parent's schedule's standard and inflexible.
On the other hand, at UTAustin when I was there, the College of Engineering had a pretty serious lock on the College of Education---they frequently had social events together, for example.
Nursing and teaching are extremely portable jobs. When I was a military officer, other than people like me (was married to another Army officer), anyone whose spouse worked tended to be married to nurses and teachers because it was really easy for them to relocate since the licensing tends to be reciprocal everywhere and hospitals and schools are pretty much always hiring and are located everywhere, not just New York and San Francisco or big cities in general.
Lots of people are teachers. Also any of the heavily gendered professions appear this way because given a hetero relationship, there is a relatively high chance at least one person is in one of these.
Lastly I know some people who avoiding marrying other teachers because the combined salary is less than many single professions.
I wonder if it’s the opposite. From my experience dentists tend to run their own practice or partner with one or two other dentists. Could it just make sense for the spouse to run the financial / administrative portion of the small business?
Whenever I meet a woman that has studied psychology it is, on average, easier to connect with them as I can relate with how they experienced their studies.
But they can't always relate with me when I'm stuck on a bug :'(
Anyway! :D
My point is: some of us have done more degrees, and can therefore pick and choose from multiple categories since a shared study experience does carry over into an easier dating process (my experience at least).
It would be nice if age or duration of marriage was also put into play. Additionally how much people moved. It's not always true, but sometimes one person in a relationship is the "portable" one who can find a job in many areas.
A theory I once read goes like this: in the past it was quite common for lawyers, directors, managers to marry their secretaries, which was the way for them to jump to higher social class. Now, a director making advances towards their secretary faces immediate sexual harassment lawsuit, so they choose to marry other managers/directors instead.
For the 1/10 times at work where the person in power ends up having a meaningful relationship with an underling that you lose, you also have the 9/10 cases of sexual harassment that you lose too.
It's a bad thing from the secretary's point of view if a) she consents to the advances and b) successfully leverages that into a marriage with far greater benefits for her and her offspring.
Yes, I've wondered the same thing. Anti-sexual harassment training, and more broadly the discouraging of socialization between men and women, has also reduced the opportunity for men and women to marry. The flip side of the male executive no longer being able to chase his secretary around a desk to try to pinch her on the butt is another executive not being able to politely court the secretary he is in love with (and vice versa).
I don't have a good answer for how to get the one without the other, but both are consequences of modern sensibilities.
More and more, I'm beginning to think that a society in which there is widespread use of birth control and in which the majority of women enter the labor force and work full time in an office is not going to be able to maintain replacement level fertility rates.
In which case, the future belongs to societies where women don't work and birth control is stigmatized.
It could be that there is a reason why the world was dominated by large patriarchal societies other than some sort of accident of history.
If that's true, then a society with lots of gig jobs or work at home jobs might help alleviate the problem. There could be other creative solutions, like reimagining higher education to give people time to marry and have kids before college. Other approaches are also possible. Whatever the reason, the secular societies will need to scramble if they don't want the world of the future to be dominated by orthodox religious populations.
The solutions are quite simple. Provide free daycare. Provide 1 or ideally 2 year long parental leaves for both parents. Provide a somewhat generous child allowance for up to 3 kids.
The hard truth is that it's not as expensive or complicated to encourage people having child but for some reason we are trying to do anything except for the things that actually matter: allowing parents that want to spend all their time with their new child this opportunity and allowing parents that can't be bothered to handle all the early mechanical aspects to avoid them.
Cheaper starter housing and for the US cheaper higher education would also help but I'm convinced those are lower priority than targeting the early years.
So much? Singapore's GDP per capita is $60k per year so $5k per month. If $2 month's worth of GDP for 1 baby so an entire lifetime of a new citizen is a lot, then I don't even know what to say.
> for something that used to come naturally through cultural forces, then it’s probably not sustainable
Having kids sucks (your mileage may vary, but before ~2-3 years the investment >>> benefits for all but the most dedicated people out there). Kids used to be cheap labor, which is now illegal for good reasons and they could be abused at will for various things, which is also illegal for good reasons. They were also frequently born because women didn't have a say in the matter, which is also becoming illegal for good reasons.
It is sustainable, it just needs to be done properly and respectfully.
Not by treating women like broodmares and kids as slaves to be worked to death and beaten up by adults who don't have any other way to relieve stress.
Do you have some data on how widespread and effective it was? Perhaps this also contributed to Rome's population problems - it needed to rely on the provinces to supply labor and manpower for a substantial portion of the Empire, and eventually the capital was moved away from Rome entirely. Constantinople was also basically empty by the time it was conquered, having a population of only 50,000 people when the Turks arrived, from a high of one million.
But I think in such ancient societies, the struggle is a little different. E.g. when you are being ravaged by wars and plagues, you need more than replacement level fertility. You need huge fertility that can recover massive population loss in a short period of time. After Hannibal decimated the population of Italy, Rome recovered remarkably quickly. They just made more Romans. Later on, that stopped working and they needed manpower from the provinces.
In modern societies, we've licked most of the other stuff and so can keep going much longer as fertility declines, to the point where we start noticing only when rates hit below replacement. Traditional societies would see population loss long before fertility rates fell below replacement.
The obvious solution is artificial wombs, but that is probably very far in the future. But since you're talking about who the future belongs to, that's who. Until then, probably low population density already-developed countries that have fairly open immigration policies to accept the children of foreign breeders. That has seemed to mostly mean the US for the past few centuries, but places like Canada and Australia could easily employ similar strategies.
Even short of artificial wombs, there is a lot that can be done to help with this. The real issue isn't that women don't want to have kids at all, ever. It's that if they enter the labor force and work full time, usually it gets put off, often until it's not exactly too late, but at least too late to have as many children as you might have if you'd started earlier, bringing down the national birth rate because too many would-be mothers have aged out. There could easily be medical solutions to that focused on making pregnancy more viable in late middle-aged women. Better prenatal care, cheaper treatments for infertility. Even non-medically, it could just be more flexible working arrangements like you mentioned, work from home, better and cheaper daycare, more generous universal leave policies that don't single out parents, possibly something like sabbaticals that universities do but for commercial ventures, too. Mandatory paid gap years for people in their 30s even if they don't have children. A country that pulls that off could keep the economic advantage of having a larger workforce talent pool to draw from without sacrificing internal population growth.
Obviously, private employers can't bear that burden and it would need to be subsidized by the government, but if you really believe there would be significant national strategic advantages to doing this, then it should be subsidized by the government.
I always see people mentioning better employment benefits and more flexibility to increase fertility in working women. Unfortunately, I think this misses a fundamental problem with working and motherhood: opportunity cost. The more driven, promising, smart and successful a woman is, the higher her opportunity cost of having children. You also have to take into account that young people are not just working for current earnings but also investing in their skills for future earnings. It would then be reasonable for young women to simply take advantage of the more relaxed work environment for further career advancement. It’s likely what explains Europe’s low birthrates despite more generous welfare policies. Eventually as people get older their career progression stabilizes and the opportunity cost falls to the point where they can afford to have children. Notice that opportunity cost is not money per say. For example poorer working class people tend to have more children, I suspect, because their opportunity cost is lower. So, in a sense, the poorer you are the more affordable children become.
Marriage is actually a great financial choice for most people. If marriage rates are dropping, I'd blame our culture — the financial incentives are clearly there.
Only if you manage to avoid the often catastrophic downside risks, which are very apparent and very frequent in many industries. It's quite straightforward and convenient (in that there is an entire industry in family law serving it) to completely destroy decades of earnings and often times decades of future earnings for one or both parties.
Have seen it happen, and literally half of the couples in the 'good part of town' where I used to live which was populated almost exclusively by well educated white collar professionals were either going through it/at some stage of it, or were in a clearly abusive situation that might even have benefited from doing it - as long as they didn't wait for the other party to really screw them over by pulling the trigger first and alleging abuse or whatever.
A friends neighbor had been on the receiving end (along with their daughter) of literally years of verbal and emotional abuse from the wife for no apparent reason. She would go after neighbors too, if they dared to exist in her presence.
Both of them were lawyers. Last time I was over there a month ago, after an hour of it, he just begged her to stop screaming in the most pitiful voice I've heard a man ever use. So she yelled at him more for being so pitiful.
It's hard to really understand how terrible a prior trusted loved one can be until you've been on the other end of it. It's easy to assume it's because the other party did something wrong to deserve it too - but that is not usually the case in my experience. It's often lack of emotional regulation/healthy outlets for stress or life problems, usually reinforced by denial from the abuser.
The abusee often can't figure out how to escape or feels held hostage, sometimes also by denial at their own problems or inability to cope that lead them to that state of insecurity.
While marriage (the legal process) can magnify the upside, it can also dramatically magnify the downsides too, and make it MUCH MUCH harder to escape a bad situation for everyone.
It's quite a shit sandwich. Always has been near as I can tell.
> Unluckily, you cannot insure yourself against the immense risk of alimony payments if a divorce should happen.
Of course you can. You can know thyself and know thy partner and have the maturity to understand what you're getting into, and the ability to commit despite that. EG: I know there's 0% chance that my wife and I will get divorced, not because marriage is so easy but because we're both people who are able to work through difficulties towards a common goal.
Men don't see it coming because they don't care. Quite frequently men are in bad relationships that don't affect them much but they generally don't walk away.
Women pull the trigger when they can't take it anymore.
This could be the reasoning of someone with survival bias though.
Unfortunately, life can be complicated, e.g. family member went through undiagnosed schizophrenia for many years, one can imagine how that upset the marriage assumptions prior to the mental health issues.
Sure. However, there are plenty of not so straightforward people too who are very well aware of loopholes in our law, society and human psyche and they are happy to exploit them.
What if you were drafted, served in a war overseas and came back with severe PTSD? For my parents generation that was a real thing that caused a lot of divorces.
Think of the tens of millions of families who last their dad in ww1 and ww2. Even that is echoing through time, because their missing influence probably impacted their Children’s success and so on.
You can mitigate most of this if you're wealthy already.
Basically, one of many things you can do - in any jurisdiction - is move all your assets to your private foundation and simply not pay yourself for the duration of the marriage, including what you personally make while in the marriage if anything. Non-profits can invest indiscriminately in anything so the money can keep growing and supporting almost anything you want.
During divorce proceedings you have pretty much nothing, except the history of earnings if any which indeed can be used to compute your alimony payments. But all your accumulation and assets are not in your name, so the alimony won't be consequential compared to the horror stories we've heard of ex-spouses having to check themselves into jail when they ran out of money to pay. Back to this plan, don't forget to load up on debt as a general lifestyle choice, way before the marriage has issues. Personally you should never have positive net worth, and there should also be a line of creditors such that anyone else has to get in line or fuck off.
Afterwards you can direct your foundation to pay you a hefty salary.
The purpose isn't to screw your spouse over, its to be judgement proof from all kinds of creditors (and maintain your standing in society as a philanthropist). That will include mitigating the folly of silly unlimited liability contracts such as marriage contracts. Simply put, the clauses could be better. Love, finances, much like a lawyer I don't really care about what emotional reasons people associate with marriage and those are always available whether you do 5 minutes of estate planning or not. In my perspective, removing the downsides allows for both spouses to focus on love or whatever they want to do together. Something more commonly associated with marriage, by at least one spouse.
"I donated everything to non-profits!"
You get to win through many life events here. A state judge will not be able to undermine the federal status of the non-profit. They do have discretion over the pre-nup agreement though. So if you have the money to make a ridiculously unsexy pre-nup agreement, you have the money to make a ridiculously sexy private foundation which gets to exist in subtlety.
If you are saving up for a downpayment on a house while your life is slipping away year after year and the whole goal is to leverage up with a spouse on a mortgage before you are an ineligible bachelor/ette, then this game has no applicability to you. There is nothing attractive about that game to me, at any earning level. Discussions about the top 10% or top 5% make no difference to me, because the circumstances are the same: wage workers that barely match the cost of living wherever they earn, slow accumulation, risks (health, employment, life events) that undercut growth simply because it takes too long. Better to just have, there is no profound message applicable because the message is that simple. There are almost too many advantages to just having.
Young people get pretty bombarded by divorce horror stories - especially from pop culture. Most divorces don't go to a court and a large number are resolved entirely internally and only seek professional help for the finalization of the agreement... but there are the attention grabbing headlines of someone being left with only the shirt on his back (and like 20 mil in options) on the far side of a really bad divorce.
I also think that culture does play a fair role. I was initially hesitant to marry (as a millennial) because a lot of my friends were being denied the ability to marry who they chose, so I wanted to stand with them and reject the institution. That, thankfully, has been resolved - but I can totally understand people who have mixed feelings on marriage.
There have always been divorce horror stories. The systemic reasons for declining marriage rates are mostly financial. The American middle class has seen declining incomes for the past generation or so, with rising student loan payments, unaffordable housing, expensive childcare etc. You have to be making a lot of income to seriously consider having children.
Whether it is mostly financial is still being debated. Even Norway (which has orders of magnitudes more in savings per capita) has low marriage rates.
Abstractly, marriage was a giant public act of consent due to the consequences of sex. Now, sex is decoupled from marriage, so the institution isn’t needed in secular culture.
Depends on the culture. For example, Rome was converted (>50%) to Christianity in about two centuries due to the impact of opening Jewish family customs to the Gentiles (read: everyone not a Jew by blood) and a reformulation of what it means to love.
I never married anyone and certainly I would never do it for financial/political reasons. It also never crossed my mind that marrying for love makes me a modern thinker :)
Marriage licenses are like $100 — are you confusing wedding and marriage in this? (i.e. it should be that marriage paperwork is not too expensive, but a wedding is unaffordable)
Well, consider, about 50 years ago almost every child was raised by married parents, today about half are.
Having so many people with no lived experience means lower cultural forces behind asking them to participate in an expensive party, even though marriage is so good for raising children (which used to be the purpose of marriage).
Why is an expensive party important? You can certainly get married at a Church or at a courthouse for pretty cheap and a party isn't required, but even if it is, you can throw a decent party without thousands of dollars spent. I've been to many of them in small towns across the Midwest.
If you are already cohabitating, marriage is an expense you can indefinitely procrastinate.
Especially if you see what others are doing on social media, your mental model of the expense continues to inflate and the pressure to procrastinate grows.
Historically marriage was seen not just as commitment between two people but between them and their community, and them and G-d. By committing to the marriage in a public, religiously-affiliated place, the couple is acknowledging their responsibility to those parties as well.
If nothing else, it makes the commitment stronger and creates greater incentives to work through issues rather than bail. You can think of G-d and community as additional "accountability buddies" here.
You can say that's stupid, and that it should simply be a commitment between two people and that's it - but you have to acknowledge that the rise of that idea is very correlated with the rise in the diverse rate.
Divorce rate is declining, likely because people aren't being pressured to enter into long-term commitments they aren't ready for by their broader community.
It is interesting to see how conservative ideas are re-packaged to remain fashionable with the time.
I was lucky to be raised by extremely great parents who have never been married and nonetheless have stayed together for 40 years, without God looking over their shoulder.
You know the big fancy wedding for 50-300 people in a hotel? That's expensive. I forget the sociological terminology but getting married has gone from a "We're getting started" to a "We have arrived" statement and the wedding is meant to show that, which is expensive.
Well sure, but that's just one example of how corporate interests tend to push tradition into being as expensive as possible (holidays face a similar fate). They're creating social pressure to solidify their revenue.
A wedding can be whatever you want. It's not "unobtainable" unless you're treating it like a class-based measuring stick.
What is expensive about marriage? I’m trying to think of reasons. Taxes? It can be advantageous to stay single, but I wouldn’t say this is that big. Kids? Another mouth to feed and educate is wildly expensive, but I doubt this is what we’re talking about. Rent/buying a home? Cheaper to share a space I’d think. I think I’m missing something.
This is correct. When I was still in grad school and the better half was working as an engineer I pretty much got the ultimatum that we needed to get married for the tax break. We had been living together for 7 years.
But then we were both working and living in SF as engineers and I did my taxes on my own for the first time about 3 years in from graduate school. I was shocked that the penalty for being married vs. not was $3000. I immediately turned to my wife, and said, "split, and split the difference?". (She understood that I was joking.) And then I discovered that you can't fix it that way, you still get taxed at the same rate. Or did. That was 30 years ago. (We're still married, humor is important.)
But after that while working at Sandia I had a PhD friend getting married to another fresh PhD, and I did tell him, do take a look at the tax hit.
They changed the bracket differences for single, married filing jointly, and married filing seperately back in 2018. Married filing seperately is basically the same as being single these days.
Maybe there's something I don't understand, but per this table it's slightly worse to be married filing separately than it is to be single at the top brackets: https://www.bankrate.com/taxes/tax-brackets/
There's also some joke in there about the only person able to write a contract to successfully bind a lawyer to a long term commitment being another lawyer.
I'd be interested to see a historical comparison. Supposedly the (male)doctor-marries-(female)nurse pattern of several decades ago--or the executive/secretary one, to give another example--has given way to a situation where Americans tend to marry within their own profession/class.
If you look at some of the trades and more artisinal professions (plumber, electrician, hvac, welding, jeweler for some examples), the top matches are often things like "non-medical secretary", book-keeping and accounting, office managers, retail supervisors, etc.
That suggests to me that there's still a lot of cases where they've got their spouse running the office or the business end of a small business. That was almost a stereotypical arrangement for couples of my parents' generation.
I think the # of female doctors has grown much more quickly than the # of male nurses (IIRC most medical students are women now). It would be interesting to compare stats by gender- does a male software engineer marry differently than a female one?
Yep, I can say with almost 100% certainty there’s a big difference between male and female dating preferences even within the same occupation. For all the talk of feminism and empowerment, women in high status fields like law and medicine are Much less likely to “marry down” to a man in a lower status field than the other way around.
No surprises that those in exploitative working conditions - not payment, but time - end up intermarrying the most: chefs, doctors, nurses... all of them have one thing in common: extremely long shifts, frequent overtime and double shifts.
When living with a "normal" 9-5 person, that person will build up resentment for not seeing their partner, for differing sleep schedules, frequent travel and whatever else comes with that job. Someone in a similar work environment however knows the struggles themselves and since they also have the same problem as their partners, there is less chance of resentment directed to the partner - hard to get annoyed by your partner working a spontaneous double shift when you have been in the same situation a week earlier!
My wife is a professional trumpet player. In the Utah Symphony the vast majority of members have a musical spouse. It is not uncommon for spouses to be in the same orchestra (nepotism anyone? fyi these positions are always filled via audition). What probably skews this data is that while musicians overwhelmingly marry other musicians, this doesn't mean that one or both don't move on to other careers to pay the bills. Also, I'm not a musical spouse.
Some jobs have very skewed gender ratios: so Early childhood teachers don’t marry other Early childhood teachers, and relatively few Police officers marry other Police officers.
I would expect people with working class jobs as far more likely to marry other working class people, and respectively for professional jobs. Hard to see from this - needs some sort of cluster analysis.
This would be more useful if happiness factored in somehow.
For instance, are software devs happy with other software devs? I could imagine getting a bit tired of knowing the other person too well and blending work and home life too much. Like, maybe you want to go on a vacation without thinking about programming, but would that really be possible?
In Ukraine there are for some reason way more females on QA and Front End side of things and also in recruiting. So totally anecdotal but know a good number of couples BE+FE :)
Having after tax family income at 8K+ USD in a country with median family income under 500 makes for a very comfortable lifestyle.
I find it interesting that teachers are high on the list for most professions but conversely teachers marry teachers and other education professionals almost exclusively.
Three possibilities..
There must be a lot of teachers. (Most likely)
They may be the most attractive profession. (Possibly)
…Or they all have secret second families at work. (I always suspected!) :)
Maybe I just missed it, but real estate agents totally run with other real estate agents. Couples, parents/ children - even friend groups. Once you are in the business it becomes your complete social group (as I sit on vacation with multiple other agents and an agent partner).
I can say from experience that bar and restaurant is quite adaptable for a couple given the odd hours of operation, the flexibility of scheduling and job mobility. We did it together for almost a decade. Not sure I would want to depend on it in the current crisis though...
One thing to remember when interpreting those stats is the popularity of a profession in general. Elementary and middle school teachers come up a lot because either there's a huge number of them or they disproportionately responded to the survey.
I clicked random for a while, just waiting to find a job with an usually high correlation with any other job. Pharmacist is unusually highly correlated with Pharmacist. Edit: Same with Lodging managers, high correlation with Lodging managers.
Not apparent in the original chart, but in the follow-on bubble chart there seems to be a weirdly strong connection between fire inspectors and pumping station operators.
I married a graphic designer, much like our ur out our personalities complimented each other fairly well so we could challenge and empower eachother, and had just enough overlap that we could relate on the nerdy things that counted.
Careers that limit your ability to socialize outside of work, due to location (eg military) or hours (eg lawyers, teachers), lead to people marrying within their industry. This shouldn't be a big surprise.
How do the hours worked by teachers prevent them from socializing outside of work? I understand how lawyers are limited in this regard, as I've known many lawyers who regularly pulled 80 hour weeks. But I've never known a teacher who worked nearly this many hours.
I used to be a lawyer and now work in edtech, so I've known plenty of folks in both professions. What am I missing?
My partner used to be a teacher and she worked 60 to 70 hours a week at the start of her career. It's the main reason she isn't a teacher any more. Most of the people she trained with and worked with have also left teaching for similar reasons. This is in the UK, so perhaps it's different where you are.
Everybody got in discussions got obsessed with what jobs marrry but I found it interesting that the unemployed almost exclusivly marry each other. Definitly no welfare manipulation going on there I bet...
What about those who have a spouse whose job is a homemaker? It seems fairly common within my social circles. Maybe that job is teacher, nurse, counselor, daycare provider, cook, all wrapped in one.
Perhaps a disproportionate number of software devs are unmarried?
My own experience actually reflects this situation. On my team, the only married people are married to other software people or teachers. The unmarried all date teachers.
Preferred, or just ratio is so skewed that they married who they interacted with all the time. Men could not do that as much as the were not enough women.
In this regard women devs get added bonus of working tech. Relatively high salary and likely have higher family incomes as both partners work in high earning field. Where as male devs would often marry partners earning less.
If nearly all of the female software developers married other software developers (which is my experience), it would work out to the numbers they show.
I actually married a hairstylist. It turns out, a lot about programming and cutting hair are similar. She has to understand the requirements and implement it exactly right, the first time. I also learned that bartering is alive and well in that world. People would trade all kinds of things for a haircut that they didn’t have to tell their spouse how much it cost: vacation rentals, private box concert tickets, sailing charters, etc. My wife worked in a high-end salon.
A place where people go to spend way too much money on hair, IMHO. A standard mens cut were over USD$40 and I don’t remember how much other style’s cost though. You could even get a massage before/after with their dedicated masseuse. Before I met my wife, I didn’t know the difference between a $7 haircut and a $40 one.
I’d go for the $40 one if I ever have to pay for a haircut again. A $40 cut grows out good, so even if you don’t get a haircut for months after, you don’t look like a bum.
I'd wager someone with the title computer programmer nowaday is close to or in their middle age at least, so perhaps it is the larger gender disparity in coding work among that generation.
I have found male programmers to have a more diverse dating/marriage pool, though most are still "tech"-y office jobs e.g. designer. That's just middle/upper middle class sticking together though.
Female programmers I've met almost exclusively date or are married to other programmers.
Tech communities are all-encompassing to begin with. Tech cities, tech friends, tech hobbies, tech side-projects..... I need out of this echo chamber from time to time.
Elementary school teachers and RNs are historically "appropriate" for females, and a lot of jobs that skew strongly male seem to pair up with those a lot.
Does this account for the total number of any given profession? Otherwise we’ll always see professions that are just highly represented in the general population.
Might be the horoscope effect, but I found that a lot of people in professions that marry school teachers in this chart, did in fact marry school teachers in my life.
So it overflows the chart on desktop Firefox for me, but, the buttom axis caps out on the right at 22%. It looks like they hardcoded the graph axis, and so since other agricultural workers are at 23%, it overflows.
On that note, bottom axis is usually x, not y. Dunno if it displays differently on mobile; on desktop the bars run horizontally; y-axis is profession, x-axis is percentage.
I guess pretty much every female software developer marries a male software developer which works out to the 12% number?
Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex. aka "male software developer has a 6% chance of marrying a software developer vs female software developer which has a 95% chance of marrying another software developer."
OTOH, its not as pronounced with nurses which have a similar problem in reverse.