Thu, 2008-10-30 15:37

[This post crystallizes for me an age-related structural gender issue that seems pretty critical but I haven’t seen it discussed much. :-) —fl]

Last week Ezra Klein raised one of those hidden-in-plain-sight issues that I think are barkingly critical to understanding contemporary gender dynamics.

Folks might remember this rather startling map that criss-crossed the internet a few months ago. Using Census Survey data, it purported to show the imbalance in singles of both genders across the country. The East Coast, it turned out, was full of lonesome ladies. The West Coast was packed with unhappy bachelors. Folks had some methodological questions, but most read the map and moved on, or read the map and moved to a city with more hot, hot, singles action.

But Great American Jonathan Soma decided to dig into the numbers and make a more manipulable map. And the main variable he let you manipulate was age. The original map counted all singles between the ages of 20 and 64. The new map lets you screw with some sliders for a data range. And the results are fascinating. On the young end of the spectrum, single men outnumber single women just about everywhere. If you hold the ages to 20-34, DC, for instance, has 27 extra single men for every 1,000 people. Shift the slider so it tracks folks from age 45 to 60, and DC has 48 more single women for every 1,000 folks.

The reason for this, basically, is that women marry younger. About 1/3rd of women are married by age 24. Only 1/5th of men are. That creates some imbalance.

Read the quote in context here.

Click to see the full comic. The syndicated cartoonist Vic Lee addresses the same issue in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

If you can’t make it out the comic is set in a restaurant. In center frame two women are sharing a toast. Behind them an angry older man exclaims to the similarly shocked woman at his table “No! It’s wrong! We’ve got to fight for traditional marriage.” At the next table a hip young man is whispering to his partner “Same-sex Issues?” She whispers back “No, same age!”

Ouch! Now there’s an unspoken taboo!

I’m pretty sure, by the way, that to the probably-substantial extent traditional gender values are involved this one is not unilaterally imposed by men. For instance if I hear one more single woman refer to their younger partner as “my 25-year-old” or, for that matter, a younger man refer to a prospective date as a “cougar” I may use intemperate language. (And duh, it already bugged me when similarly gendered language goes the other way.)

And yes, I’m aware that differential maturity rates among early-adolescent girls and boys establishes something of a gradient very early on. But here’s the deal: that gradient tends to disappear around, oh, say, age 18 — the age, coincidentally, when a blog called “real adult sex” would consider an appropriate age for folks to start having, well, real adult sex! But I digress…

If I hadn’t been thinking a lot about this I might have just left it at something like “gee, it’s just so inefficient this way — single 40-year-old women and unattached 20-year-old men should just start hooking up more often.” I’d have even had both statistical justification (marriages where the male partner is younger tend to be far more durable than other age-related pairings) or personal/anecdotal (if my dad’s parents had stuck with older-man/younger-woman then he wouldn’t be here and neither would I.) And there’s the business about how (at least for now) men tend to die before their partners and so it’s inefficient, dumb, and even self-defeatingly tragic for women to prefer older partners. I could even have dragged out examples of “other cultures” and, of course, the old saw about “sexual peaks.” A bit more recently I might have dragged out bits about patriarchy naturally favoring economically-advantaged older men and younger women with a system pitched against economical autonomy just seeing which side the bread is buttered on. And if (flying-spaghetti monster forfend) I was an ev-psych fan I’d blather about men’s preference for firm boobs and women’s preference for “proven providers…” as if most pre-modern economic and agricultural production world-wide

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that. Whatever.

Instead I’ll just say we gotta start talking about this gendered age gradient. I’m obviously not saying we should start carding couples for their birth years — not only would that be counterproductive at any point it would also be premature. But! If we don’t start looking at it we’re going to continue looking at more than a lot of lonely people of different ages sitting on different coasts.

Look at relative pay differences between men and women, to name just one. We’re so used to looking at comparable pay — how as in the Ledbetter case female manager X was systematically paid less than male managers performing the same work. Chances are looking pretty good right now that the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act will be passed by the next Congress and signed by the next President. Cool, right? Well, sure! But that’s comparative pay.

But what about relative, internal-to-relationship income and experience when by tradition and, evidently, statistical preference of both parties consistently gives the male partner a three to five year jump on the female partner?

In the outside world they can both be earning amounts comparable to peers of both genders, but when it comes to decisions at home about who brings home more money, which career moves… or even geographic ones… should take precedent, and who the family can most afford to stay home with pre-school children a bias towards… whoever has the more established career and income is going to carry a lot of weight. No matter who does most of the dishes on a daily basis. And don’t forget that whoever stays home with new children (usually the lower-earning-power member) is set back all the further.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that aggregate personal choices of partner grossly exaggerate perceptions of differences in height, strength, horniness, or whatever compared to actual averages. For instance there’s far, far, far more overlap in average men’s and women’s heights than in relative heights between hetero partners. Well, in the same way a persistent bias for younger, and therefore on-average lower-earning women partnering with older, and therefore longer-in-the-workplace men will tend to perpetuate gendered economic differences no matter how egalitarian society becomes at large.

Since one of the precepts of radical feminism is that imbalances in domestic heterosexual relationship is the template for all other forms of oppression (one reason why the old-timers kept saying “the personal is the political”) averaging the economic playing field may not create as much egalitarianism as projections of aggregate equality might lead us to expect.

So.

I’m not exactly sure how we’re going to overturn both the one-way Hugh Hefner/Maureen Dowd gender/age template. Which is ok — there are lots of ways to get there. But I will say, rather bluntly, that gender relations are going to plateau below parity until we start seeing more truly random age mixing between gendered couples.

[While all this is a new idea to me it must have been discussed by others earlier. Therefore I’ll welcome pointers to references in comments. Thanks in advance. —fl]

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Random Note: Despite the charts Ezra Klein linked to it’s not necessary to just hookup surpluses of 20-something west-coast men with 40-something east-coast women. Almost all couples are just a few years apart and I’m guessing under any optimal solution that would still be true after the gendered age gradient collapsed. (Unlike, say, Hugo Schwyzer, I don’t think larger age gaps are necessarily a problem… again, as long as they trend gender-random as well.)

Random Note: Makes me wonder about the trend where “red-state” people both begin sex and get married much younger than “blue states”... and consequently blue-state people have more stable marriages and way lower divorce rates. [Update: Doh! Corrected typo in the previous sentence implying that red-state people were better off. —fl]

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See also

- “Cougers,” Entitlement, and Unexamined Bias – Sexism? Ask me (out)