Couples Who Vote Together Stay Together, and Other Interesting New Research
America’s (Somewhat) Unique Baby Bust; The Rising Prerequisites for Parenthood; Married Gay Men are Pretty Well Off; Abortion Restrictions & Intimate Partner Violence; The Most Sexist College Majors
A note for newcomers: Welcome! This is a weekly round-up of newly published research on demography, family policy, and other family stuff. Some of the studies included here may be pre-prints or working papers and have not yet been peer reviewed. And while I have done my best to summarize their findings accurately, in the words of Ebenezer Scrooge, “I am a mortal, and liable to fall.” In other words, I hope you brought a pinch of salt with you.
Happy Friday, everyone!
Just want to say that I’m very grateful to everyone who upgraded their subscription over the past couple of days. In case you missed my recent update, I announced that I will be partially paywalling these round-ups starting in mid-August (you can read more about that decision here, but the TLDR is that they take a lot of work to put together!). The good news is that you can get an annual subscription for half-off (just $32.50 a year, or $2.70 a month!) until August 18th. If you can’t upgrade (and I totally understand that many won’t be able to do so), do stick around, as there will be plenty of reading for free subscribers as well. To the round-up!
America’s (Somewhat) Unique Baby Bust
One point of debate, or at least confusion, in baby bust discourse is the degree to which falling fertility reflects rising childlessness (more people having zero kids), or dwindling family sizes among parents (more people having, say, 2 kids rather than 3). This working paper tries to parse the contributions of each of those components in a bunch of advanced economies in Europe, the Americas, and southeast Asia.
The authors seem to feel that there has been too much emphasis on the role of childlessness in driving fertility down. They specifically mention
as an example of someone pushing this narrative, citing a 2020 report he wrote which stated that “the main cause of declining fertility in America is increasing childlessness at all ages.” But unless I’m missing something (and maybe I am—I haven’t read Lyman’s report) their analysis is mostly consistent with Lyman’s.In their broad 34-country sample, they find that less than two-fifths of the decline in fertility in the most recent cohorts for which data is available is driven by rising childlessness. The remaining bulk is due to declining average fertility among moms. In fact, in many of the countries in their sample, they find that fertility is below replacement even among parents. That means that “average birth rates even among parents would be low enough eventually to cause depopulation.” But they also investigate the degree to which the United States is an outlier on this point and find that, in America, childlessness is driving a larger-than-average portion of the fertility decline. In other words, yes, childlessness seems to be driving the U.S. baby bust, but the “U.S. is moderately unusual in international comparison.”
Couples Who Vote Together Stay Together
Many have expressed concern that women and men’s diverging political views will drive marriage rates down—but will it also drive divorce rates up? This paper used data from the United Kingdom over a period of 30 years to investigate whether holding opposing political views increases a couple’s odds of separation. Long story short: “couples with the same party preferences are significantly less likely to separate than those with different political beliefs.”
Running through their findings: the odds of union dissolution is about 39% higher for couples who prefer different political parties than for those who prefer the same political party. That’s roughly on par with, or even larger than, the association between separation and other types of “heterogamy” (i.e. marriage between people not sharing some trait, such as education level or religion). So, for example, couples in which partners hold different religious beliefs are 34% more likely to separate than those who hold the same religious views. But even more than opposing party membership, the real death sentence for a couple was holding opposing views on Brexit: the odds of breaking up are 2.3 times higher among couples who disagree about Brexit than for those who don’t. [Edit: in my initial summary, I used the word “risk” where I ought to have said “odds.” Have changed throughout. I regret the error!]
The Rising Prerequisites for Parenthood
Recently, I nodded to a study that found that high incomes are increasingly associated with fertility, and in particular with first births, in the Netherlands. According to the author, that finding suggests that the income prerequisites for parenthood are rising—that is, the income level that people feel they need to reach before they become a parent is increasing. That could simply reflect increases in the cost of things like housing, which is itself a prerequisite to parenthood—gotta have a place to live if you want to raise children. Or it could reflect the fact that people’s standards for what constitutes good parenthood have risen, such that they feel they need more income to meet that standard. Whatever the reason, the possibility that people increasingly feel like they need to earn a lot of money before they have kids offers a compelling theory for why people are delaying having kids in so many countries. It also “suggests that low-income groups may increasingly be unable to fulfill their fertility desires.”
That study was based in the Netherlands; this just-published research note explored whether this trend toward higher incomes as a prerequisite to parenthood held in a broader group of 16 Western European countries. They find that in most countries in the sample, and for both women and men, a higher income corresponds to a greater likelihood of becoming a father or mother. The association between having a higher income and one’s likelihood of becoming a parent is steepest in Nordic countries and the United Kingdom, which is intriguing since the Nordic region has robust welfare systems and family policies. Not sure what to make of that.
Looking at how this link has shifted over time, the income-parenthood link has strengthened in 7 of the countries in the analysis for men, and in 11 of the countries for women. Importantly, the shift is mainly driven by declining fertility among low-income women and men, rather than rising fertility among those with high incomes. The one exception was Portugal, where high-income women do appear to be increasingly likely to become a parent. But I think the broad takeaway here is that the “rising income prerequisites to parenthood” theory of delayed and declining fertility may have some legs.
Married Gay Men are Pretty Well Off
We’ve got a new Pew report showing that the number of American households headed by same-sex married couples has risen since 2015, when gay marriage was legalized nationwide. The report includes a breakdown on how education, employment and income levels in same-sex marriages compare to different-sex ones. One thing that jumps out of the analysis is how comparatively well-off male same-sex married couples are. Male married couples are more likely than different-sex or female married couples to have two college-educated spouses (40% vs 38% and 32%, respectively). In only 27% of male same-sex marriages does neither spouse have a college degree, compared to 35% of female same-sex marriages and 43% of different-sex marriages. Male marriages are most likely to have both spouses working (75% for male couples vs. 68% and 66% for female and hetero married couples, respectively). Perhaps most striking, gay male married couples have a considerably higher median household income ($172,689) than different-sex ($121,000) or female same-sex ($121,900) couples. So basically, married gay men are doing pretty well for themselves.
Perhaps related to all this, and consistent with some other research I’ve covered about the gendered rise of same-sex parenthood, gay male married couples are way WAY less likely to be raising kids than different-sex or female married couples. “Among different-sex married couples, just over half (53%) are raising children (defined here as having at least one child younger than 18 who lives with them).” It’s 31% for female same-sex married couples, and 10% for male same-sex married couples.
Seems Interesting*
The Most Sexist College Majors
Research on whether student evaluations are biased against female teachers is a bit mixed. This study tried to sort out exactly what’s going on. It’s kind of a complicated paper and to be honest I’m not sure I totally understood it (didn’t really read it, so that’s probably why lol), but if I understand correctly, they found that gender bias varies a lot by student and gender, with female students being less biased against female professors than male students. But then they also found that female students tend to flock to female professors, which suggests that “the bias experienced by female faculty is moderated by endogenous sorting of students across fields and classes.” So, in some sense, female teachers are somewhat shielded from bias by the simple fact that the students taking their classes are more likely to be those who actually respect them. Digging a bit more, they find that there’s a lot of variability in gender attitudes by field of study. Looks like the most sexist major is Economics lol.
The Link Between Abortion Restrictions and Intimate Partner Violence
Did not read this one at all, but it tried to figure out if “abortion restrictions in the post-Dobbs era have impacted women’s risk of exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV).” Apparently, they have: “We find that abortion restrictions – alternately measured by the increase in travel distance and by the presence of a near-total ban – significantly increased the rate of IPV for reproductive-aged women in treated counties on the order of about seven to 10 percent. These estimates imply at least 9,000 additional incidents of IPV among women in the treated “trigger ban” states.”
*Didn’t read these
It's interesting to hear that even with universal health care and affordable childcare in Europe, people are setting high income thresholds as pre-requisites for becoming parents. In the U.S., those are really major financial obstacles, where even people I know with one kid, making good money, will in all seriousness say "I couldn't bear to pay another $30,000 a year on daycare for another 5 years" and call it quits.
The cost of family health insurance is also getting pretty exorbitant here. My younger sister (engaged, probably planning to have kids soon) pays nothing in premiums for her employer-provided health insurance, and she was aghast to learn that (just my portion of) my family health insurance plan's premiums climbed this year from $14,000 to $19,000. There is one cheaper, HSA-eligible "high-deductible" plan option with a premium of merely... $17,000, but where literally every service and prescription drug, aside from one annual checkup, must be paid fully out of pocket toward the several-thousand-dollars deductible, before it actually covers anything. Even with the "good" PPO plan, we have averaged several thousand dollars extra out of pocket every year since our first kid was born in 2018.
I think the common thread across Europe and the States, then, is housing affordability. I think most middle-class workers used to believe, pretty much accurately, that they'd be able to find a decent-enough home, at a manageable if not ideal monthly cost, maybe after making some sacrifices in terms of a less sought-after location. But now people reasonably worry they simply won't be able to get decent housing within commuting distance of their career. The mortgage-to-income ratio all across the US has skyrocketed to levels formerly confined just to places like NYC, SF and Seattle. It hovered around 30% from 2012 to 2021, but is now more like 44%: https://www.atlantafed.org/economy-matters/banking-and-finance/2024/10/16/home-ownership-affordability-monitor-2-0
There is something odd with these median household numbers, given that the median household income is only about $80k in the US.