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From: larrabee@decwrl.DEC.COM (Tracy Larrabee)
Newsgroups: net.women,net.singles
Subject: Professional women remaining perpetually single
Message-ID: <1395@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Date: Wed, 26-Feb-86 18:23:41 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.1395
Posted: Wed Feb 26 18:23:41 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 28-Feb-86 22:14:13 EST
Organization: Digital Equipment Corp., Palo Alto, CA
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Xref: watmath net.women:9342 net.singles:10490


I found this article in the Living section of the February 25 edition of the
San Jose Mercury News.  I did not ask anyone's permission to type (part of)
it in.  The brackets show where I have left out paragraphs (through
laziness only)

I am not sure that I agree that conclusions based on the marriage habits of
today's 35 year old professional women can be applied to today's 25 year old
women 10 years hence, but it is clear that professional women are definitely
spending less time in traditional roles than their ancestors.  I would love
to know how many of the single women are having babies anyway (I certainly
agree with the article's statement that women do not need to avoid or seek
marriage on the grounds of fertility alone).  I must also admit a fair
amount of skepticism concerning the "parametric model" mentioned towards the
end of the article.

I would be interested in intelligent responses (publicly or through the
mail).

MARRIAGE RATE DECLINES FOR WOMEN WHO DELAY

By William R Greer
New York Times

Women who defer marriage to go to college and pursue a career are
finding that by the time they decide to marry, the marriage market has
evaporated, according to a new study by two Yale sociologists and a
Harvard economist.

College-educated white women who have not married by the time they are
25 have only a 50 percent chance of marrying, according to the
unpublished study, which analyzes census data from 70,000 households.

Just 20 percent of the women who reach the age of 30 without marrying
can be expected to marry.  Five percent of those who reach the age of
35 without marrying will marry, and for those beyond 40, "perhaps 1
percent" will marry the study showed.  And in general, a lower
percentage of the total population of women is marrying these days, the
study showed.

"I think people up until this point have suspected that well-educated
women were deferring marriage," said one of the sociologists who
conducted the study, Dr. Neil G. Bennet, an associate professor of
sociology at Yale University.  "However, it appears from this analysis
that much of this marriage deferral is translating into marriage
forgone."

[...]

Bennett said the reasons that fewer women are marrying are complex.
Essentially, the study showed that many women, after deferring
marriage, find that by the time they want to marry, there are fewer
available men from which to choose.  Those available are either not the
kind of men the women want to marry, or the men prefer women who are
younger, not as highly educated or not as successful.

[...]

These results were especially striking, Bennett said, because in most
other subgroups of the population, 90 percent of the women married at
some point.

[...]

The researchers used a mathematical device called a parametric model
that, based on past and present marriage patterns, is supposed to
project what proportion of the women covered by the survey would marry
and at what age.  The model also estimated what percentage of women
would never marry.

The study did not establish why women surveyed did not marry.  It did
not show, for example, if the women chose not to or if they could not
find suitable husbands.

[...]

There are also fewer reasons for a woman to marry, Bloom said.  Women
are more financially independent.  Contraception and the legality and
growing acceptance of abortion have also freed women from the
child-bearing function to an extent that it is unprecedented in
history," he added.  "Women don't have to get married to have children,
and they don't have to avoid marriage in order to avoid having
children."

[...]

The study did not examine men and their marriage patterns because,
Bennett said, the Census Bureau's data supplied by men were
untrustworthy.

[there is a bit more]

-------
Tracy Larrabee		decwrl!larrabee		larrabee@decwrl