Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
flowingdata.com
flowingdata.com
I guess pretty much every female software developer marries a male software developer which works out to the 12% number?
Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex. aka "male software developer has a 6% chance of marrying a software developer vs female software developer which has a 95% chance of marrying another software developer."
OTOH, its not as pronounced with nurses which have a similar problem in reverse.
You live in Seattle or the Bay Area perhaps?
Combine that 23ish-30ish age range with the fact that many (probably most) residents will work above the ACGME-mandated 80 hours a week for at least the first half of their residency, and I'm honestly shocked it's only ~21% of physicians that marry other physicians. Not to mention the fact that the income bump is substantial.
My fiancé is a physician and we met when she was a resident, and I'd say about 40% of all the residents I met during her residency who were in relationships were in a relationship with another physician.
I guess the choice is clear.
That said I'm a university dropout, and she did a degree in computer science, before switching to become a physician.
I know a lot of CS people locally who are married to dentists and doctors. There are a lot of encounters between doctors, but my personal experience is that doctors marrying doctors (or other medical specialists) seem to get divorced quite frequently.
In some (maybe most) countries in Europe, most people do not move far away from their initial place of birth. Could be for cultural reasons or just because distances are smaller. As such, by the time they are of a dating age, they already have a rich and extended social life. They don't necessarily require the work place as an important source of meeting a partner. In a way, this affords the luxury of keeping work and social separate.
The program I went to tripled in size over the course of my time there.
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2017/02/08/how-efficient-is-m...
I can see both sides, but one thing to think about is that coming back to software engineering after 5-10 years away would be brutal. It’s also a place it’s famously easy to coast and take it easy for a while.
But if I went through a pregnancy I would need a big rest and enjoy the rewards afterwards :-)
Though... she went back to Starbucks and service industry != tech industry by a long shot so....
I think it's just a cool thing to relate too
I think there's two problems with that premise: (1) a large slice of that marriage number could be male-male or other marriages. (2) the figure "10% of developers are female" is true only if you're looking at global numbers. It's higher in the U.S. where these marriage figures originate.
But this data is specifically "among married couples". The male software developer's chances of marrying a software developer are much, much higher if we just assume he's married in the first place.
It's the same reason there's a higher rate of being married to software developers among people who are married to software developers than there is among the general population.
If you look up computer programmers or analysts suddenly it's not that lopsided (they are not even the first group).
Feast your eyes on this! https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/
For example it says that while lesbian software developers often marry each other, gay male software developers often marry "recreation and fitness workers". Straight male software engineers often marry within the profession, but also marry nurses, teachers and accountants.
It's certainly happening in Sweden, but it's far from common. An almost universal constant in research of this nature is that women highly value a partner who earns similarly or more than them.
Sure does, you just don't marry if you don't find anyone you want to marry. It is that simple.
For example, we can see that even in Sweden women who earn less are more likely to marry and men who earn more are more likely to marry. Women who earn a lot are less likely to find a partner they like as you say.
It's the same in germany. It also comes down that people here don't care that much about degrees but value other things more if they have to choose.
That's what i thought as well, from anecdata it seems to me the overwhelming majority of females and gay males in software development or IT live with males or females from the same industry.
I wonder if one day the industry is more evenly distributed if we'd see a similar percentage as for lawyers.
edit just to clarify, for men. Dating pool for homosexual/heterosexual men.
If I am not mistaken, as per last results, most Informatics/Software Engineering degrees in Portugal have about 50% distribution between genders.
A mixed coding environment is always one of the points I assess when I get job offers.
Curious as you mentioned degrees, do you know if the same ratio transfers over to actual work life?
If you want a REALLY crazy number, look at physicians marrying physicians, it’s like 45%
Us programmers stick together. Quite a high rate of marrying within the community. Lawyers show a similarly high number.
A criticism of the study, is that it does not normalize by how many of these professions are in the general population. So, it appears as though software analysts don't like intermarrying. However, the truth is that there simply aren't enough of them around, they are simply more likely to run into software engineers, so that's whom they marry most.
IE. This study captures P(running into a profession) x P(preference for that profession). I would love to them model P(running into a profession), so that we could get the much juicer preferences of each group for various professions.
nobody else would take our schtick ...
Which would also be skewed by things like length of study and personality types attracted to particular interests.
Eg, Doctors and lawyers often don't want to get married until after school, at which point they've primarily been around other doctors and lawyers for the previous 3-7 years.
[1] Relatively speaking
But my point isn't so much that people meet in college, so much as there isn't really a good way to adjust statistical measurements to account for the popularity of a particular field/job, as was suggested up thread.
There are way too many related, interdependent, conflicting variables, with common field of study being a major one, even for the smaller disciplines.
Professionals I know in the 20-35 cohort only want to date other professionals. The ones that don’t want some weird stay at home trophy wife dynamic.
There’s nothing provably innate about some men preferring trophy wives. There is a lot of availability due to cultural baggage. The phenomenon that you’re talking about is culturally bound.
Anecdotally my wife makes ~150k more per year than me. She’s made more than me for like 80% of our relationship. I’ve stayed at home with our son.
We’re still top 1%. Neither of us care.
I would say it is probably true that a smaller proportion of men use it as strong of a signal as women do, but that makes sense to me considering women have a decent risk of not being able to earn income due to childbirth and child rearing.
You either want to be a power couple or just get the best partner you can and offer them a comfortable life. The relationships that are an exception to this are usually ones where both people started off equally and then one of them suddenly became massively successful but they still remain in love.
Second, men who earn a lot don't marry cashiers all that often. They want to marry within the same social class. They marry educated women whose earning potential is better then minimum wage.
Third, being stay at home partner comes with price and nowdays people really do it overwhelmingly because of children. The childless stay at home woman is mostly a rarity.
Partly because being dependent and fully paid by him comes with resentment and expectations on his side. The "I am working and you are just spending my money" feeling is one argument away. And partly because being bored, lonely and feeling useless most of time causes issues with her. Their interests and needs become different, so they diverge.
Usually, this means choosing beauty over earning potential, as beauty is much harder to find and then the value of money decreases as you earn more of it.
This thread seems to use a lot of colloquial wisdom without citing where it came from. How are your arriving at this conclusion?
Stay-at-home is not really a concept here beyond maybe a couple of years with a small child, otherwise it's just unemployment.
There's nothing wrong with earning money but there's nothing wrong with staying at home either. Some things money just can't buy.
“The percentage of dual-income households with children under age 18 has been on the rise since the 1960s”
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...
There may still be plenty of men in the same age group, single and good earners, but almost by definition they won't meet the highest of standards. Because if they did, they wouldn't be single.
And of course, some attractive ones are returned to the pool. But most are not, so the bigger issue of low supply remains.
I don’t know that you can make the claim that the mating market is completely efficient.
From the classical economist perspective, there's no point in trying to beat the market because if it were possible, somebody would have already discovered and exploited it, leaving you unable to do so similarly.
Just like the dating claim that if somebody was desirable, they would have already been taken.
My claim is that both perspectives are wrong because neither market is perfectly efficient. Ironically, taking the approach that they are efficient makes it harder to accomplish either end of beating the market or finding a mate.
If you come across a man in his 30s-40s who has always been single, chances are he is not a '$100 bill' man. It's possible that he is, but it's very unlikely. This is not the same as saying that there are no such thing as older '$100 bill' men, just like $100 bills do sometimes (but very rarely) end up on sidewalks.
>If you come across a $100 bill, chances are you are in fact the first person to come across it.
The economist assumes you won’t be the first person because of market efficiency. Your assumption above disregards this. It seems like you are having a hard time reconciling that with the imagined scenario of seeing the bill, because the assumption is someone who noticed it previously would have picked it up. The fact that those two don’t reconcile is the whole point.
The equivalent would be if someone were saying "Oh I met this handsome, rich, kind, unmarried 45-year-old man last night, but there must be something wrong with him, or else someone would have married him already." But I'm not saying that and I don't think the originator of this sub-thread is either. We're saying "Only a small portion of the available older men will actually be attractive mates (on whatever dimensions) because those who are attractive will have mostly been taken already."
It's like an economist saying "It's not a good use of your time to go outside scouring the sidewalks for $100 bills." That's not funny, it's just accurate.
We may be reading it differently but to my eyes, GP said essentially the same thing with
"by definition they won't meet the highest of standards. Because if they did, they wouldn't be single."
In other words, that rich, kind, high standard unmarried 45 year old must have something wrong with him or he wouldn't be single. I didn't take them to mean "there's a smaller pool to select from" because that's trivially apparent as more people get married, but it also cuts down on the competition as well.
I don't think anyone would argue that the longer a buffet table is open, the less chance there is to get the best choices. But the economist was saying "That cake still on the buffet line can't be good because if it were, it wouldn't be there." That's much more aligned with the GP's statement.
I imagine such a "top" man to be handsome, sociable, strong, economically successful or at least stable, funny, and whatever other quality women select for.
The chance for such men to go unnoticed and unclaimed until they are 30-40 y/o has to be close to zero. Almost all female attention is channeled to them, and they're unlikely to be passive themselves. The market should be efficient here. Do you know of any hot successful men that are single due to not being discovered?
If you widen the selection criteria to the best 50% of men, you're likely right that some of them in their 30s go "undiscovered". Yet it's questionable whether this is so in large numbers as time still matters:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profi...
In the age group of 30-49, 27% of men are single. Half of them want to be single and are not on the market, so that leaves 13.5% of remaining "supply".
So a single woman in this same age group looking for a man finds 86.5% of men unavailable or not interested. Did the market perfectly select the "best" 86.5% already? No, human affairs are complex, but we also should not look away from basic dynamics. Nature finds a way, whether we like it or not.
In my country (Netherlands) already from age 20, only 20% of men is single. It's unlikely that all remain with this same partner for life, but this is to point out that selection start early, and almost all "supply" is immediately taken. I don't know if the market is efficient, but it sure is fast. When trying to find your first partner in your 30s, you're a decade too late if you have high standards. In your 40s, most people have a family with kids that might be up to 10 years old, so "late" doesn't even begin to express it.
>The chance for [handsome, sociable, strong, economically successful or at least stable, funny] men to go unnoticed and unclaimed until they are 30-40 y/o has to be close to zero.
No doubt it's a smaller pool, but close to zero? I would be skeptical about such an absolute claim unless there's actual data. The pew research article doesn't speak to this point specifically, and I'm not such how one would quantify it.
>So a single woman in this same age group looking for a man finds 86.5% of men unavailable or not interested
This is based on the assumption that the entire pool should be the denominator. I don't think it should, and the single men looking for a desirable mate are in the a similar situation, where over 60% of women are unavailable. If one was a highly desirable female, it would seem to they can still align with a highly desirable male because both pools are dwindling. It's not like every single female is competing with every other female. As the number of available mates goes down, so does the number of competitors, albeit at differing rates. I would expect those different rates to have an impact, but not so much that the effective ability to find a comparable mate to be driven to zero, at least not for someone in their 30s-40s.
To circle back to the economist train of thought, if alignment isn't happening it could be attributed to inefficiencies (e.g., there isn't a market that allows for relatively frictionless meeting between players) or there is a misalignment of expectations that prevents agreement between players (e.g., I can't get junk bond returns at AAA bond prices/risk).
You're absolutely right that using the entire pool is a simplification. In NYC, at age 30-40 there may be plenty of attractive mates left, as there's simply a lot of people in a small place and the career life style is the norm. Meanwhile, in the small rural town there may be no mate at all, or very few.
In the original example, highly educated women in their 30s-40s being single, I think it's a case of mismatch. Being both late and demanding (if we are to follow the stereotype) whilst supply is both low and low quality. Again, local exceptions can apply.
I do believe another complexity or nuance is the massive difference between being in your 30s or 40s. This decade is the time frame where almost everybody settles, many already in their mid twenties. Early 30s you may still stand a chance, in your 40s...really not the same thing. You're middle-aged and still have to start "life". Family planning may start to become an issue.
Life starts at 20, not 40.
I think this gets to the heart of it. Nobody wants to "settle", meaning there is a mismatch between expectations between two parties.
To extend your original phrasing (which I disagree with), a desirable man would not be single in his 30s or 40s. But by the same logic, neither would a desirable female. The latter point being underscored by the stereotypical premium put on youth and biological pressure due to age.
So that analogy (which I disagree with) leaves you with a less desirable single female expecting to land a highly desirable male. Of course, this will lead to frustration and they will be, as you say (which I disagree with), forced to settle. I would argue they will be forced to make sure their expectations match reality. If your hypothesis holds, they wouldn't be single if they were truly highly desirable. I don't agree with that but I don't see why that same logic doesn't apply to both sexes, outside of market inefficiencies (which technology has heavily eroded).
Is there a particular reason why your original comment focused only on men? If anything, the reduced pressure to settle down due to a lower threshold of biological constraints seems to provide a basis for it to be less applicable to men, not more.
I think it's important to be precise about the group. I'm assuming a subset of women that have delayed relationships or family planning for 1-2 decades due to their full dedication to their careers. Most educated women would not fall in this group. They would have found some balance between the two, and start earlier with the social aspect of life. So the group is highly specific, to a degree extreme.
I do not believe that men and women look for the exact same qualities in each other. The thing these women optimized for (professional status) is not necessarily high on the list of all men. And even if it was, (many/most) men would settle for "less" in the meanwhile, indicating that again time is the selector. These women have desirable qualities, but they don't matter if they're not on the market when it matters.
The opposite situation is not the same. Whether it is biological or cultural, men fully dedicated to their career do tend to find partners accepting this imbalance, thus they don't wait until 40 years old to start a relationship or family. It doesn't even have to be a harmful stereotype if its fully consensual.
So I agree that this dynamic is less applicable to men. And indeed, said women have to adjust expectations.
Again I could sum it up as this: start in your twenties if you're picky.
It may be that there is misalignment between what that subset is targeting and what their targets are targeting.
For example, if a woman is in a culture that limits her ability to be successful financially, it would follow that she values the ability to make money in a mate to overcome those societal constraints. The cursory look into the research showed that as gender roles in a society became less rigid, the effect of hypergamy was reduced. If it were truly innate, I would expect there to be no reduction in hypergamy as societal norms change.
[1] Hadfield, Elaine (1995). Men's and Women's Preferences in Marital Partners in the United States, Russia, and Japan (PDF). Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology Vol. 26 No. 6, Western Washington University. pp. 728–750.
Right up until it becomes greater than theirs.
I think you're referring to the fact that successful marriages are largely becoming a luxury good, but these can both be true for a couple of reasons. First, using education as a proxy for attainment (please give me something better, because I haven't found it) I struggle to find statistics going past four year degrees to really talk about the top or competitive fields, and that isn't sufficient. Second, it seems reasonable to me that the women (and men) excelling professionally would have, on average, better chances of making a marriage work; it may be that a strong correlation between women's propensity for success in career and success in marriage is obscuring a negative effect of outlier-achievement on rates of getting and staying married that is also coming into play.
Besides all this, it's consistent with what I encounter in my daily life.
I agree with your post but the quote above speaks to my original point further up the thread. The fact that this assumes that the only suitable mate is one of the same career status is part of what drivers income inequality.
Other than that, the only other proxy for attainment is income but it’s still the same story
Absolutely. The proliferation of two-income families is a huge and well-documented driver of inequality. But the fact is that human woman tend not to marry below themselves in terms of some combination of status markers that they judge as important. And human men who don't feel like their contributions are important to the family (primary earner, mostly) tend to make their relationships less stable.
I think this point to what people have an issue with. In many western cultures people are told marriage/mating is based on love, yet more than a trivial amount of what people see is largely based on status. They may not be mutually exclusive, but not weighted in the proportion that is commonly spoken about
This was a central point to the aforementioned book. The gist being elites invest in education, skill investment, and long hours that leads to more money that they can use to invest in more education and skill development in their children to repeat the cycle. The irony being that, while education and skill development work to gain material success, the long hours required to stay at the top of the competitive heap also makes the meritocratic winners miserable.
There was one quote from the book of a high-achieving mother who, due to long hours, only got to spend 20 minutes a day with her child but "wouldn't give up those 20 minutes for the world."
If you're someone who values close human relationships, I don't know if I'd call that "winning".
We guys had better luck dating Early Childhood Education majors, which is supported by their chart.
There's the gender gap, which you mentioned, as well as the economic aspect, but I wouldn't discount the fact (or at least perception?) that people who choose to work with children are more likely to act in a caring and maternal way towards your typical aspie engineer (as opposed to the more common judgemental and standoffish approach).
At least that's my mum's theory.
Doctor is one of the few profession that's available in the countryside, where 90% of the jobs will be in the agricultural sector.
> So, it appears as though software analysts don't like intermarrying. However, the truth is that there simply aren't enough of them around, they are simply more likely to run into software engineers, so that's whom they marry most.
They also broke down Software Engineers into a few different professional tittles. Computer Analyst Specialist sounds very... East Coast 90's.
What happened to 'software analysts'? Is that even a career today? Sounds like something straight out of the 80s. Is it a 'product owner'?
But the real explanation is that realistically 90% of people meet their spouses in university.
This is very exaggerated. It seems like people who find their partner in university are in the minority these days.
Getting back to the data visualization, a lot of it seems to be that male-dominated jobs pair with female-dominated jobs, which isn't particularly surprising.
I believe in the last census it was found that something like 48% of American adults had an associates degree or higher educational attainment. It seems that that fact, on its face, makes your assertion nearly impossible.
The page links to a different visualization of the same data, [0] which attempts to control for the prevalence of a job within the population.
Maybe it doesn't go far enough for you but that's a pretty big first step in that model.
[0] https://flowingdata.com/2017/08/28/occupation-matchmaker/
You'd probably just get a bunch of data that tells you the more female a profession is the more it wants to marry up and the more male a profession is the more it wants to marry toward a profession with a lot of young women.
Some very small business owners, charity works (earning very little) and a few high paid professionals.
At 16k per child per year, one or two kids is equivalent to one or two persons making minimum wage.
But the more general difference is a home maker is not a maid. A home maker owns the home. That's a very big difference. Somehow people have been convinced that it's better to work to build/maintain someone else's property instead of your own.
It is a bit strange, isn't it?
We've transitioned to having both parents work, but then we pay a large percentage of the extra income on child care, house upkeep (cleaning, repairs, improvements, etc), prepared food, etc. -- things that one parent could do if they were at home instead of working for someone else. It seems worse for the kids too, to have both parents working.
It doesn't have to be the mother by the way. But I also don't think the idea of a stay-at-home mom should be as condemned as it is, at least in certain circles. Women should absolutely have the choice to not be a stay-at-home mom, but it should be a choice without stigma attached either way.
I don't know about the rest of the community but for me someone being in tech is, if not a disqualifier, something very close to it.
I have no real reason or justification! I guess maybe I'm just techy enough as is and prefer other qualities in a partner.
Our first five dates were awesome. So much agreement and joy and commonality. Instant connection and camaraderie.
Further on we realized we didn't bring enough to relationship. We didn't want the"gender I'm attracted version of myself". We each wanted somebody to bring new perspectives, challenge us in ways that work and nerdy friends don't, to talk about not work after work, or at least different work, etc. Ultimately even somebody to disagree with us.
After a few similar experiences, it's not that I ever actively avoided a software engineer partner, it's just that they never seemed to last long. Love of my life is English major with career in retail and home depot / Canadian tire store manager. She brings softer , more emotionally intelligent, people oriented side to our family. I'm the annoying pedantic literal obsessive nerdy one :-D. Works well!
Edit : All of my close developer friends are similarly married to arts major types. Interestingly, I now realize, great many of my acquaintance developer friends have nerdy or techu partners. Wonder what variables are at place but definitely to each their own!
on the other hand, most of my friends also do software stuff and we enjoy complaining to each other about work. I guess maybe the difference is you can say "not now" to a friend more easily than a partner.
FWIW, my experience:
- Key is to look at sum balance. Yes, absolutely, somebody else unwinding will increase your stress level; but IF unwinding reduces their stress level more than it increases yours (and vice verse when the tables are turned), it's a net win. And it goes beyond work rants; any intimate opening, sharing of concern or anxiety or even admitting past wrongs etc, will impose a burden on the listener. But if you believe or can work it out so that, e.g. "this increased my burden by +10 but reduced your burden by -70, so it's a good thing we did it", it'll help build mutual understanding and trust.
- Show empathy, don't try to solve. Cliche, stereotypical, but a person will tell you when they need active considered advice, as opposed to sympathy and ear. HARD for any of the IT problem solving personalities :)
- As a natural result of first two, you'll figure out who's had a worse day and gets priority; and you'll also figure out how to take some of their burden without becoming overwhelmed with it. Again, if their ask is sympathy not resolution, it's actually a lot less burden upon you than it may feel; or rather, us problem solvers impose burden on us that's not actually there :)
- More personal, but, FWIW... my spouse shared bad stories and rants about their work as a store manager, the drama of customers and supervisors and workers and people and policies etc, for 3 or 4 years. I listened patiently, tried to show support... didn't even realize how much I ingested & learned from it. When I transformed from sysadmin to people manager, after a year I realized that I've been implementing all the hard earned experience, lessons learned, approaches and thoughts she shared. One day, all my work problems were her problems of 3 years ago and it allowed me to succeed in that unforeseen (and somewhat unsought:P) transformation. So as we awkwardly say in my language, you never know what's good for what :)
Disagree here. If the other person is always or even is just mostly doing the unloading that's not fair and you just end up sacrificing yourself to the utility monster following this advice. This isn't to say don't ever be empathetic, but also don't let yourself be victim to an "empathy vampire"
It's unlikely a couple will be able to fully equalize this aspect depending on granularity of time slice: on any given day/week/month, one of you may be in better or trickier or happier or more stressful place at work, with friends, in general.
I agree that if through the entirety of relationship support is strictly one-way, that is explicitly not the way I want my relationship to work (though there are others who do seek a one-way relationship from both perspectives).
[not to mention, she can easily pay somebody to take care of house infra; whereas I cannot afford the full-time mentorship services of a socially aware and emotionally intelligent coach :P ]
So we still share loads of general interests as similarly geeky people, but one thing we don't do is we don't talk about work at home - outside of like office gossip and the like.
A colleague of mine dated a really hot girl from Tinder and I asked him if he told her that he's a software engineer.
- Not yet, came the answer :)
People still even assume that I must wear contacts, because I guess nerd == glasses, and they don't see glasses, ergo contacts? Like, nope… I just don't require those.
"I can't believe you work at BigTech!"
I don't think that's changed. +30yo is a different subject, though, most stereotypes are ironed out by then.
Just something about it turns my stomach. I hope its not some internalised misogyny, as I have no similar response to idea of a partner in any other high skilled job, such as physician, or barrister, or researcher, etc.
Want to know a great way to keep a relationship together? Never worry about money ever.
Is there no room in your utility function for mutual growth, sum being larger than the parts, etc?
I just think that a lot of couples have problems and disputes that would not exist if they had money to throw at the problem to make it go away. Like a lot of stressful problems in life, marriage or otherwise.
To steal a line from comedian Daniel Tosh: "Money doesn't buy happiness. Isn't that what people say? Money doesn't buy happiness? I dunno if that's true or not- I don't have any money. I'll tell you what I have learned. Poverty doesn't buy happiness. That I'm positive of."[0]
It's also important to me that my wife is not dependent on me. She makes enough money that if I were an asshole she could walk out the door and never once worry about how she'll get by. Which means she is in this relationship because she wants to be.
It’s great until someone stops making so much money, or you get kids and some of lifes harder issues (or mental illness) come up and the friction points aren’t something you can just spend your way out of anymore.
Then the money can get used as a weapon to maximize suffering, and yikes.
- Volume wins out: there are lots of teachers and nurses
- Like-marries-like: most marry someone in their own profession
Not that boring is bad. Just interesting that the trends overshadow any kind of special results.
In the gay community it used to be really common for white collar and blue collar guys to get together and that really helped form a power couple as one could handle the rough stuff and repairs and the other could handle the money and the paperwork. Nowadays that still happens, but it is rare because there is so much social conflict that the blue collar gays are more likely to just marry women and have men on the side because that is so much easier and the white collar gays stick to themselves.
Among straight people in the San Francisco Bay Area I have noticed a trend of wealthy techies, mostly but not exclusively men, getting hitched to ordinary folks like teachers and mechanics. It seems to mostly work out well as a way of dealing with the housing crisis, but at a basic level it seems like a deeply unbalanced and unhealthy situation.
Just some potentially related anecdata. Mileage will vary.
What's up with gaming related jobs being at the top though? Gaming managers and gaming services workers especially.
If I had to stereotype based on US gaming companies:
-Long hours
-Relatively low pay
-Typically located around urban centers (so a higher CoL)
-If the controversies at Riot, Activision Blizzard, and Ubisoft are any indication then many game related employees are emotionally stunted and immature.
I'm not sure I saw any nursing students while there. All of the students I knew were in the engineering program, or had started there and moved to the business program (often as an intermediate step before dropping out)
Biomedical engineering seemed to have the least skewed ratio when I attended... But it's also really fing hard.
There are tons of single males in STEM making buckets of money, spending very little, and retiring early. Not only does that mean the profession loses a ton of people before they become senior and have time to train up the next generation, but it reduces supply of engineers and forces employers to keep salaries high.
In that case, there would have been two senior STEMers leaving the field early.
E.g. Computer Science students had a lot of parties with nurses, and this then caused a correlation in marriages between those groups as well
See, it can be explained by Bayes theorem. P(A | B) = P(B | A) * P(A) / P(B)
Look at all ordered pairs of people in a couple. Let A be the proposition that the first person is a Dev, and B be the proposition that that the second person is QA.
P(A | B) now expresses how common it is for QA people to have a Dev partner. And P(B | A) expresses how common it is for devs to have a QA partner.
What the theorem tells us that the difference is simply explained by P(A) / P(B), that is the relative commonness of the professions. Or to be precise the commonness of the professions in the subset of people who have a partner.
One thing that is particularly nice is that I can discuss my work with her and vice versa, so she's actually been really helpful with answering some tough questions, it makes for an interesting dynamic.
Oh, and she earns twice what I do, it's crazy how much money neurologists make.
No opinion on your main point though - you may be right :)
Like you, my wife doesn't just work in another field but is very much more driven by care and emotion and logic and "justice" that matter to me. Sometimes this makes it hard to co-exist since we literally look at problems from a totally different perspective, but the resolution of that conflict (or figuring out how to coexist despite the difference) is incredibly enriching, I'd not get to grow this way with someone else.
(Also, apparently mathematician isn't a real job.)
> Some pairings are simply volume. There are a lot of nurses and teachers, so they show up on top of the list often.
Lastly I know some people who avoiding marrying other teachers because the combined salary is less than many single professions.
I know some teacher couples that are busy coming to terms with this problem.
It's also damn near the only career in the US that provides roughly European levels of time off, and, crucially, pretty good (by US standards) parental leave. Time it right and you can be off for four months or so with your newborn, which is a very rare benefit in the US (yeah, I know, some super-rich tech companies offer such perks, but those are uncommon jobs).
Teacher's schedule also means that parent can usually handle afternoon-but-before-5 kid stuff, if the other parent's schedule's standard and inflexible.
Edit: s/wife/spouse
Do you mean to refer to the wife, or to the partner who isn't a dentist?
I see what you did there.
I've studied CS and psychology.
Whenever I meet a woman that has studied psychology it is, on average, easier to connect with them as I can relate with how they experienced their studies.
But they can't always relate with me when I'm stuck on a bug :'(
Anyway! :D
My point is: some of us have done more degrees, and can therefore pick and choose from multiple categories since a shared study experience does carry over into an easier dating process (my experience at least).
How can a marriage be "less obtainable"?
There were 4 people at my wedding. It was only marginally more expensive than the paperwork.
A wedding can be whatever you want. It's not "unobtainable" unless you're treating it like a class-based measuring stick.
Seems to me two people with two incomes living in a 1 bedroom apartment is cheaper than one.
Nearly everything is cheaper when you're married: Insurance, taxes, meals, utilities.
What's less expensive as a single?
Having so many people with no lived experience means lower cultural forces behind asking them to participate in an expensive party, even though marriage is so good for raising children (which used to be the purpose of marriage).
Lived experience? Explain.
Historically marriage was seen not just as commitment between two people but between them and their community, and them and G-d. By committing to the marriage in a public, religiously-affiliated place, the couple is acknowledging their responsibility to those parties as well.
If nothing else, it makes the commitment stronger and creates greater incentives to work through issues rather than bail. You can think of G-d and community as additional "accountability buddies" here.
You can say that's stupid, and that it should simply be a commitment between two people and that's it - but you have to acknowledge that the rise of that idea is very correlated with the rise in the diverse rate.
It is interesting to see how conservative ideas are re-packaged to remain fashionable with the time.
I was lucky to be raised by extremely great parents who have never been married and nonetheless have stayed together for 40 years, without God looking over their shoulder.
Especially if you see what others are doing on social media, your mental model of the expense continues to inflate and the pressure to procrastinate grows.
... if you pair a high earner with a low/no earner
edit: changed "much" to "slightly"
But then we were both working and living in SF as engineers and I did my taxes on my own for the first time about 3 years in from graduate school. I was shocked that the penalty for being married vs. not was $3000. I immediately turned to my wife, and said, "split, and split the difference?". (She understood that I was joking.) And then I discovered that you can't fix it that way, you still get taxed at the same rate. Or did. That was 30 years ago. (We're still married, humor is important.)
But after that while working at Sandia I had a PhD friend getting married to another fresh PhD, and I did tell him, do take a look at the tax hit.
I also think that culture does play a fair role. I was initially hesitant to marry (as a millennial) because a lot of my friends were being denied the ability to marry who they chose, so I wanted to stand with them and reject the institution. That, thankfully, has been resolved - but I can totally understand people who have mixed feelings on marriage.
Abstractly, marriage was a giant public act of consent due to the consequences of sex. Now, sex is decoupled from marriage, so the institution isn’t needed in secular culture.
Have seen it happen, and literally half of the couples in the 'good part of town' where I used to live which was populated almost exclusively by well educated white collar professionals were either going through it/at some stage of it, or were in a clearly abusive situation that might even have benefited from doing it - as long as they didn't wait for the other party to really screw them over by pulling the trigger first and alleging abuse or whatever.
A friends neighbor had been on the receiving end (along with their daughter) of literally years of verbal and emotional abuse from the wife for no apparent reason. She would go after neighbors too, if they dared to exist in her presence.
Both of them were lawyers. Last time I was over there a month ago, after an hour of it, he just begged her to stop screaming in the most pitiful voice I've heard a man ever use. So she yelled at him more for being so pitiful.
It's hard to really understand how terrible a prior trusted loved one can be until you've been on the other end of it. It's easy to assume it's because the other party did something wrong to deserve it too - but that is not usually the case in my experience. It's often lack of emotional regulation/healthy outlets for stress or life problems, usually reinforced by denial from the abuser.
The abusee often can't figure out how to escape or feels held hostage, sometimes also by denial at their own problems or inability to cope that lead them to that state of insecurity.
While marriage (the legal process) can magnify the upside, it can also dramatically magnify the downsides too, and make it MUCH MUCH harder to escape a bad situation for everyone.
It's quite a shit sandwich. Always has been near as I can tell.
Of course you can. You can know thyself and know thy partner and have the maturity to understand what you're getting into, and the ability to commit despite that. EG: I know there's 0% chance that my wife and I will get divorced, not because marriage is so easy but because we're both people who are able to work through difficulties towards a common goal.
It requires self-awareness and work.
You share this mindset with every divorced guy I know, including myself. Men just don't see it coming.
Women pull the trigger when they can't take it anymore.
Unfortunately, life can be complicated, e.g. family member went through undiagnosed schizophrenia for many years, one can imagine how that upset the marriage assumptions prior to the mental health issues.
I would assume serious mental health issues are the edge case in this scenario.
Basically, one of many things you can do - in any jurisdiction - is move all your assets to your private foundation and simply not pay yourself for the duration of the marriage, including what you personally make while in the marriage if anything. Non-profits can invest indiscriminately in anything so the money can keep growing and supporting almost anything you want.
During divorce proceedings you have pretty much nothing, except the history of earnings if any which indeed can be used to compute your alimony payments. But all your accumulation and assets are not in your name, so the alimony won't be consequential compared to the horror stories we've heard of ex-spouses having to check themselves into jail when they ran out of money to pay. Back to this plan, don't forget to load up on debt as a general lifestyle choice, way before the marriage has issues. Personally you should never have positive net worth, and there should also be a line of creditors such that anyone else has to get in line or fuck off.
Afterwards you can direct your foundation to pay you a hefty salary.
The purpose isn't to screw your spouse over, its to be judgement proof from all kinds of creditors (and maintain your standing in society as a philanthropist). That will include mitigating the folly of silly unlimited liability contracts such as marriage contracts. Simply put, the clauses could be better. Love, finances, much like a lawyer I don't really care about what emotional reasons people associate with marriage and those are always available whether you do 5 minutes of estate planning or not. In my perspective, removing the downsides allows for both spouses to focus on love or whatever they want to do together. Something more commonly associated with marriage, by at least one spouse.
"I donated everything to non-profits!"
You get to win through many life events here. A state judge will not be able to undermine the federal status of the non-profit. They do have discretion over the pre-nup agreement though. So if you have the money to make a ridiculously unsexy pre-nup agreement, you have the money to make a ridiculously sexy private foundation which gets to exist in subtlety.
If you are saving up for a downpayment on a house while your life is slipping away year after year and the whole goal is to leverage up with a spouse on a mortgage before you are an ineligible bachelor/ette, then this game has no applicability to you. There is nothing attractive about that game to me, at any earning level. Discussions about the top 10% or top 5% make no difference to me, because the circumstances are the same: wage workers that barely match the cost of living wherever they earn, slow accumulation, risks (health, employment, life events) that undercut growth simply because it takes too long. Better to just have, there is no profound message applicable because the message is that simple. There are almost too many advantages to just having.
I don't have a good answer for how to get the one without the other, but both are consequences of modern sensibilities.
In which case, the future belongs to societies where women don't work and birth control is stigmatized.
It could be that there is a reason why the world was dominated by large patriarchal societies other than some sort of accident of history.
If that's true, then a society with lots of gig jobs or work at home jobs might help alleviate the problem. There could be other creative solutions, like reimagining higher education to give people time to marry and have kids before college. Other approaches are also possible. Whatever the reason, the secular societies will need to scramble if they don't want the world of the future to be dominated by orthodox religious populations.
But I think in such ancient societies, the struggle is a little different. E.g. when you are being ravaged by wars and plagues, you need more than replacement level fertility. You need huge fertility that can recover massive population loss in a short period of time. After Hannibal decimated the population of Italy, Rome recovered remarkably quickly. They just made more Romans. Later on, that stopped working and they needed manpower from the provinces.
In modern societies, we've licked most of the other stuff and so can keep going much longer as fertility declines, to the point where we start noticing only when rates hit below replacement. Traditional societies would see population loss long before fertility rates fell below replacement.
This is essentially the advice of the "Princeton Mom": Find and marry your spouse in college. <https://www.today.com/popculture/marry-smart-princeton-mom-s...>
Even short of artificial wombs, there is a lot that can be done to help with this. The real issue isn't that women don't want to have kids at all, ever. It's that if they enter the labor force and work full time, usually it gets put off, often until it's not exactly too late, but at least too late to have as many children as you might have if you'd started earlier, bringing down the national birth rate because too many would-be mothers have aged out. There could easily be medical solutions to that focused on making pregnancy more viable in late middle-aged women. Better prenatal care, cheaper treatments for infertility. Even non-medically, it could just be more flexible working arrangements like you mentioned, work from home, better and cheaper daycare, more generous universal leave policies that don't single out parents, possibly something like sabbaticals that universities do but for commercial ventures, too. Mandatory paid gap years for people in their 30s even if they don't have children. A country that pulls that off could keep the economic advantage of having a larger workforce talent pool to draw from without sacrificing internal population growth.
Obviously, private employers can't bear that burden and it would need to be subsidized by the government, but if you really believe there would be significant national strategic advantages to doing this, then it should be subsidized by the government.
The hard truth is that it's not as expensive or complicated to encourage people having child but for some reason we are trying to do anything except for the things that actually matter: allowing parents that want to spend all their time with their new child this opportunity and allowing parents that can't be bothered to handle all the early mechanical aspects to avoid them.
Cheaper starter housing and for the US cheaper higher education would also help but I'm convinced those are lower priority than targeting the early years.
If a society is required to pay so much for something that used to come naturally through cultural forces, then it’s probably not sustainable.
So much? Singapore's GDP per capita is $60k per year so $5k per month. If $2 month's worth of GDP for 1 baby so an entire lifetime of a new citizen is a lot, then I don't even know what to say.
> for something that used to come naturally through cultural forces, then it’s probably not sustainable
Having kids sucks (your mileage may vary, but before ~2-3 years the investment >>> benefits for all but the most dedicated people out there). Kids used to be cheap labor, which is now illegal for good reasons and they could be abused at will for various things, which is also illegal for good reasons. They were also frequently born because women didn't have a say in the matter, which is also becoming illegal for good reasons.
It is sustainable, it just needs to be done properly and respectfully.
Not by treating women like broodmares and kids as slaves to be worked to death and beaten up by adults who don't have any other way to relieve stress.
For the 1/10 times at work where the person in power ends up having a meaningful relationship with an underling that you lose, you also have the 9/10 cases of sexual harassment that you lose too.
Needless to say, those are pretty big ifs.
You could also say that men are much less likely to want to marry up (and not be 'the breadwinner' / 'provider).
That suggests to me that there's still a lot of cases where they've got their spouse running the office or the business end of a small business. That was almost a stereotypical arrangement for couples of my parents' generation.
When living with a "normal" 9-5 person, that person will build up resentment for not seeing their partner, for differing sleep schedules, frequent travel and whatever else comes with that job. Someone in a similar work environment however knows the struggles themselves and since they also have the same problem as their partners, there is less chance of resentment directed to the partner - hard to get annoyed by your partner working a spontaneous double shift when you have been in the same situation a week earlier!
1: Well if you consider that teachers could be music teachers, that still puts an upper bound of 25% or so of all musicians marrying other musicians.
I would expect people with working class jobs as far more likely to marry other working class people, and respectively for professional jobs. Hard to see from this - needs some sort of cluster analysis.
For instance, are software devs happy with other software devs? I could imagine getting a bit tired of knowing the other person too well and blending work and home life too much. Like, maybe you want to go on a vacation without thinking about programming, but would that really be possible?
Two factors education and passion
Eduction: The longer you spend in education the more people you are going to know within that discipline.
Passion: The more likely you would do your job for free the more likely you would date other people who can keep up in conversation with that job.
Hunters marrying other hunters would be passion
Doctor, doctor would be education.
Psychologist being the outlier.
Three possibilities..
There must be a lot of teachers. (Most likely)
They may be the most attractive profession. (Possibly)
…Or they all have secret second families at work. (I always suspected!) :)
https://flowingdata.com/2017/08/28/occupation-matchmaker/
They both seem like very small groups, though, so probably just an amusing bit of statistical noise.
I used to be a lawyer and now work in edtech, so I've known plenty of folks in both professions. What am I missing?
Biological technicians mostly marry (~6%) "Driver/sales workers and truck drivers". Didn't expect that. Maybe the driver category is a catch all one?
In this regard women devs get added bonus of working tech. Relatively high salary and likely have higher family incomes as both partners work in high earning field. Where as male devs would often marry partners earning less.
My own experience actually reflects this situation. On my team, the only married people are married to other software people or teachers. The unmarried all date teachers.
Obviously anecdotal but interesting.
I have found male programmers to have a more diverse dating/marriage pool, though most are still "tech"-y office jobs e.g. designer. That's just middle/upper middle class sticking together though.
Female programmers I've met almost exclusively date or are married to other programmers.
So, female programmers pretty much get the pick of the pack among their peer groups. (Not judging, just stating statistics)
The other 80-ish% men in programming still need to find love somewhere, so they cast a wider net.
Tech communities are all-encompassing to begin with. Tech cities, tech friends, tech hobbies, tech side-projects..... I need out of this echo chamber from time to time.
I’d go for the $40 one if I ever have to pay for a haircut again. A $40 cut grows out good, so even if you don’t get a haircut for months after, you don’t look like a bum.
Everyone marries Elementary and Middle School teachers, even that group intermarrying.
Now i know who to swipe on in the dating apps :)
1. Optometrists ~11.5%
2. Elementary/middle school teachers ~3.75%
3. Dentists ~3.5%
Notice how some letters are taller than others, in particular r, u, s and w. What the hell is going on here I wonder?