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Divorce and Occupation
- artur_makly 9y agoTIL : Phlebotmists
- madengr 9y agoThat's because financial problems are the main reason for divorce. Dual engineering incomes should not have those problems. Happily married to another engineer for 15 years. Now engineers also like to argue, so put two of them in the same household and see what happens. We do argue about finances, but it's me not wanting to spend money.
- gbrown 9y agoYeah, let's see an analysis which controls for income.
- pmiller2 9y agoThere's another graph that shows that divorce rate and average occupational income are linearly correlated, with higher income yielding lower divorce rates. This is all pretty well known, AFAIK.
- cm2012 9y agoThe link above has a graph showing the industries by medium income. There's a pretty clear correlation, with some outlier professions.
- tachyonbeam 9y agoI think it's also possible that engineering-minded people choose their partners based on more pragmatic reasons, tend to think more about the long term. In opposition to choosing someone primarily based on physical attraction and sexual compatibility, or some mystical belief in love. IMO, engineers less likely to do things the average couple might do, such as moving in together after a month, planning marriage six months in, and having a baby one year in, they're more likely to be patient and make more careful choices.
- MBCook 9y agoThat's what I was wondering. Could someone measure some kind of 'pickiness' measure to determine if bartenders just tend to get married fast where engineers tend to have a long courtship (or some other factor)? While lack of money making problems worse is certainly an issue I wonder what (if anything) this says about how people choose partners in addition to how things work out.
- burkaman 9y agoMarrying someone you aren't particularly attracted to or in love with sounds like a recipe for divorce to me.
- LaurensBER 9y agoI used to think that but it turns out that arranged marriages are quite successful: http://www.statisticbrain.com/arranged-marriage-statistics/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/arranged-marriage-statistics/ Obvious it's not as simple as comparing the divorce rate of love vs arranged marriages, cultural factors play a huge part but from what I've seen in India the fact that they're committed to making it work seems to make for happy couples.
- seppin 9y agoperhaps the type of person that would agree to an arranged marriage is also the type not to object or try and break such a public contract/agreement.
- DeonPenny 9y agoI would think it would be just the opposite or least if there were financial incentive ok. You fall in and out of love all the time, or at least I do.
- libria 9y agoParent comment was suggesting less attention given to physical attraction and more to other forms of attraction (personality, intelligence, SES, etc.), not that all forms of attraction were ignored.
- sctb 9y ago(We've updated the submission title from “Engineering couples have one of the lowest divorce rates” to that of the article.)
- seangrogg 9y agoDo you have a citation for this? Purely to sate curiosity.
- madengr 9y agoNope, just what my mother told me years ago, though a quick google search shows it's pretty high. I'd say it's the highest since "general incompatibility" can mean many things. I can say that in my 20+ years in engineering, none of my colleagues are divorced. All the typical infidelity gossip is from the other side of the business; purchasing, program management, etc.
- seangrogg 9y agoInteresting. Insofar as "infidelity gossip" is concerned, do you believe/perceive that the reason it comes "from the other side of the business" is because of some combination of traits that makes it more likely in those areas (or, inversely, that engineers lack some combination of traits that leads to a reduction in infidelity gossip)?
- madengr 9y agoThe infidelity or just the gossip about it? I can't say for sure, but I think the workload required (in school) for an "engineering major" vs. "business major" has something to do with it. If college shapes you, that's definitely the mold. The party'er types are weeded out. Could also be long term decision making vs short term, impulsive vs delayed gratification. Engineering is mostly long term thinking about what can go wrong.
- vxNsr 9y agoIt was reported that in the lead up to the first iPhone release the divorce rate among those involved was fairly high. And I'm guessing game engineers probably don't do so well either.
- watwut 9y ago
- TimPC 9y agoI find it amusing that the correlation vs causation point has morphed into arguing correlation is anti-causal (which is worse). I think if someone goes from being a doctor to being a bartender their divorce rate might be affected. I saw another data source that said the number one cause of divorce was financial so the correlation may actually be somewhat causal. Financial stress is brutal because it leads to conversations like cutting down on recreation and leisure and reducing spend on hobbies and downtime. This creates a kind of feedback loop where life adds stress and the resources to remove it are taken away because you no longer get to spend $X/month on your recreation because you needed to pay $Z on something else.
- madengr 9y agoYep, sick of the "correlation is anti-causal". I assume correlation is causal (which is usually the case) until shown otherwise, which this article did not show.
- TimPC 9y agoI think assuming correlation is causal is bad as well. But it's a good sniff test. Usually something interesting is going on: sometimes it's A causes B, sometimes its B causes A, sometimes A and B have a common related cause. Sometimes C is non-causal but correlates with A and B and wasn't controlled for. Lots of possibilities.
- morgante 9y ago> If someone who is already a physician, quits and takes a job as a bartender or telemarketer, it doesn’t mean their chances of divorce changes. Uh, I'd say it almost certainly does significantly change their chance of divorce. If you go from having a steady, high income to variable work with high uncertainty around your next paycheck of course it will put more stress on the marriage and substantially increase the risk of divorce.
- SilasX 9y agoRight, and even beyond the income issues, that kind of transition is itself unusual, and correlated with all kinds of other negative events. That tends to happen because they lost their medical license, or were embroiled in a scandal that made them unwanted anywhere, or had a major decline in performance (itself due to addiction or chronic condition, etc). To be sure, it could very well be that they had some "come to Jesus" moment and decided that's what they really wanted to do in life, and it increased their general happiness and willingness to put effort into all their other relationships. But that, I would think, is the exception, not the rule. Edit: Though it might be correct to say that the job-change is not a causal driver of the divorce, but merely affected by the real cause.
- Bartweiss 9y ago> To be sure, it could very well be that they had some "come to Jesus" moment and decided that's what they really wanted to do in life, and it increased their general happiness and willingness to put effort into all their other relationships. But that, I would think, is the exception, not the rule. And even this would make them a non-central example of physicians (and bartenders). Most doctors are heavily committed after 10+ years of education; many bartenders are not "living their dream" and expect to move on. Someone who willingly makes that swap because they've found their true calling is incomparable to the average for both careers.
- ubernostrum 9y agoMost doctors are heavily committed after 10+ years of education This is an interesting claim, because I've read various things claiming the opposite (that medicine is a career with a high rate of people leaving it, because the eventual pay and working conditions are simply horrid).
- phatbyte 9y agoIt's all good and dandy until they start fighting about spaces vs tabs, or OOP vs FP ;)
- andrewfong 9y agoI'm a little surprised the military divorce rate is so low. With the long periods of separation, I'd expect it to be higher.
- 123e1daAdfafsdf 9y agoMilitary does cut spouses checks, so there is direct financial incentive to remain married (at least on paper). Long deployments / remote spousing also leave room for other arrangements. As long as the checks come in, why not remain married in name only?
- fweespeech 9y agoBecause adultery is something you get smacked for by the military legal system.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoI know servicepeople get punished for adultery under UCMJ, but do their spouses?
- esmi 9y agoIf the spouse is a civilian then no. Civilians are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
- fweespeech 9y agoThey don't but it takes two people to make a marriage. "Staying married in name only" means anyone under the UCMJ can't have sex _ever_ if its a marriage in name only.
- emodendroket 9y agoAs far as I understand it, they are not going to go digging if nobody is making a fuss.
- monkmartinez 9y agoI would love to see Police officers and Firefighters... anecdotally, I would expect a very high divorce rate.
- thehardsphere 9y agoI've seen other studies that have suggested lower divorce rates than would be expected for police officers, and that divorce rate varies based on specialty and experience. More experienced police officers are less likely to divorce, as are those working in supervisory roles. I would provide a link but it was years ago when I read this. I also remember there was some kind of hitch in the data that may have undercounted divorces, but it was consistent across all professions that were part of the data set.
- mywittyname 9y agoCorrections Officers was listed and it was near the top, along with first-line supervisors. Firefighters was also listed, it's at the 30% mark, well below the other Protective Services occupations.
- tarr11 9y agoCan someone explain to me what the x-axis means in the "Divorce Rate By Occupation" chart? It seems to be just a random distribution from -1 to 1, because the author wanted to use dots to represent each title. I suppose that's a very space-efficient way of representing the data, but it's also pretty tedious to have to mouse over everything, and it doesn't work well on a small screen. Might have been better just to put this in a list.
- CabSauce 9y agoI don't think there's any actual measure on the x-axis. It seems to be done for visual effect.
- portman 9y agoIt's a beeswarm plot, linked in the footnotes: https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/6526445e2b44303eebf21da3b6627320 https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/6526445e2b44303eebf21da3b662732... As such, the x-axis is a metric about the population, not the individual. I happen to use them a fair bit as I find them easier to intuit density from than the alternative, which is to plot on a single line with transparency.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoIt doesn't give any information about the spouse's occupation or the combination of occupations in the former union. A single earning bartender with an unemployed spouse should have like a 99% divorce rate, according to this chart. Anecdotally..... I could see that.
- bambax 9y ago> If someone who is already a physician, quits and takes a job as a bartender or telemarketer, it doesn’t mean their chances of divorce changes. Of course it does. Just try it.
- dogruck 9y agoI wonder if there's an inflection point as income increases. A divorced colleague once joked: why is divorce so expensive -- because it's worth it. Similarly, I'm sure there are many poor people longing for divorce, but they can't afford it.
- technotarek 9y agoArmchair hypothesis: these careers are highly correlated to extro- and introversion. Introverts are content in their relationships and/or less frequently get themselves into situations that lead to divorce. Call it the nerd coefficient.
- treehau5 9y agoArmchair conclusion: false. Introverts are more likely to use online dating sites and engage down other avenues that would not be natural, but rather virtual. I don't know many of my jock friends growing up that had a "girlfriend" in an MMO, as an example.
- wnevets 9y agoArmchair conclusion: false. As an introvert even online interaction with people can be exhausting.
- saint_fiasco 9y agoVirtual socialization is more of a shy extrovert thing. An introvert will get exhausted after a lot of socialization, virtual or physical.
- Bartweiss 9y agoOnline dating sounds incredibly high socialization to me. You scan through dozens of people in quick succession and interact with many of them. Talking to a single stranger in real life is way less demanding than that. You're right to distinguish shyness from extroversion; as someone who became less shy without becoming any less introverted, it's not a clear association.
- Chaebixi 9y agoThose things are not at all alike. Bartending means accidental social interaction; using an online dating site is deliberate. If you're in a relationship and using an online dating site, the relationship is probably already deeply on the rocks. If you're a bartender, you're more likely to accidentally meet someone you click with without even trying, which might imperil a relationship that's doing pretty well.
- UnfalseDesign 9y agoSo what happens if a physician marries a bartender? Does that increase their chance of divorce or decrease it? (Maybe a silly question but it would be interesting to dig into this shallow report with a much more critical eye.)
- emodendroket 9y agoCross-class marriages have become much rarer over time than they used to be. But I'd expect a pretty likely outcome of that marriage to be a resignation handed in at the bar.
- ddlatham 9y agoGetting married tends to increase the chance of divorce.
- CocaKoala 9y agoIncreases it, obviously; a physician and a bartender who are dating but not married have a zero percent chance of getting divorced!
- thaumasiotes 9y ago> a physician and a bartender who are dating but not married have a zero percent chance of getting divorced! That's only true if they also have a zero percent chance of getting married. Getting married will still increase the risk of divorce, because it bumps the odds of getting married up to 100%, but two dating unmarried people have, in general, a nonzero risk of getting divorced.
- BadassFractal 9y agoWonder if dating is also tougher for these less outward-facing professions, so they'd rather stick together than be thrown into the meat market again?
- tabeth 9y agoI remember for a school project long ago I had to interview a bunch of people in nursing homes. Many of them had been in marriages that spanned several decades so I asked them how they made it work. Shockingly everyone said basically the same thing: agreeableness. Supposedly, having low or nonexistent levels of disagreement, whether financial, moral or otherwise is the key. So with this said, I'd be curious to know how your profession affects your agreeableness (especially in respect to power dynamics). I wish I asked if they choose to agree, e.g compromise, or if they and their partner were naturally agreeable.
- abpavel 9y agoThis. After a decade of marriage battles I think I'm finally getting a hang of it thanks to this. Saying yes instead of no. Quietly letting something happen instead of arguing for the opposite.
- gertef 9y agoThis is sage advice for business as well.
- old-gregg 9y agoIndeed. Karl Pillemer also interviewed a bunch of people in nursing homes and wrote a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/30-Lessons-Living-Advice-Americans/dp/0452298482 https://www.amazon.com/30-Lessons-Living-Advice-Americans/dp... The book says the same thing.
- mark212 9y agoand yet "lawyers, judges, magistrates and other judicial workers" -- a profession not at all known for agreeableness -- have a divorce rate substantially below the median. (Shocked the hell out of me, to be sure.)
- goldfeld 9y agoPeople in these careers usually seek job security, they tend to be less risk-averse, grounded type of persons.
- coss 9y agoI don't know what it was about this particular presentation of data but I found it much easier to read than other stuff I see on here, so kudos to the author for that.
- tlb 9y agoDo they correct for age? How? It seems like they're just considering the raw divorce rate per year, but obviously software developers have a different age distribution than some of the established industry jobs, so the comparison doesn't seem fair. The same folks show divorce rate by age: https://flowingdata.com/2016/03/30/divorce-rates-for-different-groups/ https://flowingdata.com/2016/03/30/divorce-rates-for-differe...
- Bartweiss 9y agoThis is a great point. Married people who are e.g. doctors are going to have a minimum age way above that of e.g. flight attendants, and that's definitely relevant to odds of divorce. Either they were married before choosing their positions, and therefore have already been married for quite a while, or they got married older, dropping their divorce risk.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- newobj 9y agoWTH is a Gaming Manager?
- eloff 9y agoMy first thought is in video games development, but it could be a position in a casino, which would make it closer to the bartender occupation in some respects and maybe why they're ranked alongside them in divorces.
- humanrebar 9y agoI was also guessing pit boss or something like that.
- dredmorbius 9y agohttps://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes119071.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes119071.htm
- pokemongoaway 9y agoNice visualization but I would like to see some follow up studies - since I'm already aware of this data. Track more things like cultural background, how many family members they grew up with etc...
- kennethh 9y agoWomen initiated nearly 70% of all divorces. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-resilience/201508/women-initiate-divorce-much-more-men-heres-why https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-resilience/2015... Unemployment Can Spell Divorce for Men, But Not Women https://www.livescience.com/14705-husbands-employment-threatens-marriage.html https://www.livescience.com/14705-husbands-employment-threat... One might say that women who get high status men (high salary) choose to keep them and those who get low status choose to find new new opportunities.
- ourmandave 9y agoI've read that a lot of men never see it coming and though everything was fine. The wife has suffered in silence for years and has finally given up on the whole thing.
- cbcoutinho 9y agoYou might say that the question "where have all the good men gone?" is synonymous with "where have all the good jobs gone?"
- ikeyany 9y agoPerhaps we should look inward. Perhaps our understanding of "good" is fundamentally flawed.
- DiNovi 9y agolol holy shit, causation does not equal correlation applies highly here
- nnfy 9y agoYou dont have to be so skeptical just because the premise is not PC. Edit: you people act like this isn't the reason he was so shocked. We will not solve society's problems if we do not allow ourselves to look at all possible causes. Science and taboo do not mix.
- deleted 9y ago
- mamon 9y agoThis data disproves an urban legend that university professors are most likely to get a divorce. Reasoning for that being that their job involves a lot of contact with young and attractive people :)
- dorfsmay 9y agoI'd love to see the %divorced per level of education normalised for age at marriage. I am mankind a wild ass assumption that people marry less while in school, hence this could be due to late marriage as much as education per se.
- thinbeige 9y agoMy brief interpretation of the data: The more opportunities to switch and to cheat the higher the divorce rate (eg bartender, stewardess, dancer). And the lower the salary the higher the divorce rate (guess the financial pressure creates extra tension).
- hkmurakami 9y agoThe bifurcation in the legal category is fascinating (4 data points). I'm guessing that the higher two are "lawyers" and the lower two are the roles with better work life balance that attract lower ego, more balanced personalities like paralegals.
- mdekkers 9y agobecause we are always fucking working. I know, I was half of a computer engineering couple.
- collyw 9y agoAs a software engineer who's girlfriend is a doctor, I don't think either of us would have time to be chasing anyone else around. I wonder if that accounts for any of it.
- humanrebar 9y agoWell, to support that thesis with negative examples, it seems being a bartender, flight attendant, or massage therapist isn't great for a marriage.
- djb_hackernews 9y agoThat might be an age thing. Once you have seniority in either field you gain a lot more free time if you want. Source: Am a software engineer, wife is a physician and we both have plenty of free time.
- josinalvo 9y agoDoes anyone know how to extrach the raw data list from the site? There are quite a few numbers there that I'd like to know...
- joshhart 9y agoNeed to account for both age, location, and salary as variables in the model, then see what's left over for occupation. We know that occupation is correlated with salary which is correlated with divorce rates. Need to account for this!
- rthomas6 9y agoInteresting that a massage therapist has among the highest divorce rate, but a physical therapist has among the lowest. Those jobs don't seem that different.
- neves 9y agoThe author didn't considered some obvious correlations, maybe because it would be more difficult to get some data about it. It looks like that occupations that promote more social interactions are more prone to divorce. I also spotted that occupations with weird or irregular work hours also have higher divorce rates. I didn't understand what the x-axis means.
- MechEStudent 9y agoYou are missing an axis. It is auto-regressive in time. If you include age of the marriage as well as employment, it should split out substantially better.
- nl 9y agoThe same site has another page on divorce rate by age, and allows you to look at it by employment status, race and education level[1]. It's mostly as you'd expect, but the bit that I thought was most interesting was the "Not in Labor Force" breakdown. In that, women and men have almost identical rates until the age of 60 (retirement?) at which point the male divorce rate increases much more quickly than women. At 60, both are 13%, at 70 it is 24% vs 28% and by 80 it is 31% vs 38%. The causal analysis of this is difficult: male participation in the workforce is higher until retirement, so there it is hard to judge how much of it is because of retirement and how much is couples who would have divorced anyway and just happen to have employment status change. [1] https://flowingdata.com/2016/03/30/divorce-rates-for-different-groups/ https://flowingdata.com/2016/03/30/divorce-rates-for-differe...