Chart Shows Who Marries CEOs, Doctors, Chefs and Janitors | Hacker News Reader

Chart Shows Who Marries CEOs, Doctors, Chefs and Janitors

bloomberg.com

452 pointssremani314 comments

If anyone wants to improve the usability, data files are:

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/job-...

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/pair...

I collected the raw files used from the American Community Survey: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0ByZIeqREehZySFg3MTdo...

It looks like I forgot to check in the R script used to process the .dat files to my gist https://gist.github.com/1wheel/a8e65b1576b750c5e3e3, but I'll add it when I get home.

We also tried to use salary info like the magazine version https://twitter.com/adamrpearce/status/697844614754123776 did, but had some problems with slighty different occuptation categories: http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/sala...

Interested to see what people come up with! This is a super interesting, rich data set that deserves much more than what I've done.

I'd recommend popping this into your console.

$('.job-text').css({color: 'black'})

If I get some time tomorrow, I will try to do a network visualization - a coincidence graph (like this one http://p.migdal.pl/tagoverflow/) or something in the line for word2vec (job2vec? ;)).

I sorted the data by which occupation marries within the same occupation the most:

     13.9%    Physicians and Surgeons
     10.7%    Textile Winding, Twisting, and Drawing Out Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders
     10.1%    none
      9.7%    Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural Managers
      9.7%    Lawyers, and judges, magistrates, and other judicial workers
      9.5%    Miscellaneous Personal Appearance Workers
      9.3%    Veterinarians
      8.8%    Dentists
      8.5%    Miscellaneous agricultural workers including animal breeders
      8.4%    Postsecondary Teachers
      7.6%    Software Developers, Applications and Systems Software
      7.6%    Health Diagnosing and Treating Practitioners, All Other
      7.5%    Optometrists
      7.3%    Chiropractors
      7.2%    Pharmacists
      6.7%    Elementary and Middle School Teachers
      6.4%    Food Service Managers
      6.2%    Agricultural and Food Scientists
      6.1%    Physical Therapists
      6.1%    Gaming Services Workers
      6.0%    Upholsterers
      5.9%    Communications Equipment Operators, All Other
      5.8%    Air Traffic Controllers and Airfield Operations Specialists
      5.8%    Physical Scientists, All Other
      5.8%    Nurse Anesthetists
      5.5%    Chief executives and legislators
      5.5%    Real Estate Brokers and Sales Agents
      5.4%    Clergy
      5.2%    Marine Engineers and Naval Architects
      5.0%    Psychologists
      4.9%    Lodging Managers
      4.8%    First-Line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers
      4.7%    Miscellaneous Managers, Including Funeral Service Managers and Postmasters and Mail Superintendents
      4.7%    Medical Scientists, and Life Scientists, All Other
      4.6%    Secondary School Teachers
      4.0%    Textile Knitting and Weaving Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders
      4.0%    Podiatrists
      4.0%    News Analysts, Reporters and Correspondents
      4.0%    Sewing Machine Operators
      3.9%    Bailiffs, Correctional Officers, and Jailers
      3.9%    First-Line Supervisors of Personal Service Workers
      3.8%    Tailors, Dressmakers, and Sewers
      3.8%    Economists
      3.8%    Musicians, Singers, and Related Workers
      3.8%    Environmental Scientists and Geoscientists
      3.8%    Property, Real Estate, and Community Association Managers
      3.7%    Insurance Sales Agents
      3.5%    Agricultural Inspectors
      3.3%    Butchers and Other Meat, Poultry, and Fish Processing Workers
      3.2%    Morticians, Undertakers, and Funeral Directors

Looks like there's a correlation with long hours and isolated work environments away from other peer groups.

Doctors for instance are well known for pairing up during the residency grind since it dramatically drops their interactions with anyone outside of their residency program and also occurs during their late 20's. A perfect storm.

The top 5 is also a list of professions requiring extensive graduate education. There is a lot of pairing up in medical/dental/law school.

FYI, the ranking has changed. The results depend on how the lines of the form "1, 10, BLANK, BLANK, 2.04E+07" are interpreted.

Physicians are still up there, but some other occupations have also entered, such as "Farmers, Ranchers"

>Looks like there's a correlation with long hours and isolated work environments away from other peer groups.

Doctors are prestige seekers who see marrying a software programmer as a step down.

you are not a doctor, are you?

Not a doctor, just frustrated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11085519

just an opinion based on personal experience. Have many family/friends who are doctors.

many fish in the sea, no reason to be frustrated.

I've lived with two medical doctors, both of whom referred to me, with a doctorate in particle physics but now a software engineer, as the 'real doctor'.

Which for me really highlights the point that, despite using the same title, the word doctor implies two completely different but equally important types of experience.

In Chinese, the common words for medical doctor (大夫 and 医生) are totally different from the other type (博士).

I'm an Engineer working in finance and a couple of my medical doctor friends refer to me as the 'inteligent' in the group.

I was dumped by a medical resident recently, she said she is "looking to settle down with a doctor". :\

She did you a favour. Doctors are notoriously hard to live with.

(Doctor here. Married to probably the only female doctor who is not hard to live with ;))

Why? Most of the doctors I know are actually fairly reasonable. Consistently bad at business, but smart/interesting, and some of them are pro-science.

I'm being slightly facetious.

As a generalisation though, many (or most) doctors:

- Have lousy work hours.

- Have a lot of work-related stress and are therefore often quite moody and irritable.

- Often have poor social skills, and can be particularly bad at resolving conflicts.

- Have a tendency towards narcissism and can therefore be quite high maintenance.

- Don't have an off-switch when it comes to work, so may bore you to death with work-related stories and complaints.

How to interpret this kind of entry (pair-count.csv):

1,1010,,,1.53E+07

where sex_sp and occ_sp is omitted. Also, how to interpret the first entry in the job-name.csv:

none,none,0,none

I'm currently inclined to simply ignore these in my analysis.

In my graphic I ignored those rows, but you could look at only those rows to see which occupations are most likely not to be married.

It looks like counts of people with particular job.

Most interesting connection I saw: "Eligibility Interviewers, Government Programs" <-> "Unemployed, with no work experience in last 5 years"

Hah! They must marry their customers.

I think eligibility interviewers are just on the other side of being able to qualify for benefits, for the most part, so it's not _that_ surprising

For some of the couples, yes. Some more might result from corruption or fraud (e.g. "I'll make sure my colleague processes your paperwork... he'll make sure you get accepted")

Or, less cynically, some could be because it's easier for spouses of someone who is in the bureaucratic system to navigate/utilize it.

I like Explosives workers and Librarians

EDIT: Nevermind, some commenters further downthread pointed out that the visualization was adjusted to always show same sex lines.

For me it was some of these jobs not having heterosexual lines in both directions. "Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers", "Pipelayers, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters", and "Welding, Soldering, and Brazing Workers" don't have any female -> male lines at all if I'm reading the charts right, just male -> female and female -> female. "Miscellaneous Office Support Workers", "Receptionists and Information Clerks", and "Preschool and Kindergarten Teachers" are the reverse.

It makes sense given that gay people are more likely to be gender nonconforming and all of those jobs are gendered very strongly, but still interesting to see the extent of it.

It might be that those professions are so dominated by one sex that there is very little data. Finding a female welder, pipefitter or lineman... er, person, is like finding a unicorn.

There's enough women in the profession to have female -> female lines originating out of them, though. The implication is that there's a huge majority of queer women in them, to the point where heterosexual ones won't even show up on a visualization despite how much of a minority GLBT people are in the general population. (Or, alternatively: heterosexual women in those professions don't marry for whatever reason, and queer ones do.)

No, the visualization is adjusted such that it always shows at least one female->female connection, and one male->male connection.

So it might very well be the case that there are a lot more heterosexual female welders than homosexual female welders, it's just that there are so many male welders that their connections dominate the top five.

Oh, I didn't realize the visualization was adjusted like that. That makes more sense.

They say in the fine print:

  Same-sex occupation/relationship matchups weren’t common enough to reach the top five in any occupation.
  So the chart also highlights the top male-male and female-female job matchups for each occupation.

In other words, female -> female pairings are overemphasized in the chart, otherwise you would not see them at all.l

> the visualization was adjusted to always show same sex lines.

We went back and forth on this a lot. Just showing the top relationships by number would result in omitting all same sex relationships, which didn't seem right. Their inclusion seems to have caused lots of confusion though - maybe it should have been called out more prominently than in the methodology. Even better would have been to have a toggle to show the more distinctive relationships.

Yes, a toggle to filter for homosexual relationships, or even for each of M->M, F->F, M->F, F->M would be ideal.

And apparently models REALLY have a thing for truck drivers.

Uh, apparently everyone has a thing for truck drivers.

Most common occupation in the US, I believe.

Till autonomous cars take their jobs...

Well when CGI takes the models' jobs they'll have plenty of time to hang out

interesting that the Clergy marries mostly within their own occupation

Feale air-traffic controllers have a thing for female announcers. Guess they're into sexy voices.

With the adjustments in place to highlight same sex couples +relatively unique combinations of professions -- I'd love to see someone speak up with HEY! That's me and my spouse! I wish they had the numbers on those. Actually numbers on all of them would be interesting (raw, % population, % couples, etc).

Yeah, since percentages can be highly misleading once the base size drops close to zero.

Is it me or the visualization is very hard to follow?

E.g. if you highlight the 'Dancers and Choreographers' section, it's not at all clear that more female dancers marry male welders.

Of all the lines starting at 'Dancers and Choreographers' which are initially red, the thickest one is by far the one that is blue at the other end and ends at 'Welding, Soldering, and Brazing Workers'. I think that's the intended way of drawing that conclusion from the graph.

Overall I'm satisfied with the visualization itself, but it would be nice to have more sorting options.

This is one of the interesting connections on the chart. My theory (being an ex-welder as well as a dancer) is that both of these are strongly one-gender dominated professions - almost all my welding friends were male and almost all my dancing friends were female (in three different states no less). And for the majority of marriages up to this point in largely heterosexual historical data, you don't meet many people of the opposite gender to marry in your regular day. The one exception is when set workers (male welders) are around a stage all day where the performers (female dancers) are doing the show. So you get these relatively few places to meet a potential mate that turn up in funny combos.

ha! You are the guy who introduced all these female dancers to the male welders!

Or perhaps they were just inspired by Flashdance?

Thank you, I was wondering why this was such a thick line.

Depending on the definition of dancer, this could be less surprising.

So how are software developers supposed to meet women?

Take up dancing?

Dancers are more likely to be girly girls and welders are more likely to be blokey blokes, making the two more likely to be compatible?

Yeah, def not my cup of UX tea

You're not wrong, this is incredibly hard to parse.

As far as I can tell most groups seem to marry Elementary school teachers

This

I think that's a class thing. Auditors, teachers and RNs are all solid middle class, female heavy gigs. Teachers and RNs have the added bonus of an awesome schedule.

All the RNs I know have terrible schedules where they work 12 hour days 4 days in a row with three off, or something similar. Plus lots of on call time.

The standard RN schedule is 12-hr shifts, but 3 days on and 4 off.. So they work 36-hours per week. Often times they can build their own schedules, so they can work something like, Th - F - S - S - M - W then have a week off without PTO. On-Call is typically voluntary, but typically pays very well past 36-hrs per week.

My wife's a nurse and it's an amazing schedule if you like to travel. Especially in California since they are actually well compensated for their time, and can afford to do so.

Your mileage may vary by state though, we came to California from Michigan where they treated nurses like shit and it was extremely dangerous for patients too (1 ICU nurse taking care of upwards 5 or 6 critically ill patients etc.) but the schedule was pretty much the same.

Go on a dating site like Match.com, and it seems like 75% of the women are nurses or teachers. Fewer natural dating opportunities in such heavily female professions, I suppose.

Anecdotal, but I have to think really hard to remember a male teacher that wasn't married to one of the other teachers in my school district.

Part of the problem is that each profession isn't scaled to how many people are in it. "47-5031 Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters" had a total employment of 7,970 in 2012, but there were 1,353,020 people employed as "25-2021 Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education"

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes475031.htm http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252021.htm

Yeah, that makes the whole thing meaningless if you ask me. Well, maybe not meaningless... I supposed I can say... as an X, I'm most likely to marry an elementary school teacher. But if I meet an explosive worker, this will not tell me how likely I am to marry them... which I think is more interesting.

Yeah it says male software developers are most likely to marry female teachers or administrative assistants, like practically every other majority-male profession. Would be more interesting to show trends relative to males in others professions rather than in absolute numbers.

(edit: replace 'male' with 'majority-male' as I didn't mean to sound 1950s, just meant the left side of the chart)

It's not entirely you, but I think that the fundamental problem is less with the visualization than with shortcomings of the implementation. With regards to the implementation, I have trouble reading the unselected text. With regards to the visualization itself, the switchboard-style network view is really neat, and the line coloration idea was clever, but thickness of lines is really hard to infer proportional information from. There really needs to be supplementary information appearing dynamically alongside the grid.

It's rather hard to take seriously..

There also seems to a disproportionate amount of male-male lines, weighted just as heavily as male-female lines. I don't think gay marriage is that prevalent to show up with equal weighting, but my cursory googling didn't turn up the number of gay couples in the US.

FTFA: "Same-sex occupation/relationship matchups weren’t common enough to reach the top five in any occupation. So the chart also highlights the top male-male and female-female job matchups for each occupation."

Doesn't seem to be normalized? Lots of folks marry mostly teachers etc. Perhaps because there are lots of teachers out there?

Was going to say exactly this; the data needs to be normalized by population of the professions to really show us anything.

I guess I should stop using Tinder/OkCupid, and start going to teacher meetings

There are plenty of teachers on those apps.

Its really weird but it does seem like most of my peers either married other people in software development or teachers. No idea why.

Teaching as a career gets a lot of flak for being underpaid, but in many cases it's actually paid pretty well on top of having solid retirement benefits, an incredible schedule, and a lot of stability. The pay, if it's low, is also not as much of an issue if the other partner makes a large amount of money, as is often the case right now for software developers. It can be an incredibly family friendly career.

My SO is going into teaching, at least temporarily for a few years, in a medium-COL city. She'll be making $55k-$65k in base salary, depending on if she teaches 10 months or 12 months out of the year, plus full retirement benefits, and they also provided her with enough scholarships just for taking the job that she has no college debt at all. Meanwhile I know engineering graduates (not necessarily software) who started in roughly the same range, with considerable debt, not as much stability, no retirement beyond a 401(k) with a pitiful match, and just a week or two off per year.

Teachers have very, very predictable schedules compared to practically everyone else. They're part of a reliable industry. They have a very clear career progression ahead of them. They have holidays, maternity leave, etc. It's very conducive to marriage and raising kids.

There are two things to consider from that.

1: people who want a stable married-with-kids life are likely to also want a stable, predictable career

2: People who happen to be in a stable, predictable career find it easier to say yes to marriage and kids

As for marrying other people in software development, that's a really easy one: proximity, physical presence, similar backgrounds, shared group of friends, etc, etc. Dentists marry dentists. Military folk marry military folk.

I think it's a familiarity bias with the occupation. More women have business degrees than nursing or education [1], but it may not seem so since business degree holders are more dispersed among types of businesses. The link seems to indicate that software developers are just as likely to marry accountants or nurses as teachers.

[1] http://www.collegeatlas.org/top-degrees-by-gender.html

Teachers and Nurses appear often simply because there are a lot of them compared to all other occupations. There are, say, 100times more female teachers than female X for all other X.

Most common human Bayesian fallacy: forgetting the priors.

Yes, I think this visualization would be FAR more helpful if the weighted lines were adjusted by the relative population in each group. Or at the very least make each group a different sized bubble so you aren't surprised when so many lines seem to keep going back to it.

All the cute nurses I've met are married. They seem to get married at a young age (20-23).

I used CoffeeMeetsBagel. Nearly every women I'm matched up either has a Masters, PhD, Law Degree, or Med Degree.

Too bad none of my statistical positives (wealth in real estate, part ownership of a successful startup) show up in my profile. Wouldn't be surprised if they balked at my lowly Bachelor's degree. I say this as a person who met a woman who said she basically doesn't date anyone who has anything less than a Master's degree.

> I say this as a person who met a woman who said she basically doesn't date anyone who has anything less than a Master's degree.

At first, I thought that is petty. However, such bluntness is helpful to you; you get to very quickly (i.e. never date) select against a potentially improper partner. Supposing you have a Bachelor's, would you want to date a woman who only dated men with a Bachelor's degree or higher?

My first guess is that she is avoiding sub-Master's degreed men as a means to avoid boring, wealthy, and/or immature men. My second guess is that she might be trying to use a simple criterion to select among a relatively high volume of date offers.

> Supposing you have a Bachelor's, would you want to date a woman who only dated men with a Bachelor's degree or higher?

Sure, why not? I only have a BS and it's probably the case that my wife (PhD neurobiologist) would have only dated someone with a college degree. Someone else's particular preferences aren't much of a concern to me, provided I meet them.

I need to go hang out with some accountants apparently.

Agricultural workers marry each other a lot. Also lawyers and judges marry each other. Software developers too. But apparently we also like to marry nurses, middle school teacher and accountants. But male and male marriages for software developers are somehow with recreation and fitness workers.

Meter readers don't marry other meter readers too much. Guess,once you define something so narrowly it would present a different picture.

Education related professions seem to marry other education-related professions but in administrative positions (or "other instructors") and somehow also marry various "managers"

And truckers apparently are fond of bartenders, just like dentists seems to like to dental hygienists.

Business Insider has run several articles of the urban college female "problem". With 30% more females obtaining college degrees currently than males plus that males generally dont marry up, there is a surplus of 20-something college females in all metropolitan areas except San Francisco and Washington DC. Good news for guys then.

One silly article tried explain the success of hookup apps is that more desperate females are willing to put out in this environment.

How is that silly? It could be that commitment and sex have become inverted in order as the preferences of the scarce "resource".

As a queer woman, I have to say this doesn't seem like a problem to me and I think you've made some bad assumptions about who this is good news for.

Why as a queer woman? How's that relevant?

She means it's also good news for her...

The surplus is caused by a lack of suitable males, implying a surplus of heterosexual females. Unless a lot of these females are bi, it's not much of a boost.

And I think now you are touching on the other part of her comment...

1. Sexuality - particularly with women, in my experience - is variable: hetro women can and do consider other women as viable sexual partners, even if they don't consider them long term partners;

2. The implication of a "surplus of hetero females" is flawed given that bi and homo females do, in fact, exist and aren't properly accounted for. Not every single female in that surplus is available to you. In fact, some of them are available exclusively to "themselves" if you were.

I'm not sure how that second point works wrt homo women, what do you mean by 'accounted for'?

also, not every single female in the surplus needs to be 'available', since it's a statistical implication. a surplus of hetero females correlates with a surplus of 'available' hetero females.

I think the overall meaning is that saying "Good news for guys then", while not a false statement, isn't a complete one either. "Good news for guys and lesbians" would be more accurate. "Good news for folks in the market for women" even more so.

I don't think she's in any way suggesting you're wrong, (and neither am I) she just wants you to remember that she exists as well and benefits from this too. I can't speak for her but I also see it as a slightly humorous addendum to your point.

I'll leave it to men to decide whether highly educated women being less likely to want to couple with available men is good for them. But I'm surprised anyone would assume it would be.

It's good news for both, it doesn't mean it's a bad assumption just because it might benefit more than one demographic. It just comes off as smarmy with the whole "As a ____, I feel". That line always comes off as condescending.

Could have just stated its good for lesbians too (and included like me), and been done with it, and come off as less hostile.

Identity politics is how you shut down rational thought in the postmodern era. Very relevant to how people "argue" now.

Excuse me?

You may be right but I find it difficult to believe you can really detach argument from peoples sense of identity. People are just too susceptible to bias for that. I don't trust scientists, I trust science. Rationalism is something to aspire to, not a sense of identity to attack people with.

>You may be right

No... no, they're not.

Males generally dont marry up?

Couple things come to mind. Throughout my time, I've seen that women have their fair share of not wanting to marry down either. You want to say generalizations generalizations. Sure, but I think the age old stereotypes do have a hint of truth to them and the Bloomberg page here also states, "High-earning women (doctors, lawyers) tend to pair up with their economic equals, while middle- and lower-tier women often marry up."

You say problem in quotation marks and I don't know why that is? If people are not finding their partners, that's a huge problem.

Here's the anecdotal: My sister and her friends are all pretty educated women. Unfortunately, their standards have really gone up since receiving said education. I'm not saying this to bash, it's simply my observation. These days, they're all still single and reaching/past 30 and no man can scratch their itch. The whole thing is problematic.

> My sister and her friends are all pretty educated women.

What do you mean by this exactly? PhDs? MDs?

> These days, they're all still single and reaching/past 30 and no man can scratch their itch.

Could you give examples of the occupations of the rejected suitors?

Yes, they include PhDs, DDS, Architecture, Mech Engineering. Their rejected list is guys that don't have much all the way to degrees in mining engineering. Software engineering tends to be what they "settle" for or are ok with. One, because software engineers make decent enough money and if they discounted them, they'd be throwing away a huge and competent group of men.

I can't speak for him but I'm a bit over 40 and single again, and looking. What I'm seeing in the DC metro area is a ton of single women in my age range who are single and never married, and all of a sudden now they want to get married and have kids. (Some of them want kids, some don't.) So not "pushing 30", but "pushing 40". Other data I've seen shows that there's a big surplus of single women in both the NYC and DC metro areas. OTOH, in Seattle and the Bay Area, there's a big surplus of single men. (There's a smaller surplus in Portland.)

My problem is that I don't live quite in the DC area, I'm about an hour away from downtown DC. And what I'm finding is that the desirable single women all live right in downtown DC, and do not want to date a man who lives an hour away. Now, if there were a healthy market of compatible men, this attitude would be quite understandable. But we're talking about a bunch of women who are bitching that they can't find any decent men to date, but then I come along and I'm told, "you look great, but you're too far away!! Sorry, but give me a ring when you move closer."

So IMO, these women are extremely picky and unrealistic. If I find someone I really like and might want to marry, I would move to be closer to her, just like married couples routinely move long-distance because one of them got a new job. I've even stated this up-front, as I do not plan to stay in my current location long-term (I'm a software engineer like probably half the audience here, our jobs don't last that long and we move around a lot). So as far as I can tell, many of these women have done this to themselves by being way too picky and having overly high expectations. They think they're going to find a guy who looks like George Clooney or whatever, has a $250j/year career, and lives across the street from them.

Might be related to how inflated the praise for higher degrees is. I mean, I know a JD or medical degree is no small feat, but it doesn't mean you're suddenly only good enough for the best of the best or are in some privileged genius tier (that goes for men and women).

Sadly, there are plenty of people in the world who are great at memorising but are actually horrible at applying their knowledge. While such degrees can be impressive achievements, it says very little about a person. I've met brilliant high school graduates and plain stupid people with phds. A lot of it depends on the person.

Ha, same area here, but exploring the pushing 35 range.

From what I've seen, I don't think they actually expect to meet George Clooney. After living with their independence and high paying job, 100% of which they can spend on them-self, usually enabling tons of international travel. They don't actually want to settle down and put work into a relationship, but their friends and family constantly pester them to do so.

So they settle for appearing desperate to keep their friends and family happy, but keeping standards high so that either the sacrifices to have a relationship would be worth it to them or they don't get a relationship they didn't want anyway.

I'm not sure about all that, but I will vouch for the tons of international travel bit. In fact, it's so bad I feel like a lot of these women are woefully ignorant about anything in the US that's outside of a few major cities, because they never go anywhere outside their city; any time they have a little vacation time they're flying to Argentina or Africa or something.

I disagree about them not wanting to actually be in a relationship, but I think what's happened is that they're so used to being single and free, and never having been in a serious relationship for that long, that they really have no idea how to do it, and it's probably a lost cause. They're now realizing they have to get started right now if they want to have natural kids, but they're not prepared to make the sacrifices you have to make in order to be in that kind of relationship.

In addition to my last comment regarding these ~40yo women now wanting to have kids, what's even worse is that it seems a ton of them are getting themselves inseminated (artificially or otherwise, probably artificially for these high-income women so they can screen the genetics of the donor more accurately) and deciding to become single moms.

As someone who was raised by a single mom, it's a horrible experience, and prepares you for a life of never being able to be successful in an adult relationship, because you've never seen such a relationship except maybe on TV (which we all know is not reflective of reality at all).

I do not see a good future here for our society. I'm not a social conservative in most ways (I'm a big believer in poly relationships for instance), but what I'm seeing with the 30-45 women makes me very worried for the future of our society. Maybe the Millenials and Gen-Zers will do a better job than us stupid Gen-Xers; they seem to be much more open-minded and willing to try out different relationship styles, rather than not having relationships at all.

The sad bit is that guys are more interested in their youth (or lack of thereof at 30) and looks rather than education... Hence CEOs marrying young secretaries. Cruel joke.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/07/06/has-being-si...

Well, anecdotal evidence to match your anecdotal evidence: I'm a female with a master's in software engineering and am marrying a guy with one semester of music school who's been a social worker for 10 years, in the spring.

But less anecdotally: for the first time in history, the percent of couples in which the woman has obtained a higher level of education than the man is higher than the other way around: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/12/record-share... Keep in mind that this is ALL couples, whether they were married last month, or 50 years ago, so the trend can be expected to lag behind current graduation trends. So both men and women seem to be figuring it out, your sister aside.

"Does marrying someone with less education mean “marrying down” economically? Not necessarily. When we look at the newlywed women who married someone with less education, we find that a majority of these women actually “married up.” In 2012, only 39% of newlywed women who married a spouse with less education out-earned their husband, and a majority of them (58%) made less than their husband."

Not really that surprising. Irrespective of gender, a terminal degree rarely leads to increase job earnings except for MD, JD, MBA, and similar.

Right, my interpretation of other comments about education, was that women were marrying down based on education level. But economically this isn't true. They still marry up.

I'd be surprised if degree level was a major factor by itself. E.g. If the woman has a masters but the man has only a bachelors, she would discount the man as a potential mate. He may still be socioeconomically on par or better.

> Males generally dont marry up?

My wife has a PhD, and is a Senior Data Scientist (why not Chief, who knows), and belongs to a noble Swedish/Finnish family.

I am P.O.C. trash, from a (mostly) poor town in S Tacoma, WA.

I hit the jackpot.

> Unfortunately, their standards have really gone up since receiving said education. I'm not saying this to bash, it's simply my observation.

I suspect that part of it has to do with the circles you hang out in. If you are a non-professional man, you are less likely to interact with professional women. If you do, you will have more chance to pair-wise bond. Anecdotally, a guy I train Krav Maga with, works at the maintenance crew at a local hotel. His wife has a degree in Aerospace Engineering. They met at a gym.

Parkland?

Yes. Though I often times claim Spanaway, since I attended Spanaway Elem, Spanaway Jr High, and Spanaway Lake Highschools.

I'm pretty fond of Parkland and Spanaway. I went to PLU.

Nice. Growing up, I loved going swimming at the PLU pool.

Also it's a small world when an HN reader that attended college in the small town I grew up in, would find my comment and correctly guess that small town.

S Tacoma, wow, she must be a saint :)

is she hot? men dont value women as much for professional achievements...

Yes.

https://www.google.com/search?q=beauty+is+in+the+eye+of+the+...

Also it took me a good solid year of my A-game to win her over.

In marriage intelligence is more important than status. Men normally don't want to marry a smarter woman then them and the opposite on women. 1600 karma gives you some relationship potential and places you above trash..

Height for men is like weight for women. Women want taller and men want lighter.

Money for men is like looks for women. Men want a wife with good looks and women want a successful man.

Intelligence for men is like likability for women. I think there are a lot of parallels.

Height for men is like weight for women. Women want taller and men want lighter.

No no no no no. Height for men is like age for women. A woman can lose weight if she wants a particular man, but, just like men cannot make themselves taller, women cannot make themselves younger.

Also, some men like a BBW. I suspect this is much more common than women who actively prefer short men. (I have been a BBW. Some men really, really like that.)

Deal breakers: intelligence level very far from mine, politics and ethics very far from mine.

Turn offs: taller then me, under average looks, older then me, personal life more complicated than mine.

Edited -- male point of view for a potential wife

> Men normally don't want to marry a smarter woman then them

Maybe that's true for a certain type of man suffering from insecurity.

In general I find that men love to find a woman who is smart and practical. After all, this is about your life partner.

> 1600 karma gives you some relationship potential and places you above trash.

I think you might be valuing people rather strangely, don't you think?

I'm not sure that's true, most of my close male friends prefer smart women but generally not in the same exact area as them.

I personally think having slightly divergent competencies is more stable than closwrr matches since it'd be less competitive or directly comparable.

Learning is also fun, and it can drive some pretty cool conversations.

Bit of anecdote to back this up, I personally wouldn't like to date a woman smarter than I am. I want her to be smart, just not quiiite as much.

Guess I'm just insecure.

> 1600 karma gives you some relationship potential and places you above trash.

First time I've heard that spending more of your time posting comments to the internet raises your dating potential. Karma comes from comments. More comments, more karma.

perhaps one reason people don't marry up or down often is that they do not tend to frequently interact. In a professional environment how often do you meet up with people not as the same or nearly the same level as you? Do many workers fraternize with their bosses when many are just more likely to complain upper management doesn't understand?

I would put most marry up/down on those who have frequent non professional outside activities. Whether its religious, a particular hobby, or simply a circle of friends whose careers all diverged.

Of course you'll find some males that "marry up", but the data proves what many of us have known forever - as a man, you should strive to be elite in something, preferably something useful and sexually attractive. Otherwise you're just another brick in the wall.

Where this is all going to blow up in society is the fact that women are now better-educated, and will soon make more money than their male counterparts, who are slowly getting more discriminated against (see Yahoo lawsuit) and less engaged in the proverbial rat race.

A case in point is looking at highly successful black females. They have a rough time in the dating scene, and this is extremely well-documented. Over the course of the next generation, I see this spreading to other females as well.

What effectively is going to happen is that you'll see more men dropping out of the marriage pool, the pareto principle in dating will become stronger than ever, and reliance upon the nanny state to help single mothers raise their children will likely go up too.

Hate it all you want, but these are three extremely well-established trends and I don't see them getting any better. Tinder is the canary in the coalmine. This is where we're heading.

A country needs strong, highly-engaged men who act as leaders. America is losing that more each and every day, and it saddens me.

I agree a lot with you. Time will tell and we can just hope to carve out the best for ourselves in this big cold world.

> as a man, you should strive to be elite in something, preferably something useful and sexually attractive. Otherwise you're just another brick in the wall.

The way you phrase this, the more probable cause would be that women don't want to marry down, hence men are motivated to be better (and they know that by being "just another brick in the wall" won't get them the partner they want").

This agrees with my observations of the world. Men don't care about accomplishments, they (we) just want a woman that is beautiful; whereas women care much more about a man's social status (warning: this is a very broad generalisation and of course doesn't hold for everybody).

Regarding your point about black women:

At least in North America, Black females, like Asian men, have a harder time in the dating scene partially due to their gender/ethnicity combination. Both sets endure media representation and stereotypes that play against their sexual desirability. I'm sure people here will profess that they are immune to any images cultivated by the media and I'm not going to discount their experience. However, I think it's naive to believe that images we consume on a daily basis, such as the gender/ethnicity makeup of desirable lead characters or negative representations in the news don't unconsciously affect us. Anecdotally, I have met more black men who said they would never date a black women and Asian women who said they'd never date Asian men compared to white people who say they'd never date a white person. Online dating stats from eHarmony, okCupid, and coffeemeetsbagel reinforce that observation.

On top of that, people generally have a statistical preference for those within their own race. And if black men have a higher tendency to be imprisoned than other men, that puts black women at an additional disadvantage to finding a partner.

I guess my overall point is issues black women face are very different and unique to what Hispanic/White/Asian women face.

> ...in North America, Black females, like Asian men, have a harder time in the dating scene

data to back this up: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/race-attraction-2009-2014/

As an Asian man - If I was single and I "hit on" a woman on the street once a day, it's more likely than not I'll be in a relationship within the month. It's not that hard, I often wonder how easy it is for non-Asian men. Do you just turn on Tinder and find yourself sleeping with women within 24 hours?

You've got more bravery than most to just walk up to a lady during the day and say hi. That more than makes up for any disadvantages your race may put you at.

I have seen and experienced this, from the inside.

I'm an educated black man (MS Degree) with a good job (Fortune 500 company) and my female relatives, many of whom are also educated and successful have difficulty with establishing and maintaining relationships.

Obviously not all, but many black women have unrealistic expectations. As other have already pointed out, women are adverse to marrying "down" so when a woman reaches a certain level of education/career advancement, it's extremely difficult to find a mate that meets her criteria. Lists of things, like Over 6 feet tall, lots of muscles, Bachelor's degree or higher, Churchgoing Christian, no children, good relationship with his mother, not domineering but not too passive, earning at least 6 figures and other wish-list type stuff. There are women who won't give a man the time of day unless he meets all of them. They, as you can well imagine, are lonely.

There are cultural taboos against black women becoming romantically involved with non black or hispanic men. I have only personally known one black woman who was involved with an asian man(his family came here from Vietnam and he grew up in "the 'hood") and only a few who are involved with white men.

I have never been in a relationship with a black woman. A date here and there. A fling here and there but never a relationship. Where I live, a video game playing, Dungeons and Dragons fan, comic book collecting, politically active guy doesn't tend to get much romantic interest from black women. Then, there's also the phenomenon of the black women who don't want anything to do with you getting upset because you're dating outside of the race.

I have also noticed that as we approach and pass 40 years of age, these women with their stratospheric standards are forced to carry on alone and bitter or drop their standards. Some of them get rid of them entirely just to get a man. I have even heard a fair bit of professional women getting involved with street dudes.

I guess my overall point is issues black women face are very different and unique to what Hispanic/White/Asian women face.

Agreed. Some of the issues are cultural, some are societal and some are of their own making.

Re-reading this a couple of days later, I can see how a part of it could be misinterpreted so I wanted to clarify.

I should have said that many of my female relatives have these problems.

In retrospect, it looked like I was saying all of them.

> I have met more black men who said they would never date a black women and Asian women who said they'd never date Asian men compared to white people who say they'd never date a white person

Anecdote: a second-gen-immigrant Italian friend of mine said her mother declared that my friend was not allowed to marry an Italian man, the reasoning being "I didn't raise my daughters to be mothers to their husbands". My friend said that from what her mother saw, Italian-culture men behaved like other men when married to a non-Italian woman, but when married to an Italian, there was a cultural expectation similar to mothering involved.

data size n=1, anecdata, all that stuff.

> A country needs strong, highly-engaged men who act as leaders. America is losing that more each and every day, and it saddens me.

Literally every president in US history has been a man, 80.6% of Congress are men, 95.5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are men, and you're sad that it's getting marginally harder for men and that the country is lacking in strong male leaders?

Men-as-homogeneous-group fallacy. Given a high variance, it's entirely possible that the top [small-percentage]% of men hold presidencies, CEO positions, etc, while the large majority of men are suffering a degradation in status, respect, resources, etc. (And objectively so -- look at earnings trends in inflation-adjusted terms for men vs. women over the past 40 years.) The way these two are conflated seems to be at the root of a lot of animosity in the Gender Wars lately.

I'd tend to agree with GP that while existing as a white male today is still "easy mode" in many ways when you do push yourself, there's definitely this feeling that society is celebrating everyone else while you're sort of left on your own without much encouragement.

It'd be interesting to see historical statistics on the variability of different "success" metrics with regard to sex.

I don't really agree with the sentiment but your example is also pretty poor rebuttal because those are some of the laggiest indicators.

They also represent exactly what the poster wanted: the leaders of America (who are mostly strong aggressive men).

I find it rather interesting that people advocate for such things as basic income (wherein a basic level of financial incentive is obviated), all the while steadfastly grasping at the notion that sexual/ marital incentive is essential for a thriving country.

> Males generally dont marry up?

> I've seen that women have their fair share of not wanting to marry down either

"Males generally don't marry up" and "Females generally don't marry down" are exactly the same claim.

Not really, if you read between the lines and realize that they are not just claiming fact, but also cause ("men don't want to marry up" vs "women don't want to marry down").

And which one is the cause here? I don't see why anyone wouldn't WANT to marry up.

I'm pretty sure that there are much fewer women in the high status category than men, so these men make the only rational decision (if they don't want to stay alone) - they marry down.

> My sister and her friends are all pretty educated women. Unfortunately, their standards have really gone up since receiving said education.

Once you reach a certain level in earnings you will have a very hard time finding someone that earns approximately the same amount.

I'm sure that this is currently even harder for men.

In this situation you really only have the choice to either marry down or never have a family of your own and stay alone for the rest of your life.

The thing is, you don't really "marry down". Usually people in the US/EU don't have to fear that they will have to face starvation or anything like that if they marry the wrong women/man so what is marrying down even about?

If one partner already has a lot of resources, why would he/she then require the other partner to be his/her equal in this regard?

When you remove economic resources from the equation you'll find that there are many perfectly fine potential partners out there with all the attributes that one could hope for.

> Males generally dont marry up?

It's the politically correct way of saying women don't marry down.

Cf. the works of the great poet of our times, K. West.

Men, generally, can't marry up because women, generally, won't marry down.

If you're a man trying to marry up, you're facing extra challenges if the woman values her family's opinions at all. Not too long ago in pretty much all the civilized world the Father controlled who his daughters wed, you had to impress him even more so than the woman.

Funny you bring this up.

I was on a date last Thursday and this girl (29 yrs old) was constantly trying to figure out how she was better than me....IN EVERY FACET OF LIFE.

For example, she went on and on about how she is a badass since she went to the Amazon forests to a nice touristy shack with a guide and a bar. She told stories of hammocks, mosquito nets, snakes, insects and other wild stuff.

After a long time, she finally asked, "Tell me something about yourself...what adventures have you done? Or do you just do some programming stuff" (stereotyping of software engineers is rampant)

I simply smiled at her and said, "I backpacked through the forests in India without tour guides and ate wood-fried insects for lunch" (all true)

She was surprised....and all of a sudden, the average me piqued her interest. She couldn't believe that I had done better than her in pretty much everything.

Now she wanted me....but I didn't...not anymore.

I'm 27. I want practical, non-judgemental girls...not massive egos.

Honestly, you both sound pretty lame.

True.

Unfortunately, I can't remain humble when my date starts a brag-fest like high school kids.

Humility is sometimes taken as cowardice or shyness.

My rule: unless it was TERRIBLE, I always try for a 2nd date. Too much variability in a first date to draw meaningful conclusions.

Truth....was she nervous, was she not into where was picked for the date, did you not get her humor yet, did she not get yours, etc

Easy on the ablism there "balls187".

Yes. No one want's to hear about your gap year in Bolivia.

I have a better explanation. She was talking about the kinds of stuff she was into, and didn't sense that you were into the same things. Then when you said you did do stuff like that, she was interested because you had more in common.

She didn't have an ego, you did. If you didn't, you guys could have talked all about the particulars of the stories she was telling, interspersing with similar tales from your adventures.

But no, you wanted to prove that you were better than her. So you let her talk thinking not of having an actual conversation with her, but wanting to go on your spiel.

Honestly, you weren't there, you have no idea what kind of tone / non-verbal cues she was putting out there.

It's entirely possible you're right, but all you know about the situation is what he's written here. Without any other information, I'm inclined to believe what he's saying.

You're right, I wasn't there.

But it's not hard to have an engaging conversation with someone, even someone you are not interested in as a romantic partner. Especially when you have things in common to talk about.

He pointedly stated that he didn't want to do this, citing a problem he had with her attitude. To me, it doesn't matter what tone she used, what non-verbal cues she put out there. You're sitting there with someone doing nothing else but talking for an hour or so. If you can't make the most of it, and you blame the other person for that, then it's you that has the ego problem.

A conversation, particularly in a date context, is a delicate dance of perceptions, temptation, discovery, and yes, ego. It's fun whether or not you plan on doing anything else with them or even whether you like them.

Honestly, while I'm not inclined to believe vinceguidry's opinion, I'm also pretty sure NTDF9's opinion is wrong, for a two simple reasons:

1) Virtually every single time I've heard my guy friends talking about (and drawing conclusions from) a bad date, it's almost always (in my judgment) psychobabble BS - there are a million reasons for having a bad experience. Now that I think about it, this applies to women talking about their dates too.

2) Why would you talk about a bad date on an internet forum? I have a strong prior belief that any personal interpretation of the opposite side in a romantic situation on an internet forum, is probably wrong.

> She didn't have an ego, you did.

Why do you defend her?

She was clearly being stereotypical of computer programmers; in her own words - "Tell me something about yourself...what adventures have you done? Or do you just do some programming stuff" (the keyword here is "just" ... as if computer programming is not an adventure).

So what if she was? He just let her talk for 10-15 minutes, contributing little. If I were her, I'd be a little annoyed too. He had all this time to participate, why didn't he?

I'm sorry, but I'm way more inclined to think that it was him that was lacking in social adroitness than that she was so unbelievably insulting that he couldn't even talk to her.

I don't want to analyze it too much, in the end it's just a bad date. But I get asked stuff like that all the time, and it doesn't piss me off. Some coders really aren't very adventurous. If I was one of those coders, I wouldn't get mad either. I'd just realize she's not my type, enjoy the conversation as much as I could and move on.

Why be so quick to take offense?

> So what if she was?

It means that for a man who wants "practical, non-judgemental girls," the decision to call it quits is much easier in regards to a girl possessing an ego that is stereotypically judgemental of his identity in such a demonstrable fashion of her "trying to figure out how she was better than [him]....IN EVERY FACET OF LIFE".

And you know all this... from 15 minutes of chatting? You've never been a little nervous or said something stupid during a first date?

As none of what NTDF9 wrote of his experience (and nowhere did he write that it was "15 minutes of chatting") even remotely indicates her being "a little nervous" or her having said "something stupid", your two loaded questions cannot be answered in their present form.

Saying something stupid (like "programming stuff") is definitely something that someone might say because of nervousness.

That is such a bizarre characterization; where on this earth do you see the use of phrase "programming stuff" implicating its utterer being in a nervous state? Besides, you are ignoring the whole context that NTDF9 spelled out in his original post; it really pays to take that into consideration instead of reading something with layers of prejudiced interpretations.

I have little reason to believe NTDF9's characterization of the encounter. Neither do you. These are just random internet opinions, keep that in mind. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11085463

> I have little reason to believe NTDF9's characterization of the encounter. Neither do you.

I do not have such need to believe, as I take what the other person says at face value. Specifically NTDF9 gave a report of his date (a real-life event), and it is hardly a random internet opinion; he was the one who was there in flesh and blood body and only he could have assessed it better than anyone here (with their random internet opinions/ judgements). Not imposing my own opinions and biases on the other person -- and generally taking what they say at face value -- makes life much easier when it comes to interacting with people.

Also, as random internet opinions don't spring out of nowhere -- they are reflective of the people who write them -- I wouldn't downplay it using the attribute "just." I started this whole thread after being bewildered by someone (vinceguidry) defending a girl who was just reported to be stereotypically judgemental of her date. He wasn't just expressing a random internet opinion, especially as I am familiar of this attitude among (some) men in the real-world.

What people talk on the internet is reflective of what happens in the real-world.

>> I have a better explanation. She was talking about the kinds of stuff she was into, and didn't sense that you were into the same things. Then when you said you did do stuff like that, she was interested because you had more in common.

Or...she could be a normal person and try to understand what I've been doing my whole life until now, just like I was listening to her about her own stories. Because in normal world, people have diverse lives.

If I say I only want a programmer woman (since I'm a programmer), but who is even better than me. What would you say about that? Am I being picky? Big ego? If I am, then why isn't she called picky?

> Am I being picky?

Yes. You rejected her.

> why isn't she called picky

Because she did not reject you.

> she could be a normal person and try to understand what I've been doing my whole life until now

A date is not a normal situation. Just like job interviews, there are all kinds of objectives people can have that influence their behavior that don't really involve you that you're not going to know about going in.

She may have been on a bunch of dates with guys where there were these long, boring discussions on stuff that the guy found interesting but she didn't. That happens a lot from what I've been told. So she forms a strategy for making her dates better.

> I was listening to her about her own stories.

You weren't just listening, you were listening and forming judgments. You need to be aware that these judgments you are forming aren't necessarily correct and that you should allow her to correct them before you let them take control of your date.

You need to participate in the telling of the stories, not just sit there like a cold fish.

> If I say I only want a programmer woman (since I'm a programmer), but who is even better than me.

I would say you're being needlessly and destructively dismissive of potential mates. You don't pick the woman you want, you pick among the women you have available to you.

If you really want a programmer, then you should be taking positive steps to meet more of them. Same with any of these criteria. If that's really what you want, yet you're limiting yourself to just what comes along, than your desires are just wishful thinking. It's like marketing, you need to have a way to target your audience.

Sorry, man. Based on what you wrote and how you wrote it I'm sensing that you might be the one with the massive ego.

> girl (29 yrs old)

> I'm 27

Besides you can afford to keep dating for another 5-10 years, she has to settle soon due to fertility window. Pickiness is the bane of latest generations...

Not all women want to have kids.

Most women want to have at least one child.

I don't think you're the massive ego. There is a competition nowadays to who's done more. Actually when people tell it, it's not that they want to be the best. It's that they want a minimum, and that minimum is perhaps "At least my partner has to be able to enjoy travelling" or "At least my partner must have seen enough different situations so he will be flexible and compassionate if I become broke/superrich or if we have friends from variety X or Y". Maybe try to decrypt what she was asking for and she'll notice you're on the same wavelength. Don't let that mold into a competition.

She could have been nervous and wanted to impress you. A girl who does not like is not likely to spend time trying to outdo you, she'll just fake some reason to leave.

> was constantly trying to figure out how she was better than me

Is there anything wrong with that? I like people who claim to be better ... assuming they can support these claims. She was positive and interested in you - why would that be a problem?

> that males generally dont marry up

Huh? It's females that generally insist on marrying up, ergo insist on not marrying down. Males are much less picky in this regard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

Or just go to any dating site that allows visible income preferences.

If (straight) females aren't marrying down then (straight) males aren't going marry up.

I am aware of the symmetry of the final action. I was commenting on who enforces that outcome. Note 'insist on' and 'less picky'.

I am a woman. I married "down". I also married a man shorter than me, something I don't advertise much because men who are shorter than average tend to have enormous amounts of baggage and I don't want every short man on the planet thinking I am the solution to their problem. In many cases, I do not want to get involved with them because they are assholes, not because of their height.

As a woman who defies two really common stereotypes here, I will suggest that most women are as bad about wanting men who are tall and moneyed as men are typically bad about wanting someone younger and hot looking. And, hey, those two types go well together. They don't make for the kind of relationship I want, but women aren't all saints who marry for "love" with zero conditions or whatever the hell. Most women are just as biased about who they date as men are, they just have different biases than men have.

> I will suggest that most women are as bad about wanting men who are tall and moneyed as men are typically bad about wanting someone younger and hot looking

Agreed, although there seems to be a big difference in the social acceptability of admitting it.

Women will quite openly say they want a tall man, without being criticised. Whereas a man who says "I won't date anyone who weighs more than xxx lbs" or "I'll only date women at least 5 years younger than me" will often be seen as a shallow asshole.

This is only based on my experience of discussing it with (male and female) friends. YMMV

I agree with you and that is why I am commenting on it: Because "men are assholes" if they comment on it.

I think the reason for that is because men have so much more economic and political power than women and there is a lot of expectation that heterosexual women will get financial support for their male lover. So a woman who is not "picky" is "a whore, just selling it" and a man who is too picky about things like looks is "just treating women like sex objects." The sex for money deal is only socially acceptable when they love each other and marry for love and then the defacto situation that he probably brings more money to the table is somehow OK.

I think there are legitimate concerns there, but I don't agree with the way we resolve those issues. I do what little I can to try to change the conversation about such things.

I don't see homemaker (i.e. housewife, stay at home dad, etc) on there. I wonder if it's because it doesn't rank high enough or just wasn't included in the data set. I'd imagine that the higher paying jobs would lean more towards a single income household.

Probably because that's not tracked as a profession beacuse it's not really one. You are tracked by what you actually learned. People become stay at home mums/dad in the relationship, not before.

> Probably because that's not tracked as a profession beacuse it's not really one.

Anyone who thinks being a homemaker is not a profession has no clue what it entails. If you consider a couple as a single unit, it's simply optimizing by specialization. When you look at the cost of baby-sitting/nannies it makes a lot of sense too. Why make $40K extra if I'm going to spend $35K on a nanny?

> You are tracked by what you actually learned.

No you're tracked by what your current position is. I'm pretty sure that office assistants who studied literature are still tracked as office assistants.

> People become stay at home mums/dad in the relationship, not before.

Exactly and this data represents a set of married people, not a set of jobs. If it doesn't include homemaker as an option then you've excluded all married single income households.

> Anyone who thinks being a homemaker is not a profession has no clue what it entails.

Or just has one of the many common definitions of profession, for which homemaker doesn't qualify. E.g., the first definition in most dictionaries tends to be something like this "a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification."

Homemaker is not, generally, a paid occupation, nor is it an occupation that requires prolonged training and a formal qualification.

I think the desire to characterize it as a "profession" is that the social perception of the social value of professions has led to a desire to characterize any vocation with perceived social value as a "profession", and a perception that a judgement that something is not a profession implies that it is not a worthwhile vocation.

> If it doesn't include homemaker as an option then you've excluded all married single income households.

No, it doesn't. Its possible to have a married single-income household where neither partner is a homemaker. (Single income households where homemaking tasks are either shared or contracted out, and the non-income-earning partner devotes their bulk of their time to tasks that are neither income-earning nor homemaking exist -- my perception is that they are more common among higher income groups, but that's not the result of any systematic study.)

Anyone who thinks being a homemaker is not a profession has no clue what it entails.

I was married to a stay-at-home mom for 12 years. When she moved into an apartment and left me with the 4,000 square foot house and our three kids I realized just how ridiculously easy being a stay-at-home parent is when you have kids in full day school. I'm a software engineer that works 40 hours per week from home and I have no trouble keeping up the house, the kids homework, the kids activities (karate, cheerleading and basketball right now) in addition to a full time job. For home cleaning and laundry I hire kids from the local university for $10 to $15 per hour from Care.com for a total of 3 hours per week.

My soon-to-be-ex wife used to spend over 8 hours per day on Facebook. Not surprising considering she was literally sitting at home by herself for 8 to 9 hours per day. Her mom was a stay-at-home mom as well and she used to brag about sitting around at home all day and then when the husband would surprise her by coming home for lunch she would grab the vacuum cleaner and pretend to vacuum. Keeping up a house and taking care of kids over 5 is not a full-time job. Don't get me wrong - you can make it a full time job by being incredibly inefficient, doing things for your kids that they should be doing on their own and doing inconsequential things that don't matter to anyone if they aren't done. But other than that, being a stay-at-home parent is not even close to being equivalent to a full time job.

Can we talk about your opinion of it not being a profession? I've always noticed that good homemakers share the same qualities of a good professional. Organized, punctual, good communicator, and good manager. They don't earn a paycheck from an employer, but neither do other professions. A home maker simply does not stay at home and watch TV (well, a good one). There is a lot of work behind keeping a home in good standing.

Am I talking non-sense? If so, why?

Profession is literally 'a paid occupation' and homemakers aren't paid - so homemaking would be an occupation but not a profession. Furthermore, as the parent mentioned, there aren't really unmarried homemakers, except those who are independently wealthy. Someone may be a physicist or nurse and then _become_ a homemaker.

All this isn't to to say that homemaking isn't challenging or exhausting (it can be), just that it doesn't really qualify as a profession. I don't think the parent poster was implying it wasn't difficult, just that it doesn't fit within the framework of professions.

Good points. I did not consider it being an occupation and not a profession. Thank you.

Yeah, it's a matter of definitions. A "profession" is something you do that you get paid for. No one sends paychecks to homemakers. An "occupation", however, is something you do to occupy your time (hence the term, "occupation"). Usually, they're one in the same, but not always: if you don't need a paycheck, you can have an occupation as a homemaker, a philanthropist, a volunteer, a socialite, etc.

This is exactly why amateur athletes cannot take money for their wins/etc. Because as soon as they do, they are professionals by definition.

Well, you wouldn't expect to, right? That's a category that doesn't exist UNTIL you get married i.e. you're not a househusband/housewife until you're a husband/wife. That's obviously a somewhat contrived subset, but admittedly this is ONLY looking at married couples.

I'd be more curious how it handles change of career, for example.

The number of professions that connect to registered nurses seems really high. Especially in the gay male community. Huh.

looks at Facebook

Wow. I do know a lot of gay male nurses.

Disclaimer: I don't know of any stereotyping around that, but if there is, I'm certainly not trying to contribute to it.

I guess it's not much of a surprise how often Truck Driver comes up considering it's one of the largest professions in the US.

It'll really suck for them when we have driverless trucks.

It won't. They'll simply shift to another job. It's not like they're absolute idiots, they can learn a new trade.

Like what? Driving a taxi/Uber? No, that'll be automated too. Working at McDonald's? No, that'll be automated too. Becoming a software engineer? If they were any good at that, they would have done it already.

The fact is, all these low-education jobs are going away in the near future, to be replaced by robots and automation. We're not going to need hordes of poorly-educated people to work any more.

I find it interesting that many of the IT/Engineering/Tech jobs have a high degree of connectivity to elementary/middle school teachers. So the high salaries are helping to balance out the crap salaries.

Hmm, or maybe to balance out the lack of pensions and retirement healthcare after the techies burn out :-)

or the balance of empathy/emotional intelligence

Or maybe simply male-dominated field (social circle is mostly male) with female-domainted field (social circle is mostly female).

Like the previous post stated, this is likely just because there are many nurses and elementary school teachers. There was no statement that the graph corrected for this.

Or the unpredictable late night hours in IT with the teacher hours that work around a child's own school year and daily schedule.

That's hilariously spot on for me. I'm a tech guy and my wife is a elementary teacher.

reminded how 20 years ago a school principal wife of an older guy in our IT department made sure that all unmarried/unattached guys from the department attended the Women's Day party (Russia) at her school :)

Software developers seem to be incredibly endogamous to me.

Duh... who would take us? Have you seen us?

Probably due to using words like endogamous.

I love what these conclusions entail: female programmers are either lesbians, or so turned off by their male colleagues that they'll marry anyone else with a spread so wide to be statistically insignificant.

Or maybe the males are marrying anyone..

Oh, right! Now I realize the chart doesn't really show "other". It would be interesting to calculate entropy from the distribution for each profession.

At first I found this fascinating -- "data shows that CEOs marry assistants" is a good narrative about gender attitudes towards marrying. But as I played with it, I was kind of bummed to learn: most male professions tend to marry assistants, since there are a lot of married female assistants (second only to teachers for females).

I did a quick search for who male Programmers, Executives, and Janitors marry (tried to pick a diverse set), and then filtered out the top five female occupations in this data (Teachers, Assistants, Nurses, Misc Managers, Salespersons). The remaining results were: male Programmers marry female Programmers, male Executives marry female Executives, male Janitors marry female Janitors or female Maids.

So I whipped up a script that, instead of measuring the absolute frequency, normalizes the data set against how often the target occupation gets married to. ie instead of just counting common pairings, it measures "how much more likely is profession X (compared to the general population) to marry profession Y?".

For male CEOs, the result is: they marry other CEOs. Male CEOs are 12x more likely to marry a female CEO than males in other professions are. They are also 12.6x more likely to marry embalmers! 7x more likely to marry Announcers, 5.3x more likely to marry "Dancers and Choreographers", and 4.9x more likely to marry "Public Relations and Fundraising Managers". They are only 1.2x more likely to marry a Secretary than other males are.

For male programmers, it is similar: male programmers are 20x more likely to marry female programmers than other male occupations are. This is because only 0.2% of men marry female computer programmers, but 3.4% of male programmers do. Male programmers also marry female Materials Engineers (20x more likely), Information Security Analysts (13x), "Surveyors, Cartographers, and Photogrammetrists" (10x), and "Architects, Except Naval" (8x).

I also picked one final way of slicing it: "how many more of these marriages did we see than expected" (expected based on the relation frequencies of the two occupations). This is another way of removing "well we would expect a lot of these marriages", but in a way that is less geared towards low-occurrence matches like CEO-Embalmer. For CEOs, the results are: CEOs, Misc Managers, Elementary and Middle School Teachers, Secretaries, Accountants and Auditors. For Programmers, it's: Programmers, Misc Managers, Other Teachers and Instructors, Software Developers, Accountants and Auditors.

Anyway, this isn't to say that these other ways of looking at the data are any "better", they're just answers to different questions.

I threw up the code in a gist -- sorry it's messy https://gist.github.com/kmod/ee6ac3c029641b39d0b6

This is great, thanks for writing up what you found!

TIL There is an occupation called 'Gaming Cage Worker'

It's the person who works in the "cage" in a casino, i.e. exchanges money for chips and vice versa.

It seems odd that there are enough of them to warrant their own classification as opposed to a general gambling or even recreation classification.

I expect it's a legal thing. Most people involved with the gambling industry have no qualifications whatsoever, but the act of dealing cards is extremly formalized (for obvious reasons), so there is probably a specific designation in law for dealers.

An aside: This visualization's UX is rather poor but I'll let Bloomberg slide this time around because their 404 page is incredible: http://www.bloomberg.com/404

Eh, I'm a snob, I know, but I think the UX for both this and the 404 page is poor.

For the dataviz, I noticed many nits, but for brevity I'll say this:, I think the visualization falls way short of communicating patterns in the data, or indeed illustrating any relative significance of a given match set over others. The design and the narrative need some work. I can see the gender matches are illustrated, but it isn't communicated why that is important. The D3 development work is adequate, but within that, there are some behaviors that could use some tweaks finesse (for example on desktop, when hovering across multiple items to a specific, the experience stalls slightly while calculating the graph updates for each item).

The 404 page shows some personality for sure, so that's cool, but a 1.6meg choppy animated gif isn't exactly awesome, and the repeat-x doesn't add anything either.

I wonder what difference between "Software Developers" and "Computer Programmers" causes the former to marry mostly within themselves and the latter to prefer nurses, teachers and secretaries.

If it's self-described, that's maybe even more interesting.

If you apply exaggerated stereotypes and think of "software developers" as cool web x.0 startup UX whatevers who failed to find a more matching category and of "computer programmers" as Fortran-wielding remnants left over from the IBM age, it does not seem all that surprising anymore.

I think it's funny to notice how people are saying "If you want to get married to a (some profession) then you should work as a (other profession)." We shouldn't think that the correlation implies a cause. This data doesn't track what people's professions were before they were married, or how the professions change over time.

It would be interesting to see how people changed their profession as a result of getting married. For example, when people get married they're probably less likely to have jobs that require a lot of travel.

There is a job called "Computer operators"? Isn't that just, Everybody?

Think blue collar IT. In the old days, the grunt who watched mainframe batch jobs and fiddled with printers. If you see grumpy old people wearing overalls or non-khaki pants in a government or bank datacenter, you've spotted the operators.

Sometimes help desk types get categorized this way.

My guess was data entry people.

I am particularly amused by the thick line between "Proofreaders and Copy Markers" and "Dispensing Opticians".

So disappointed. Was looking for the connection that shows who super models marry, so that I may plan my career like wise.

My guess: Talent agents & managers, sportsmen, actors, photographers, male models, musicians.

If I'm reading the viz correctly, it's actually truck drivers.

Go for model instead of super model. The aesthetic difference is negligible, and i'd guess the egos, on average are smaller.

Changing the font color to black helps usability a lot. Just enter this snippet in the url bar

javascript:jQuery('.job-text').css('color', 'black');

With chrome, you might have to re-enter the 'javascript:' part.

Non-software engineers are really strange:

Mech engineers marry registered nurses

Elec engineers marry teachers

Civil engineers marry teachers

Chemical engineers marry secretaries

Mining engineers marry teachers

Nuclear engineers marry teachers

With the exception of chemical engineers, there's basically no marrying inside the field.

Software developers (men) marry Recreation and Fitness workers (men). Maybe we should use this data to incentive gay men to become software engineers! At least would bring some diversity to my profession.

Most of the non-straight people I know are in software. It really doesn't seem to lack diversity orientation-wise.

Female Models, Demonstrators, and Product Promoters partner with:

Truck Drivers Miscellaneous Managers Retail SupervisorsLaborersRetail, SalespersonsIndustrial, and Refractory Machinery Mechanics

Yeah, the model-truck driver connection is a real head-scratcher. It doesn't seem like they would often be in the same social circles.

I wonder how broad the term 'model' is in this case.

Self-identification as "model" quite likely includes any number of people who are registered with some agency but effectively unemployed.

This is absolutely brutal to use. I'd like to search for something specific but can't ctrl-f, and visually searching is useless. Very cool in concept

Type your search into the search box labeled "Select a job..."

Nice visualization! Maybe they should have limited the colors to just the primary ones. I had a hard time figuring out the gradients in the middle.

I once knew a male high school teacher who was married to a Yale dropout, after 1 year. He told me she had gone to Yale to meet someone to marry well. Apparently common that time, 40 years ago.

Although it didn't quite work out well for her. He was a great msn husband but not a doctor or lawyer...

That's funny, I always got the feeling that almost every civil engineer I know were married to nurses, mid school teacher or childcare worker (and the occasional psychologist). Seems confirmed.

Someone please explain to me Emergency Management Directors (men) --> Probation Officers (women), overwhelmingly beating out teachers and secretaries. wat.

This reminds me of how it seems celebrities can only marry other celebrities. One exception is women celebrities can marry billionaires.

Explosives Worker -> Librarians

I guess opposites do attract.

Maybe it's survival bias. Explosive workers who spend a lot of time reading up on the latest industry literature after work survive longer than those who hit the bar after work? (Yes, if the death rate made a measurable difference here, OSHA would step in.)

Strangely I find this more usable on my Android Phone where it presents a list than their fancy annoying graph.

So Software Developers marry mostly within their own group? How does it stack with the gender imbalance?

I hope not. That would be incredibly boring.

Most software developers stay single?

This is interesting. Of all the married software developers I know, none are married to another developer.

Doesn't mean mostly (majority), just means the largest block. If 10% of software devs are married to other software devs, and the remaining 90% are scattered across 100 professions with no single pairing exceeding 10%, then dev<->dev marriages will show as the largest.

Interesting, but sort of suffers from a few dominant trends:

- white men without a college degree marry secretaries - white men with a college degree marry teachers

It'd be more interesting to know how occupations shift choices away from other demographic factors.

I would have guessed Fence Erectors would be most likely to marry Republican Presidential Candidates, but I guess I'm wrong.

Visualization is very terrible

This chart is massively unusable.

As a guy, what occupation do I need to be in to increase my chances of marrying a woman CEO?

It tells you in the introductory paragraph. You need to be a CEO. So better improve at reading the executive summaries.

I interpreted it differently. If you want to marry a male CEO, you have to be a woman CEO.

I'm asking the reverse.

No. The article says In other words, female CEOs tend to marry other CEOs; male CEOs are OK marrying their secretaries.

This means that female CEOs want to marry other CEOs. Male CEOs are happy marrying secretaries. If you want to marry a female CEO, you're best off being a male CEO.

Its official, I can't read. I swear it has to do something with that typeface they used, it just doesn't want to render well and my brain won't just come out and admit to this fact, so I keep trying to read it as if there is nothing wrong.

Why do web developers do this?

The visualization is horrible

the people behind this are no Mike Bostock..

crap visualization

The usability of the page is pathetic. First, the fonts are too small. If you enlarge then you can't scroll horizontally to see the rest of the titles because the lines get in the way. Didn't anyone think to make the graph clickable instead of just mouse-over. And on top of everything we have the heading of the site that floats and gets in the way. Fucking hell. Someone saw the graph and said, wow let's just use it because it looks awesome. Sure it looks awesome if you have a couple dozen labels, not a gazillion of them

I like the graph and small box for typing a filter. Works great for me.

On my mac using Chrome, if I pinch zoom I can see the text and scroll around for what I want, then pinch zoom out and don't move the pointer.

How do they sleep at night!? /s

Drunk and with good company.

They (Designers) marry Miscellaneous Managers.

Worts part: the search implementation is very poor.

Typing "Teacher" will give you the following options Postsecondary Teachers, Special Education Teachers, Secondary School Teachers, Other Teachers and Instructors, Preschool and Kindergarten Teachers.

However it will not give you Elementary and Middle School Teachers.

> Someone saw the graph and said, wow let's just use it because it looks awesome.

Close to what happened! The magazine graphic (https://twitter.com/adamrpearce/status/697844614754123776) was finished before I started on the web version, and I just had a couple of days to make something that could go online. I initially tried a more sort of 538/scatterplot/analysis approach, but wasn't making a ton of progress. I started just sketching out different ways of putting all 500 jobs on the screen at once. The grid of jobs with lines showing up on mouseover was the most fun to play with and being pushed to finish before valentines day, I went with it.

Sorry it was hard to use!

I thought it was creative, entertaining and different than the usual boring charts. It's not perfect but I still liked it!

I think it's really cool. Saved for later to pick apart the d3 code.

We clearely need quotas for female truck drivers. What an absurd disparity!

Surprisingly many of the comments here have a boorish, misogynistic tone. Please be respectful. This is Hacker News, not r/RedPill

It's not that surprising... it's not that HN is like this, but this story wakes up people that have those opinions.

Surprisingly many comments accuse others of misogyny without pointing out any specific instances or providing any argument whatsoever.

It turns out that "sexist" is also a commonly used tactic for shutting down discussion.

Yoga instructor is missing. That's pretty much the ideal wife (lots of free time, unreasonably fit), and I'd like to know what job to obtain in order to be pursued by yoga instructors.

And DJ is missing. Which prevents us from confirming the hypothesis that DJ's do better than JD's.

http://longorshortcapital.com/short-jds.htm

Most men seek the JD to “make a lot of money” which is really just a euphemism for “power over women.” This means you sign up for four years of college and four years of college debt, ... then three years of law school with its accompanying three years of law school debt...

Over the entire course of this process the person who sought the opposite designation, the DJ, will be pulling more strange each night than the JD will in his entire life, all with a designation he obtained at no cost.

DJ is the actual opposite of a JD as not only are its letters the reverse of JD but it goes before someone’s name not after. It comes at virtually no cost, requires almost no talent or taste, and lends itself to sleeping in and having anonymous sex with women who not only are not wearing sweaters but likely do not even own sweaters.

Yoga instructor would drastically skew the graph

Recreation and Fitness Workers

Sounds like basically your usual corporate middle+ manager that marries to there, which seems to somewhat bind rather tightly to the further left.

This is really a hard graph to follow. There's probably a reasonable chord diagram arrangement that could help us filter through the data, but perhaps really this is too unwieldy for even a chord diagram due to the relatively high number of node vertexes to associate together.

> having anonymous sex with women who not only are not wearing sweaters but likely do not even own sweaters.

Is there something inherently unsexy about sweaters?

I imagine it depends on who you ask, a DJ or a JD

I imagine you have to be similarly crunchy and "free-spirited". So things like "raft guide" or "ski instructor" probably do well.

> Most men seek the JD to “make a lot of money” which is really just a euphemism for “power over women.”

The first sentence is so wrong, I can't even bother reading on.

Don't bother, it only gets worse. The level of misogyny and sexism in this thread is way beyond what I expect from HN. What happened to professionalism and treating others with respect, guys? When our female colleagues complain about sexism in tech, stuff like this is (part of) what they're complaining about.

Funny, you think it was written by a man. I thought it was written by a woman.

Where's the misogyny and sexism in what he said!?

If what you are describing is an example of 'sexism in tech',then it's nonexistant.

The only problem I see is the inability to have honest discussions, without being called a 'sexist'.

Just curious - how do you find this wrong? What utopia do you live in where money does not confer power?

It's wrong because s/he assumes that men collect money to "have power over women". That's a 180 degree wrong perception of reality. Men gather money to have power over other men! By being the "best man" (rockstar, CEO, famous actor, mafia boss, most popular kid in high school, a prince), and having the greatest social status, you get disproportionate access to women/sex; it doesn't really matter if it's money that gives you power or something else, it's just that money is increasingly important in our world.

I think your argument presupposes that women have no say in the matter. Like you're talking about men beating other men to have "access" to women, as if that's all that's needed. I personally believe that women have more agency than that, and they gravitate towards richer men. That establishes my earlier post - rich men have power over women.

Obviously women have agency; it just happens that they choose (in average) similar things. Like money (and fame). Men observe that and learn. And compete with other men to be chosen.

Edit: Ah, forget it. I don't think there's much point in my (second) comment; we're basically saying the same thing with slightly different words.

Yoga instructors believe a lot of crazy things. For long-term happiness, you need to consider ideological, religious / spiritual, and financial compatibility.

If someone bombarded me with pseudoscience everyday, I'd have a hard time keeping a long-term relationship, no matter how hot the sex.

You should get an amethyst so that you can align your 3rd chakra, you beautiful diety.

I was led to believe there would be hot sex.

> Yoga instructor is missing. That's pretty much the ideal wife

You you like to be on different economic terms. I prefer to have relatively equal relationships where both persons can support the same kind of lifestyle.

> Yoga instructor is missing. That's pretty much the ideal wife (lots of free time, unreasonably fit)

I see why you made a throwaway account to make this comment, but am surprised you haven't been downvoted into oblivion. Does HN really need it to be pointed out how sexist this comment is?

How is this sexist? He's just expressing his preferences (which BTW seem pretty universal - who would want to be in a relationship with someone who's unhealthy and has no time?!).

It's sexist to say the ideal wife can be defined by their physical fitness and free time. That is pretty much the definition of objectification.

Sort of. What if a woman said that her ideal husband would be a handsome man who wasnt a workaholic? I agree with you, but im just pointing out how, deep inside, everyone objectifies to some extent.

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