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1.
AS
A
high-powered
media
executive
in
New
York
city,
Leah
had
been
wary
of
marriage.
After
seeing
other
women get
“mommy
-
tracked” at work, she
was ambivalent
about letting children
compromise her career. But love has
a
way of making a hash of plans, and these days she
and
her
husband
manage
two
full-
time
jobs
and
the
care
of
their
18-month-old
daughter.
Leah
still
works
nearly
50
hours a
week and earns a bit more than her husband, but
she
also
handles
most
of
the
routine
caregiving,
cooking
and cleaning at
home. Juggling everything often leaves her
feeling
“inadequate,” she
admits, but she chalks it up to the
struggle of trying to have it all.
“Rich world problems, right?”
she says
with a chuckle.
2.
While
fewer
women
are
marching
to
the
altar
—
the
proportion of those married before the
age of 30 has fallen
from 50% in 1960
to around 20% today
—
the ones
that do
increasingly
look
like
Leah.
Highly
educated,
financially
independent
women
were
once
among
the
least
likely
to
get hitched. Now they are
getting married at a faster rate
than
their
lesser-educated
peers,
and
often
to
highly
educated
men.
These
unions
are
not
only
the
most
common,
but
also
the
most
harmonious.
New
data
show
that
America’s divorce rate has continued its plunge
from
its 1981
peak
—
from 5.3 to 3.2
divorces per 1,000 people
in
2014
—
but
this
decline
is
largely
concentrated
among
the
better-
educated.
Among
college
graduates
who
married
in
the
early
2000s,
only
around
11%
divorced
within seven years,
according to data from Justin Wolfers
of the University of Michigan.
3.
This
has
created
a
fairly
uneven
marriage
market.
Although
the
returns
to
a
college
education
have
risen
sharply
in
recent
decades,
America’s
college
-graduation
rate has been inching up slowly, and
now hovers at around
40%.
Women
make
up
a
growing
share:
those
born
in
1975,
for
example,
were
around
20%
more
likely
to
complete a four-year degree than their
male counterparts.
Meanwhile,
women
with
less
education
are
stuck
with
a
stock of less-appealing men. Women of
nearly all levels of
education
have
seen
their
earning
power
climb
since
the
1970s, while the earnings of men
without a college degree
have
fallen
between
5%
and
25%,
according
to
David
Autor
and
Melanie
Wasserman,
both
economists
at
MIT.
Less-
educated men also tend to have more anachronistic
views about who should do what at home:
they are not only
less
comfortable
with
partnerships
in
which
women
earn
more, they also tend to be less-
attentive parents and less
helpful
around
the
house
than
their
better-educated
peers.
4.
This
asymmetry
is
especially
profound
for
African-American
women,
whose
store
of
available
men
has
been
whittled
down
further
by
higher
rates
of
incarceration
and
mortality.
Inter-racial
marriage
is
becoming more common but remains
relatively rare. Black
women are half
as likely as black men to marry someone
of
another
hue,
according
to
the
Pew
Research
Centre.
Mismatched
desires
among
lesser-educated
men
and
women have shrunk the
share of households headed by a
married
couple
from
two-
thirds
in
1960
to
less
than
half
today. The proportion of children being
raised by a single
parent
has
more
than
doubled
in
the
past
four
decades.
More than seven in
ten births to African-American women
are outside marriage
Here’s
your whisky, darling
亲爱的，
来杯威士忌吧
Concentrating
gains
from
marriage
at
the
top
has
exacerbated existing trends in
inequality.
5.
On most
measures, the children of married couples are
already
more
likely
to
fare
better
than
those
with
single
parents.
But
well-educated
parents
often
have
more
money
for
schools,
safer
neighbourhoods
and
nutritious
food,
and
fewer
children to invest in
(owing
to the higher
opportunity
cost
of
child-
rearing
for
career-oriented
women). Well-educated parents spend
more time with their
children
than
their
less-
educated
peers.
For
mothers
the
gap
is only a few extra hours a
week, but
among fathers
the
difference
is
considerable:
those
with
a
job
and
a
college
degree
spend
more
than
double
the
time
of
less-educated
men,
according
to
Jonathan
Guryan
of
Northwestern University
and his co-authors.
6.
Having
fewer
sprogs
makes
it
easier
to
continue
this
support through early adulthood, which
more parents seem
to be doing. Nearly
43% of all young men (ages 18 to 34)
and more than a third of all young
women have yet to flee
the nest,
according to a new Pew analysis of census data.
This
boom
in
late-bloomers
may
be
another
sign
of
privilege. A recent paper
from the New York Fed found that
this
trend can largely be attributed to the surge in
student
debt over the past decade or
so, and it is better-off children
who
tend to enroll in college in the first place.
Children from
homes
with
an
annual
income
of
over
$$108,650,
for
example, are nearly
twice as likely to enroll than those from
homes that make less than $$34,160,
according to a report
from the Pell
Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher
Education.
7.Y
et
while
marriage
has
been
transformed,
the
roles
played by each partner
in the home have been slower to
change.
A
recent
Pew
study
found
that
in
households
where both parents work full time, more
of the day-to-day
parenting
responsibilities fall to women. Mothers are twice
as likely as fathers to say that being
a working parent has
hurt
their
careers,
in
no
small
part
because
many
employers still function according to a
single breadwinner
model.
This
is
slowly
changing,
particularly
as
more
women
start out-earning men. In couples with two full-
time
working
parents,
26%
of
women
earn
around
the
same
amount as their
partners, and 22% earn more, according to
Pew.
8.
Conservative
policymakers
often
argue
that
getting
poorer women to
marry will improve the lot of their children.
But programmes to encourage more people
to wed never
seem to work. This is
largely because most Americans are