The reason? Women are now far more likely to be well-educated and earn more, but not the blokes with whom they mate. Yes, women are marrying down more than ever before. For men, it’s hypergamy, the concept of marrying above your station. Women are pitching their sights a lot lower, hypogamy. Both of these risk the long-term stability of relationships and the answer is monogamy. Joke. It’s actually homogamy. More about that later.
damn those hypergamous men!
seriously though these numbers require very careful handling
regression to the mean
(actually this is the exact example used by Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Is regression to the mean sufficient as an explanation? If we assume that marriage partners aren’t selected for income at all, we’d expect women to marry up more than they married down due to the pay gap, so it seems to me that there remains something to be explained when we find that the exact opposite is occurring.
Have you accounted for the higher rates of both incarceration and homosexuality in men? Oh, and dying off faster too. Basically, there are fewer “eligible” men than women.
Hmn… no doubt this situation will be described as sexist later on. (”A net transfer of wealth to men! How dare they! Where have all the good men gone!”) Though while in my extended family an executive married a blue collar man, said blue collar man was still a very manly type (and fairly sharp, had his own business at one point). Big, tall, works with his hands, likes hunting and fishing, and other things I can’t quite describe.
(Unlike a few other members of the extended family, I approved of this relationship. He’s a pretty good guy. Trustworthy.)
I’ve talked about women wanting status in men, and I think the trick is actually in that gender segregation of professions everyone hates so much. If the career track has no women in it, or few women in it, then it still works for proving masculinity even if it’s low-earning. (It’s a status track that he’s further along that she isn’t, as compared to her being better than him at literally everything.)
Though now I’m wondering about the death rates of lesbians and bisexual women relative to men.