Who Marries CEOs, Doctors, Chefs and Janitors (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Who Marries CEOs, Doctors, Chefs and Janitors (2016)

bloomberg.com

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For another interactive data visualizations, I enjoyed:

- "Most Female and Male Occupations Since 1950" https://flowingdata.com/2017/09/11/most-female-and-male-occu...

- "Singles, 18-64" - on gender imbalance in various cities in the USA (in particular, San Francisco and New York) http://jonathansoma.com/singles/

> New Orleans used to be a great place to find an unmarried girl in her twenties, but now they've all migrated north to Jackson, Mississippi.

There’s a whole lot under the covers here. Low marriage rates and high incarceration rates among young black men probably created a high ratio of single young women in New Orleans and Jackson. Depopulation among the black community post Hurricane Katrina likely explains the relative decrease in single women in New Orleans.

Living in New Orleans, you beat me to it.

I'm a bit confused by the "Singles, 20-34" map in your second link. How can there be more single men than women essentially everywhere if there is roughly an even balance of men and women (which there is?) I don't know of any weird dip in the female birthrate 20-34 years ago.

More men are born than women but women live longer on average so the ratio stays around even.

While the gender ratio for a particular age gets increasingly skewed. Past a certain age, it's mostly old women. Since, on average, men tend to marry women a few years younger than them, older women face a rather tough dating market and it gets worse with every passing year that they fail to die.

Dealing with heterosexual couplings only, the "50/50 balance = no excess singles" theory assumes men and women pair up equally, but if, say, a percentage of women go for a significantly smaller percentage of men - and share them - this would lead to an excess of single men.

As this seems to be a touchy subject with some, I'm not trying to make a point, just relating how this could statistically work - and of course, it would work the other way round and leave an excess of women.

This reversal may be indicated at the 50+ age ranges in some of the links where single women are in the excess in that demographic.

People don't marry within the same age bracket. Younger women marry older men. So if you are male and in your 20s you are competing against single men in their 30s and 40s who are all going for girls in their 20s.

Wow, fascinating data, thanks for sharing. Wonder how much that gender disparity has contributed to the various "movements" of young men deciding to give up on mating altogether.

Assuming monogamy, it's a zero sum game, and it looks like, at least until men hit 50 there's no way for everybody to be paired up, so you either compete or you are likely to fall into that spillover bucket.

Obviously this is a vastly complex topic, but I wonder how much impact it has on society's stability. Would be interesting to learn more about it.

Why are there so many more single men than women until mid-ages, where male death causes more single women than men?

> Among 20- and 30-somethings, almost every single city in America has more single men than single women. Although no single woman in New York will believe it, I promise it's true.

Could the common complaint among NYC women be that it's not as balanced in their favor as they've been used to? Maybe it's because men aren't looking for relationships until later on in life? Or perhaps could it be due to the increased financial pressure society has on men which leads to increased standards for a male partner? Or maybe society has an increased dating pressure due to a female's age, which makes less females successful in their search due to their age?

Regardless of why these differences exist, it seems loneliness is only getting worse, and we are trending towards a less and less compassionate future. How can people help with the issue?

Casual dating and high concentrations mean there is no incentive to stick around if things aren't 100% what you're looking for. And if you're reasonably pretty then you have no shortage of options -- why settle, esp. if you're not looking to settle down?

> why do female dancers have a thing for male welders?

One thing to note is that it is likely that welders are some of the highest paid blue collar workers in America. The other thing to note is that careers in the arts are for the most part about passion, not money. Thus it is not super surprising that someone with a career that does not pay a lot, would want to pair with someone that has a well paying career that is spread out through the country.

My guess is a lot of welders are marrying strippers.

I suspect that a welder probably has zero access to a "professional dancer" other than that.

I'm a white collar worker, and that would probably be even my only access to a "professional dancer".

Not sure why the downvotes. Outside of my cousin, who did a lot of serious ballet as a younger lady, I can't think of anyone who does dancing on a pro or semi-pro level without allusions to champagne rooms.

.. does that include the retina burn compensation ?

Flashdance fetish?

One danger is looking for correlations in a dataset means you will find them. It could be by noise. I can't even see what the percentages are in the visualization, when you move the mouse it changes the view, it is quite annoying.

Let's say you have a room full of developers and 15% of them have their birthday in May. Do you make conclusions from this? What is the chance of that happening purely by chance given that all developers had a pretty-much equal chance of being born on any given month.

Why do male welders have a thing for female dancers?

Knowing some guys from high school who had the ambition to be a male welder, their drive was to make the most money so they could impress beautiful girls better.

I think it is safe to assume that female dancers are beautiful on average.

Not so sure about beautiful, but they definitely have great bodies.

I thought it was interesting/funny that the top male-male coupling for software developers was to "recreation and fitness workers". Apparently we want someone to help keep us in shape after sitting all day.

The second author on the piece, Dorothy Gambrell, also publishes interesting data at Very Small Array (http://www.verysmallarray.com/) and has been writing the webcomic Cat and Girl (http://catandgirl.com/) pretty much forever! She's real neat.

There are too many job categories, the whole page would have been much better if things are grouped more generally, like 'Teacher', 'professor', 'office clerk', 'secretaries and admin', 'middle manager', 'senior management', 'programmer' etc.

'Truck driver' makes perfect sense.

> why do female dancers have a thing for male welders?

Are they exotic dancers?

>Unemployed, with No Work Experience in the Last 5 Years

>Eligibility Interviewers, Government Programs

Huh.

Yikes.

> Male Dancers and Choreographers partner with: Unemployed, with No Work Experience in the Last 5 Years

This seems unsurprising if you know male dancers. It’s almost entirely gig work. The difference between an employed dancer and his unemployed friend is that the employed one is having a good month.

This is cool but the hotlinks to the visualization seem to break UX on mobile. Often I get jerked to the visualization as my reward for my thumb landing on a link when trying to swipe to read. This is frustrating given that my screen is small and the link density is high...

If interested, this was discussed in 2016 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11081575

there's separate entries for "Computer Programmer" and "Software Engineer" with similar, but not quite the same results.

Yeah, these job categories seem awfully out of date.

Is it just me or is it hard to get any meaningful insight on the strength of each correlation from the visualization?

It's interesting that a man will gladly marry a woman who makes less money that he does, while a woman tend not to.

how do you differentiate open-mindedness from a closed-minded preference in other direction (i.e. straight men who specifically want to out-earn their spouses)?

You can see if there's a change in who initiates divorces after the couples switch their income ordering.

It would be particularly indicative if

1) Women who start out earning their husband start initiating divorces at higher rates, while men stay constant or decrease the rate of divorce.

However, to differentiate that from the hypothesis that all people moving up in the income spectrum have an tendency to split up with their current partner to find a new one, it would also be useful to see

2) Men who start out earning their wives do not start initiating divorces at higher rates, while women stay constant or decrease the rate of divorce.

You could also see how a switch in income ordering affects divorce rates in homosexual couples to factor out the gender aspects.

Another, less direct metric would be seeing who uses income filters in online dating more, though few sites seem to offer it nowadays.

Is this really more "open-minded"? Or is it just reflecting the traditional cultural expectation that men should be the primary earner?

One could as well make the opposite: women are more open-minded because they will gladly marry a man who makes more than them.

I don't agree with them about it being open-minded, but flipping the situation in your example doesn't compare. Marrying up is going to improve your networth, marrying down is going to lower it. Being unwilling to marry down, but being willing to marry up, is just common sense to even the most closed-minded person.

Common sense and culture don't always align. In traditional American culture, until recently, it was expected that men earned the income and women kept the house.

You're dramatically underestimating the power of societal expectations. Heterosexual couples in the US where the wife earns more than the husband lie about their incomes [1] to reduce the difference in earnings. Going against societal expectations is not "just common sense" to most people.

Full disclosure: my wife earns way more than I do, though that was not what we expected when we got married.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/07/wives-earning...

Hypergamy isn't culturally mediated. Women marry 'up' cross culturally, irrespective of their income. In fact, a lack of higher income male partners is associated with later marriage / reluctance to marry, among highly educated / paid women. The corollary is men preferring young, more attractive partners cross culturally. You can infer what you like from these results, but they've been highly substantiated.

Most likely, this is partly due to the fact that women bear children which can have a significantly negative impact on your health, welfare and earning capacity. Even if you are a woman making good money, a pregnancy with complications can derail your life and you may have no idea it's coming.

Source: I'm a woman who has read up a metric fuckton to understand why I ended up a homemaker instead of getting the serious, well-paid career I expected as one of the top students of my graduating class with academic honors that suggest I was one of the top students in my state and doing well on a national level as well.

sources?

Do something that directly benefits you AND fulfills a cultural expectation is not exactly being open-minded.

Marrying a lower-earning woman (one with a less-demanding career who can be the primary caretaker of children and home) also directly benefits men.

Are you in such an arrangement, to be able to tell that? If so, can you detail the benefits? Let's see if our impressions overlap in any degree.

I'm on the other side of that arrangement. When we got married my wife and I were both on demanding, competitive career tracks. We both made significant sacrifices when we had our first child, but stayed on the same paths. When we decided we wanted to have a second child we looked at the situation and decided the best option was for me to put my career on hold and be the primary caretaker.

There were a number of reasons for that decision, including differences between our fields (it would be much, much harder for my wife to restart her career after a prolonged break) and my own dissatisfaction with the job I was in at the time. We looked at full-time childcare but for the quality of care we wanted in our city it would have been over half my pre-tax salary for the two kids, so it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

Anyway, I'm primarily a stay-at-home dad now. I still do a little work here and there on a temporary/contract basis but my wife earns over 10x what I do annually. I take care of the kids, plan and prepare meals, wash dishes, do laundry, clean the house, buy groceries, take care of home maintenance, and generally keep our lives running. When a kid is up crying in the middle of the night I walk them to sleep. When someone's sick I take care of them and take them to the doctor if necessary. When my wife forgets something at home I load the kids in the car and take it to her at work.

When the kids are a bit older and don't need constant adult supervision I'll probably go back to work, perhaps part time or in a work-from-home arrangement at first. Eventually I expect I'll go back to normal full time employment. Unlike my wife's field I don't expect to have any great difficulty getting back into my career, though obviously I'll be years behind my former colleagues on the promotion track and probably lost any chance of reaching the highest levels of my profession. I never really cared about that anyway though so it doesn't bother me.

For all you rich ladies out there, I just want you to know I'm open minded, lmao.

This falls out of the distribution of incomes even before any "preference".

From a UK perspective, men outearn women on average, there are fewer female CEOs, many well paying fields are 70% male, etc.

If you pick a point on the income spectrum, there are more men in the country earning above that figure than women, and so unless you have incomplete pairing (same sex relationships likely don't change the ratios enough to matter) this is a trivial result.

Maybe "open-mindedness" isn't the right term, as was pointed out, because perhaps men are actively pursuing low-income women.

However one clue is the difference in the steepness of the preference: > On a list of 149 countries’ Gini indices provided by the CIA World Factbook, this would place the female dating economy as 75th most unequal (average—think Western Europe) and the male dating economy as the 8th most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war—think South Africa). [0]

One can also look at pop culture for hints on the differences in societal desired traits of the opposite sex. Compare TLC "No Srubs" [1] to Bruno Mars "Just The Way You Are" [2]

[0] https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-t... [1] https://genius.com/Tlc-no-scrubs-lyrics [2] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/brunomars/justthewayyouare.h...

> It's interesting that men are more open minded than women and will gladly marry a woman who makes less money that he does.

Men are not more open-minded, they just on average place less importance on womens’s earning potential, largely due to both men and women being influenced by traditional gender roles in which the male is expected to be the sole or primary earner while earning income is a secondary-or-less-significant role for women, and indeed seeing it as an important selection criteria can be seen as an indication that a man is unable or unwilling to perform his expected role.

Can EVERY MALE PROFESSION really be marrying secretaries, middle/elementary school teachers and nurses as this data suggests?

It would seem like you should eventually have a supply problem, no?

There are about 4-5M female nurses+teachers in the US. Both jobs that require major scale, and that happen to be 75-95% done by women.

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