Today United Press International is running a story on new research – presented at this weekend’s American Sociological Association annual meeting -from sociologist Hannah Brueckner of Yale University, which suggests that fewer highly educated black women in the U.S. are marrying and starting families.
UPI reports, with the author’s commentary:
“In the past nearly four decades, black women have made great gains in higher education rates, yet these gains appear to have come increasingly at the cost of marriage and family,” Brueckner said.
The study on family formation and marriage longitudinal trends in the specified demographic found the marriage gap between highly educated black and white women increased dramatically between the 1970s and recent years.
In the 1970s the gap was 9 percent, while that gap rose to 21 percent in 2000-2007. Brueckner said the growing divide may be due to a lack of acceptable partners for highly educated black women.
“They are less likely than black men to marry outside their race, and, compared to whites and black men, they are least likely to marry a college-educated spouse,” she suggested.
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