Why Rising Female Income Might Make Marriage Rates Go Down

Phyllis Schlafly has apparently not yet had her fill of saying really stupidly anti-feminist things. She's at it again, arguing that this whole "pay gap" thing between men and women is some combination of not really that big a deal and a good thing. Here's a nice solid debunking of her claims from the new Vox.com. But as a feminist man, I just had one point I wanted to add that Vox's thoroughly empirical work didn't really capture.

Schlafly suggests that men prefer to be the higher earner in a couple, while women prefer to have their (male) partner be the higher earner. This, she argues, would mean that in a world without a gender pay gap, half of all women would be unable to find a suitable husband. Now, that's some damn shoddy internal logic, for one thing. If the income distributions for men and women were identical, you could just line up all the men and line up all the women from highest-earning on down, and then have Man #1 marry Woman #2, Man #2 marry Woman #3, etc., and the only people left without a potential mate would be the highest-earning woman and the lowest-earning man. That is, obviously, absurd, but it's just such a glaring logical flaw in Schlafly's "argument" that I couldn't resist pointing it out.

But my main point is different. The Vox piece notes that Schlafly seems to be somewhat correct that a lower wage gap seems to correlate with less enthusiasm for getting married early and often. But I daresay there's an alternate causal mechanism for this phenomenon that has nothing to do with the innate preference of both sides for the man to be the breadwinner. Basically, it seems to me that an awful lot of men don't really seem to go out of their way to be, y'know, kind or decent toward women, much at all. An awful lot of guys are at least somewhat, y'know, rapey. There's an unfortunately large segment of masculinity that really does seem to regard women as existing for the sole purpose of the convenience and pleasure of men. To put it bluntly, that whole complex of attitudes is probably not very attractive to the majority of women. To put it even more bluntly, you'd expect that the kind of guy who's open to essentially coercing a woman into being with him would also, therefore, need to use coercion to get a woman to be with him, at least in any sort of long-term capacity. Not necessarily coercion through physical violence or chemical incapacitation, though of course both of those are disgustingly prevalent.

No, coercion can be a lot subtler than that. And for a lot of human history, including up until pretty recently and still to a large extent today, the coercion guys have used to get laid is economic in nature. Men are the breadwinners, and if women want to share in the fruits of their labors, well, they need to marry one of them. And here we see what I would imagine explains most of this apparent statistical connection between the wage gap and marriage rates. The more women are able to be economically independent, the less reason they have to even consider getting with a man who is--aside from his bank account--totally unappealing. If they find a guy who is appealing, in ways beyond the financial, then they'll still be interested in him, and maybe even in marrying him, naturally enough. But because being single is a less desperate situation, because your lack of a good romantic partner is not compounded by a serious impediment to your ability to live a life of decent material comfort, there's just a lot less reason to settle for a guy who isn't willing to be basically decent to you (and then some).

If this is right, of course, there should be a long-term correction coming. That is to say, if broader trends in society make women a lot less desperate to find a guy, any guy, just someone to take care of them, men will have a much stronger set of incentives telling them to shape up. Hopefully, therefore, female economic empowerment would over time lead to a more enlightened set of behavioral norms among men. Give it long enough and some formerly oafish men might discover that it's not so bad being nice to women. They might actually discover that, hey, a lot of women are actually really cool people once you get to know them, and stop just trying to screw them by any means necessary. And if that happened, then marriage rates would presumably come back up. And, I daresay, divorce rates would be substantially lower at the end of this process than at the beginning, because more people would be getting together, and married, for the right reasons.

So where Phyllis Schlafly sees the end of civilization, I see the potential for a feedback loop that could make civilization a lot better. That's the hope, anyway.