The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only ushered in stronger federal protections for racial and ethnic minorities and women, but also for religious minorities. Antipathy toward Catholics and Jews in the US was a persistent and prevalent theme through much of American history. It was common for these groups to be labeled “un-American” and even categorized as “non-white.” Members of these religions were often discriminated against in hiring and in admission to institutions of higher learning (this was especially common for Jewish applicants) and excluded from many neighborhoods, clubs, and political positions. From the late 19^th through the mid-20^th century, organized hate groups, most notably the Ku Klux Klan, used the threat of violence to intimidate not only African-Americans but Jews and Catholics as well.

After World War II, these restrictions and prejudices eased somewhat. By 1955 the now-classic essay Protestant Catholic Jew could proclaim that although these three religions were the primary sources of identity in America, they were now “alternative ways of being an American” rather than two of them being seen as Un-American.

Still, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism persisted. In the 1960s, some commentators worried that President Kennedy, a Catholic, would take orders from the Pope. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon was recorded making several anti-Semitic comments. And even today nativist hate groups continue to perpetuate centuries-old hostilities against Catholic and Jewish Americans. But the Civil Rights Act did give these minorities protection against outright exclusion and discrimination, and other religious minorities have also looked to it for security as the American religious landscape has diversified. more...

American families are diversifying in ways that are more complicated than ever, creating distinct patterns in different parts of the country and subgroups of the population. That’s why policy-makers and community leaders need detailed, locally-specific census data about family formation, marriage trends, divorce, and widowhood. This information is essential in order to accurately assess everything from population growth patterns to the special educational and social needs of different neighborhoods. Yet the Census Bureau has announced plans to cut from the American Community Survey several questions that provide such crucial information to researchers, planners, journalists, and the general public.

The questions to be cut include:

In the past 12 months did this person get—Married?

In the past 12 months did this person get—Widowed

In the past 12 months did this person get—Divorced?

Times Married—How many times has this person been married?

In what year did this person last get married?

What is the American Community Survey?

The American Community Survey (ACS) is the large Census Bureau survey that replaced the “long form” of the decennial census in the 2000s. It uses a sophisticated rotating geographic sampling design to gather information for households at all levels of geographic detail – even down to small neighborhoods. Administering the survey is expensive, but cutting these questions to save money in the short run will cost America dearly in the long run.

Why we need the ACS to keep these questions:

1. Believe it or not, there is no national count of marriages and divorces. In 1996, the government stopped collecting detailed national data on legal marriages and divorces. Now the government produces simple counts of marriages and divorces, but without any accompanying information about age of marriage, marriage duration, or number of remarriages. Furthermore, the figures they produce exclude six states (California, Georgia, Hawaii, Minnesota, Louisiana, and Indiana) that together account for 20 percent of divorces.

The ACS is the only reliable source of national, state, and city data on the frequency of marriage, divorce, widowhood, and remarriage. It provides data that is vital for estimating the impact of socioeconomic trends and social policies on marriage rates and on married and unmarried households.

2. The ACS is the only source of data that can measure marriage and divorce patterns in smaller sections of the population, such as particular states and cities, minority groups, and gay and lesbian couples. Asian Americans, for instance, are now a relatively small section of the population, but they are the fastest growing racial-ethnic group. Don’t we need to know what kind of family trends are occurring in this group?

Some things we can learn with the ACS data – and only with ACS data:

How divorce rates for “millennials” vary in the top 25 metropolitan areas: Surely it’s worth knowing that divorce rates range from 3.9 per 100 married people in Portland to just 1.4 in New York City. Other ACS data can help us understand what factors may account for this.

How divorce rates differ for 15 different Asian national-origin groups: Generalizations about “the” Asian population obscure the fact that Thais and Cambodians have much higher divorce rates than Indians and Pakistanis.

How the recession affected divorce rates: The recession appeared to have slowed some divorces in its initial years. This was followed by an uptick in divorces in 2012. But the 2013 divorce rate (just made available) shows a sharp drop in 2013. This drop has yet to be explained, which is why we need continuing detailed data from the ACS about the socioeconomic and cultural factors and local variations that may be involved.

How marriage histories for men and women differ by education level: Married college graduates are much more likely than those with less education to be in their first marriages.

Marriage rates for people with different disabilities (by race/ethnicity): Having a disability reduces the chance that a person will marry. The overall first-marriage rate for people aged 18-49 is 71.8 per 1,000. For people with disabilities, it’s 41.1. But marriage rates vary by the type of disability, and also by race, regardless of disability type.

Detroit’s catastrophic demographic situation: Without the ACS we would not fully grasp the especially high divorce and early widowhood rates, falling population, educational failure, and unemployment that comprise the urban crisis there.

If we lose this kind of data, our ability to forecast future trends, anticipate potential problems, and understand our own families and local communities will be severely compromised. And that’s what might happen unless researchers and concerned citizens tell the government we need this kind of information to continue being collected. The government has given the public until the end of December to make its views known.

Information about the planned cuts to the American Community Survey is here: https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/10/31/2014-25912/proposed-information-collection-comment-request-the-american-community-survey-content-review-results.

This briefing paper was prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Philip Cohen, Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland.

The gendered mystique that still poses barriers to African-American women in their personal and public lives is perhaps best described as an “unfeminine mystique” – the idea that they have characteristics and embrace lifestyles that are outside the boundaries of “real” womanhood. This “unfeminine mystique” has plagued African-American women for more than 200 years. more...

When I think back on the Feminine Mystique, I am reminded of my favorite childhood television show, “Bewitched,” which featured a beleaguered housewife and witch, Samantha Stevens. As partner in her husband Darrin’s “two-person career,” holding a job of her own was out of the question. She was on call to whip up fabulous meals for Darrin’s boss and his clients at a moment’s notice – yet she wasn’t even supposed to use her superpowers to add a tasty dessert. She spent her days cooking, cleaning and helping her husband’s career, all the while proudly avoiding magical shortcuts. She had the requisite two children, but they mostly sat in the background, being supervised by a witchy relative or their babysitter, Esmeralda. more...

In the late 1970s, after a long period of holding fairly steady, the gap in wages between men and women began improving. In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement – more than a quarter of it — happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains. more...

Cross posted on the Family Inequality blog.

Disability is a very broad concept, representing a wide array of conditions that are not easily captured in a simple demographic survey. However, disabilities are very prevalent, especially in an aging society, and the people who experience disabilities differ in important ways from those who do not. Previously I reported — in a preliminary way — that people with disabilities are much more likely to divorce than those without. Here I present some numbers on marriage rates.

This isn’t the kind of thorough, probing analysis this subject requires. But I have two reasons to do it now. First is that I hope to motivate other people to pursue this issue in greater depth. And second, I want to highlight the importance of the data I’m using — the American Community Survey (ACS) — because it might be not available for much longer. These questions have been slated for demolition by the U.S. Census Bureau on cost-saving grounds. I put details about this issue — and how to register your opinion with the federal government — at the end of the post.

Disabilities

The ACS asks five disability questions (I put the shorthand label after each):

1. Is this person deaf or does he/she have serious difficulty hearing? (Hearing)
2. Is this person blind or does he/she have serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses? (Vision)
3. Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does this person have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions? (Cognitive)
4. Does this person have serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs? (Ambulatory)
5. Does this person have difficulty dressing or bathing? (Independent living)

These aren’t perfect questions, but they cover a lot of ground, and the ACS — which involves about 3 million households — can’t get into too much detail.

One great thing about having these questions on the giant ACS is you can use the data to get all the way down to the local level, or into small race/ethnic groups. And with the marital events questions, you can combine disability information and marriage information.

First-marriage rates

Using marital events (did you get married in the last year), marital history (how many times have you been married), detailed race and ethnicity breakdowns, and the disability questions above, I produced the following figure. This uses the combined 2008-2012 ACS data because these are small groups, but even with five years of data these groups get quite small. There are about 90,000 non-Hispanic Whites with a cognitive disability in my sample, but only 356 people who are both White and American Indian with a hearing disability (the smallest group I included). This sample is people ages 18-49 who have never been married (or just got married).

The overall first-marriage rate for people ages 18-49 is 71.8 per 1,000. For people with disabilities it’s 41.1 (shown by the blue line). So that’s much lower than for the general population. But there is a very wide variation across these groups, from 15.5 per thousand for Blacks with disabilities in independent living all the way up to above the national average for Whites and White/American Indians with hearing disabilities. (For every condition, Blacks with disabilities have the lowest marriage rates.)

I don’t draw any conclusions here, except that this is an important subject and I hope more people will study it. Also, we need data like this.

In previous posts demonstrating the value of this data source, I wrote about:

• Divorce generally
• Divorce for “millennials” in 25 cities
• Divorce for Asian Americans from different national origins

Whether you are a researcher or some other member of the concerned public, I hope you will consider dropping the government a line about this before the end of the year.

The information about the planned cuts to the American Community Survey is here: https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/10/31/2014-25912/proposed-information-collection-comment-request-the-american-community-survey-content-review-results:

Direct all written comments to Jennifer Jessup, Departmental Paperwork Clearance Officer, Department of Commerce, Room 6616, 14th and Constitution Avenue NW., Washington, DC 20230 (or via the Internet at jjessup@doc.gov).

Comments will be accepted until December 30.

Why do women earn less than men? Research points to a number of different explanations, but one of the central factors remains women’s caregiving responsibilities. The wages of childless men and women have been converging steadily over the last three decades – but mothers continue to earn significantly less, while fathers earn a bit more. These motherhood and fatherhood effects have been stable over time while childless women’s wages have been rising, even though mothers are increasingly likely to be employed.  more...

Husbands and wives who share similar levels of education now enjoy a lower risk of divorce than those in which husbands have more education—a trend consistent with a shift toward egalitarian marriages. This brief was part of the Gender Revolution Rebound Symposium first published July, 2014.

The prevailing view for the past several years has been that the gender revolution stalled in the 1990s. In that decade, there was a flattening or slowdown in many trends associated with progress toward gender equality: women’s labor force participation, women’s entry into male-dominated occupations, reductions of the gender pay gap, and egalitarian gender attitudes.

But recent research throws doubt on the conclusion that the gender revolution has stalled. Through the 1990s and 2000s, for example, one trend that did not slow was women’s increasing educational advantage over men. more...

This brief was part of the CCF Equal Pay Act 50^th Anniversary Symposium, first published June 2013.

First the good news: Gender parity has already been reached in secondary educational enrollment rates in high-income countries and in Latin America and the Caribbean. From 1975 to 2010, the Arab region saw a remarkable rise in the ratio of female to male secondary enrollment rates, from 59 to 98 percent. In Asia and the Pacific region, there are 99 women in secondary education for every 100 men. Africa, too, has seen gains, with the ratio rising from 54 to 85 percent during this time period. And in 53 countries, ranging from Hong Kong to the Caribbean island of Dominica, women are now the majority of students enrolled in secondary schools.

There is also good news on the health front. Parity in life expectancy (taking into account men’s and women’s biological probabilities of long life) has been reached in all regions of the world. That means that in any region, on average, women’s life expectancy relative to the biological goalpost is on par with men’s, and in most regions, exceeds men’s. One caution is that regional averages obscure some disturbing inequalities in individual countries. Women’s relative life expectancy is less than 95 percent of men’s in 26 countries, including Israel and Bahrain.

But these gains in education and health have not translated into economic parity—or at least, not enough to significantly narrow gender gaps. more...

Has “hooking up” become the defining feature of college life? Does everyone do it? Does everyone want to? Most research on hooking up has examined college students who live on campus, or nearby, and hook up after alcohol-fueled parties. For example, the Online College Social Life Survey (OCSLS) of 21 colleges and universities shows that more than 70 percent of students, overall, hook up at some point in their college career. Even so, new research from the University of Illinois at Chicago, a diverse urban, public university with more commuters than on-campus residents, suggests that college sex is something quite different for the typical commuting student. (Go here to view this release online.)

In their study, “‘It Goes Hand in Hand with the Parties’: Race, Class, and Residence in College Student Negotiations of Hooking Up” (in February issue of Sociological Perspectives), Rachel Allison and CCF Senior Scholar Barbara Risman find that commuter students do not typically participate in hooking up culture—but they still believe it is a key feature of authentic college experience.

Allison and Risman explain, “The students we interviewed endorsed the media-driven belief that the ‘real’ college experience involves parties and hooking up. They explained, though, that it is simply unavailable to many of them.” Sociologists Allison and Risman found that only students who live on campus or in apartments away from their families have substantial opportunity to “hook up.” In particular, the authors found: Only students who live on campus or in apartments away from their families have substantial opportunity to “hook up.”

• Less-wealthy students and most of the non-white students at this university who are working class participate in hookup culture far less than middle-class students.
• Even when white working class and racial minority students live on or near campus, the tendency for students to hook up within racial and ethnic communities means that working class and racial minority students still feel excluded from what they see as “real” college experience.
• Students who work for pay many hours per week also feel excluded from a party culture that takes both time and money.

What is hooking up? “Hooking up” typically means some sexual activity—ranging from kissing to intercourse—outside of a committed relationship. While much research focuses on residential college students and shows participation is common, those studies also demonstrate that hooking up leads to sexual intercourse less often than college students—and the general public—imagine. According to OCSLS data, 40 percent of students who have ever hooked up report intercourse during their most recent hookup.

Is hooking up the “real” college experience? Allison and Risman’s study elaborated specifically on commuter students’ beliefs and experiences with hooking up. Allison and Risman explained, “Students from a range of class and ethnic backgrounds told us the ‘real’ college experience involves parties and hooking up, but white middle-class students believed they actually live the ‘real’ college experience.” One student (a Middle-Eastern woman) in the study explained about hooking up: “It goes hand in hand with the parties.”

Commuters and minority students talked wistfully about missing what they believe–often based on what they see in movies or television of campus life–is the “real” college experience. The researchers explained, “They feel they are getting a second rate experience.” The researchers added, “It’s not that the commuting students don’t tell us they sometimes have casual sex—they do. But they do not participate in the hooking up culture that most students see as part of college life.”

About the study. Allison and Risman analyzed 87 in-depth interviews with undergraduate students at the University of Illinois-Chicago for an article forthcoming in the February issue of Sociological Perspectives. Thirty-three percent lived on or near campus; 39 percent lived with their parents. The authors were especially struck by the extent to which students were convinced that the party and hookup scene was part of an authentic college experience. “On the one hand, our study demonstrates a lot more diversity in the way that students actually experience college—but on the other, it showed us that students don’t necessarily see the wide range of collegiate experiences as equally valid.” The authors reflected, “Could the real college experience be redefined as about learning? Of course, as college professors, we’d like to think it could.”

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Rachel Allison and Barbara Risman’s February 2014 article, “It Goes Hand in Hand with the Parties”: Race, Class, and Residence in College Student Negotiations of Hooking Up in Sociological Perspectives.