marriage/family

Following up on our most recent re-cap of data analysis from OkCupid, sent in by Sara P. and an Anonymous Reader, in this post I summarize their findings on reported sexual orientation and recorded messaging.

It turns out that a whopping 80% of all users who identify as bisexual message men or women, but not both.

The reasons for this are likely complex, diverse, and not immediately obvious.

Blogger Christian Rudder’s hypothesis:

This suggests that bisexuality is often either a hedge for gay people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually adventurous to their (straight) matches. You can actually see these trends in action…

The figure below plots age against the percent of self-identified bisexual men who message both men and women, only women, or only men.  The percent that are bi in practice as well as theory message both men and women drops by about half between the ages of 18 and 54 (from about 20% to about 10%), but men in their 30s and early 40s are much more likely to message only women.  Ticking biological clocks and hopes for a wife and kids perhaps?

The narrowing blue swatch may reflect the possibility that men who once identified as bisexual have come to terms with being plain ol’ gay (but the data isn’t longitudinal, so it may be a cohort thing instead of a life stage thing).

Or perhaps the distribution is the result of an interaction between age and who it’s easy to meet.  Maybe young bisexual guys have an easy time meeting women and turn to the internet to meet men; whereas men in their 30s and beyond find it easy to meet men and so turn to the internet to meet women?

Other ideas?

For women who identify as bisexual, the percentages messaging both men and women, just women, and just men show less of a trend across age.

Overall, however, 75% of women who identify as bisexual are not messaging both men and women.  Rudder suggests that there may be a social desirability factor here; that is, that straight women know that men are into bisexual chicks and, so, they claim to be bi in order to appeal to the dudes.

UPDATE: I recommend reading the comments thread for a great discussion of sexual fluidity, the meaningulness of labels like “bisexuality,” and lots more good ideas for why this data looks like it does.

Also from OK Cupid: the racial politics of dating, what women want, how attractiveness matters, age, gender, and the shape of the dating pool, older women want more sex, and the lies love-seekers tell.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Two friends of mine recently had a baby and the hospital sent home all kinds of instructional packets, all of which included product sample, advertising materials, etc. One item they found was this advertisement for the U.S. Career Institute’s program to become a medical claims processor who works from home. The ad plays on the guilt mothers often still have about working outside the home:

I don’t have a problem, in and of itself, with suggesting that a job provides options for parents who want to be home full-time but also work. Given the fact that women still bear the primary responsibility for childcare even though most want or need to provide financial support to the family, I’m sure many women (and for that matter, a lot of men) would find them appealing (in theory, anyway; I have my doubts about a lot of the “work at home and make a gazillion dollars a week!” pitches, but I have no knowledge of this one in particular).

What bothers me is the way the ad is written to not just say, “Hey, if you are staying home with the kids but would like to work for pay as well, this is a great opportunity.” Instead, the blaring headline “I’m glad you work at home Mommy” ties into the idea that children desperately want their moms (but apparently not dads) to stay home with them, and moms who do so are being the best moms. Even among women who value their careers and always planned to return to the paid workforce, many are surprised by how much guilt they feel when they do so. They may feel guilty for leaving their child with another childcare provider, but if they actually look forward to going back to work and are excited or relieved to be there, they often feel guilty for that, too. This is a burden of guilt that new fathers do not generally share; while they may wish they could be home more with their children, they usually don’t express guilt for not doing so, largely because by working outside the home, they are actually fulfilling the normative role of what a good father does, whereas working outside the home, particularly when children are young, it incompatible with ideals of good mothering.

On the very bottom of pg. 2 it does say, “USCI is nationally accredited and approved for veterans’ education benefits!” That’s an interesting line, since the majority of people would would qualify for veterans’ educational benefits would be men (for instance, women currently make up only 15.5% of the U.S. Army). There are other elements on the brochure that seem gender-neutral — being your own boss, setting your own hours, increasing job opportunities in the field — but that line seems to be the one part that is more tailored to a male audience.

On an unrelated topic, I love the totally meaningless graph at the top right of the 2nd page: look! This one column is way bigger than the others! It is entirely lacking in any useful information — how are they defining “growth”? What is 0% referring to? What level of growth are we talking about here? For all we know, the health/medical services bar could indicated 0.000001% growth.

And just out of interest, do any of you have any experience with these types of jobs? Did it live up to the claims (particularly flexibility and the amount of money you can make)?

Way back in June my friend Abby Kinchy let me know about an article in the New York Times by Stephanie Coontz, a scholar best known for her book The Way We Never Were, which addresses myths about the “traditional” family. The article is about no-fault divorces and their pros and cons. What struck Abby were the accompanying images, which depict two hypothetical break-up letters (to “John” and “Jane”) that include a list of stereotypes about men and women, what they want out of marriage, and why they fight.

The Dear John letter:

So women want to break up because they feel stunted in their marriage (they miss out on experiences, they’re bored, they want to travel), they are still hung up on old flames, they want kids and their male partners (of course) don’t, and they just might be lesbians.

The Dear Jane letter:

What do men stereotypically want to leave their female partners for? Being emasculated (“you make me feel like less of a…”), men aren’t supposed to be monogamous (“it’s not natural for a man to be mono…”), they want more sex with more people, women spent too much money shopping, or their wives get stupid haircuts.

There is some gender agreement, though; neither men nor women can take a spouse who gets fat.

UPDATE: Citizenparables thinks the images are more playing on those still-existing stereotypes:

Perhaps the point of the images is rejecting – crossing out – those cliche stereotypical excuses, which are by implication false (because surely they can’t all be true!), leaving the essential idea that when someone leaves a relationship it’s a choice, pure and simple, which they ought to own rather than blame on either themselves or the partner.

The New York Times has a neat interactive graph based on data from the American Time Use Survey that lets you look at hour-by-hour time use broken down by sex, employment status, 3 racial/ethnic groups (White, Black, Hispanic), age, education, and number of children (though, unfortunately, you can’t search by more than one category at once). Here is the breakdown for the entire sample:

For people age 15-24:

Watching TV and movies takes up a lot of the time of those over age 65:

You can also click on a particular activity to get more information about it:

Those with advanced degrees spent the most time participating in sports or watching them in person; I suspect that the data might look a bit different if time spent watching sports on TV went in this category instead of the TV category:

Just a note, the averages for time spent at work seem pretty low, but that’s because they’re averaged over all days of the week, including any days off, rather than only days a person actually went to work.

Presumably the amount of time you’ll spend playing around with the site goes under computer use.

Women spend their young and young adult lives dreaming of their wedding day, or so the stereotype goes.  Where might girls get the idea that weddings are a particularly important day in a woman’s life?

SociologicalMe sent in a wedding day toy for girls found at a Pathmark grocery store in Delaware:

And Mary, who blogs at Disney Princess Recovery, collected these examples of Disney Princess-themed wedding books for little girls:

So maybe it isn’t part of having two XX chromosomes.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

According to this 1935 ad for canned corn, the key to a man’s heart is his stomach.  Mr. Thomas T. Twiggers was a miserable husband, so miserable that Mrs. Thomas T. Twiggers booked a trip to Reno for a quickie divorce.  But then she fed him Niblets canned corn.  With proper feeding, a man and a marriage can be happy as can be!

Vintage Ads.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Reflecting the expectation that it is women who will do the majority of the child care, men’s bathrooms frequently do not have baby changing tables.   This particular bathroom at the Baltimore airport, however, is an exception.  Notice anything odd?

Thanks to Corey O., Monique P., and eaglevision for the submission!

See also our post on stick figures and stick figures who parent.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Lisa recently discussed the trend of women having children at older ages. The Pew Research Center also just released data on women who do not have children lessfree (a commenter pointed out that “childless” implies a lack, whereas “childfree” doesn’t; others say “child-free” is also value-laden; “childless” is the word used in the report). They defined “childless” as women aged 40-44 who have no children; importantly, women who have adopted but never given birth themselves are also categorized as without children, which I find rather problematic. I can see why you might want info on both situations, but to define adoptive mothers as not having children? That’s weird. Also, they don’t report info for men.

From the report:

One in five women aged 40 to 44 reported that they’ve never had children. Meanwhile, just 41 percent of Americans say having children is necessary to a good marriage, compared to 65 percent in 1990.

The number has been increasing over time, with slightly short-term dips here and there:

Not having children is more common as education increases, though interestingly, the number of women without kids who have a Master’s or higher degrees is actually lower than in the early ’90s:

Of course, you could interpret the educational pattern a couple of ways. Perhaps achieving advanced degrees requires women who would have liked to have children to choose between career advancement and family life. Or maybe having an advanced degree makes them less attractive to potential partners, or unwilling to accept the partners available to them, so they have to decide whether to be single parents. But of course, it could also be that women who pursue advanced degrees are women who were less interested in having children to begin with. I’m sure there are other explanations and that it’s likely to be a combination of all these factors, and I’m sure somewhere there is data available. Let me know if you’ve got a good link.

But I’m stumped about the decrease in the number of highly-educated women without children between the early ’90s and now. Any thoughts on what might have caused that?

Anyway, moving on…

The increase in women without children holds for all racial/ethnic groups (and, as usual, data on Native Americans wasn’t included; sorry):

Probably not surprisingly, women aged 40-44 who never married are much more likely to be without children than are married women, though as we see, the percentage has gone down, indicating more never-married single mothers:

From that perspective, it appears that marriage and childbearing are tightly linked–only a small proportion of women who have been married at some point have no children.

But if we break down the data a bit, we see that of women aged 40-44 without children, 60% were married at least once:

So while for the U.S. population as a whole, getting married generally indicates children will appear at some point, most women who forgo childbearing do marry at least once, showing that this isn’t just a phenomenon of single women.

Where did I learn about this report? From the website Shit My Kids Ruined, which I read with morbid fascination.