|
| Maureen Dowd's love life: a statistical analysis |
|
navigational aids: News ticker:
|
02 February 06.
Ms MKW of Washington, DC, was the third reader to point out to me an article by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, so it's evidently time to give Ms Dowd's thesis a closer look. She explains that educated women have a disadvantage on the marriage market because boys prefer girls who are nonthreatening, less smart, and less successful. She cites an article by John Schwartz, also of the NYT, that cites an article by Stephanie Brown of UMich. Ms Dowd explains that this study demonstrated that males have a genetic aversion to dominant females. You know I have no patience for 'they did a study' hearsay, so here's the data [1].
The experiment is pretty simple: researcher shows to subject a photo with a story attached. The key point of interest in the story is that the person in the photo is a subordinate, a coworker, or a superior. The subject is then asked if the person in the photo is attractive for a one-time sexual encounter, for an activity partner (“would you like to exercise with this person”), or for a long-term relationship. Nine means absolutely and zero means absolutely not. Generally, you can see that when the boys rated girls, the mean floats around 6.5; when girls rate boys, the mean floats around 3.5. For the “would you exercise with him” question, the girls' means went up about a point. So policy implication number one: boys, ask her out for frisbee. Looking a little more closely, we see the anomaly that the paper and two New York Times articles are based on: boys rating an assistant for a long-term relationship rated her at the usual mean of 6.4; boys rating a boss rated her at a mean of 4.2.
That's it: a 2.2 point difference. The number after the ±
I was a little surprised by the use of the
F-test here, because we're comparing two means, which just screams
of t-test to me. I checked some undergrad readings, and yes, this is
the correct procedure for ANOVA on a multi-way hypothesis. Here's the
summary: the t-test is generally preferable, but it can only test for
a difference between two numbers. To compare three means, or to test
the hypothesis 'all the numbers in this subset of the table are not
equal', you'll need the F-test. So to check how males rate subordinate,
equal, or boss females would need an F-test, but to compare males
rating subordinate or boss females, you can take your pick. Evidently,
you'll get different results with the data they gathered.
Which is all just to say that it
is valid to apply a t-test and it fails to reject the hypothesis that
the means of the two treatments are identical.
Part of this may come from the experiment's design. Ms Dowd is interested
in the question 'do boys like smart and successful girls', but the
narrative in the study was:
Finally, and this is the least of my issues here, this is a study
of 120 male and 208 female UCLA undergrads. The sample size of a
few hundred is normal to large for this sort of work; for example, this academic study of pick-up lines
had only 142 F and 63 M subjects. But to
say that UCLA undergrads speak for all of homo sapiens seems a
bit much.
The discussion links this to evolutionary theories about boys trying
to work out who the father of a baby is. Our NY Times correspondents
confidently cited the evolutionary results as proven by this paper. Me, I
will refrain from commenting, since I'm unfamiliar with the evolutionary
lit. But the structure of the paper itself is that nothing about how
boys evolved is proven. Instead, the researchers ran a survey, and stated
that it supports a certain existing hypothesis in the lit. Appropriately
modest.
Unfortunately, Ms Brown is not so understated
in the press, and in another Dowd
editorial,
Ms Brown is directly quoted as stating “Powerful women are at a
disadvantage in the marriage market”, and of course, the press eats it up.
I have no clue how to find the study Ms Dowd attributes to “researchers
at four British universities”, so I can't comment on whether it correctly
supports Ms Dowd's claims or not. An SF Chronicle
article
says that that study only surveyed people born in 1921(!?).
level of education given married
Here's what we're looking at: I took the column for boys and girls with
>16 years of education (i.e., a college education) and boys with 12
years of education (high school) in these periods, and calculated what
percentage of them are matching with a spouse of the years of schooling
at left. Each column sums to 100%. So in 1940, 31.74% of married
college-educated boys were married to college-educated girls, while in the
mid-80s, 60.52% of married boys were wed to college-educated girls. That
is huge, and we see a corresponding drop in the college-educated who
marry the high-school educated.
The high school educated boys were still mostly marrying high school
educated girls in the second period, but both of the categories about
marrying better educated girls showed an increase, and both of the
categories about marrying less educated girls showed a decline. So this
data says that even those with a high school diploma showed a stronger
preference for an educated wife.
For college-educated girls, the rate at which the married among them is
matching to a college-educated boy is not moving nearly as much--2.2
percent in forty years. [I leave as an exercise to
the reader the fun of designing a data set where all of the above facts
are simultaneously true. Hint: the unmarrieds have not been mentioned
in any of the data above.]
Overall, in 1940, 55.6% of married women were sub-high school educated;
in the mid-80s, 11.1% were--about five times fewer. In 1940,
3.85% of married women were college educated; in the mid-80s,
22.37% were--a proportion over five times larger.
[from [2], p 21]
But, you retort, the number of college-educated girls has gone
up significantly. Which is true, and the post-college girl-boy
ratio is closer to 1.0 than it was in the 1940s, but the shift
in this ratio is not at the scale of the shifts above. Here's the
data (from historical tables A-1 of the Census Bureau's educational attainment page)
educational attainment over time
You can see that the rate of college (plus postgrad) completion is way
up all around, and the college-completed girl/boy ratio has gone from
69% to 96%. This is great, but is clearly only a fraction of the the
doubling and quintupling of the percentages that we saw above.
To summarize my story of Ms Dowd's love life: educated women marry
less. People who have been out of school a long time are less likely
to marry those who match them, just as a matter of statistics. A
person who only wants to date the top 5% on any scale is going to be
rejecting 19 out of 20 comers by assumption. This sums up to mean that
a single, graduate-educated gal over 40 will have a much tougher time
marrying a graduate-educated boy than she did twenty years ago. Also,
a single graduate-educated boy will have a tougher time marrying a
graduate-educated girl than he did 20 years ago. However, none of this
has to do with cultural trends regarding what boys want: the trend since
the 1940s has been toward boys of all levels marrying increasingly
well-educated girls, and any education penalty that may have existed
for women in the past has evaporated. There will always be the arse at
the bar who turns tail at the first sound of education--and I as an
overeducated boy have at times had exactly the same experience--but
that does not quite make for a national trend.
[1] @articlebrown:dominance,
[link] [2 comments]
Replies: 2 comments
on Friday, February 3rd, Debra said
Some of you might want to check out: on Wednesday, July 29th, Debbie said
My problem is this; I'm dating a guy who didn't graduate from high school. I have a college education (B.A.) I am finding it very difficult to communicate with him on a variety of levels. He wants to get married but I don't think I really do... what do you know about this situation? I'd love to do some research on this subject re: happiness levels of the better educated wife and the less educated husband... or partner or...
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
