7 ms·

Who Marries CEOs, Doctors, Chefs and Janitors (2016)

87 points by Reedx 7y ago

baron816 7y ago
> why do female dancers have a thing for male welders? Are they exotic dancers?
fortran77 7y ago
It's interesting that a man will gladly marry a woman who makes less money that he does, while a woman tend not to.
- czr 7y ago
  how do you differentiate open-mindedness from a closed-minded preference in other direction (i.e. straight men who specifically want to out-earn their spouses)?
  - codingmess 7y ago
    That's just a feminist lie. Most divorces are initiated by women, and the dominant reason for divorce is money issues. Not what you would expect to see if the feminist narrative was true.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    You can see if there's a change in who initiates divorces after the couples switch their income ordering. It would be particularly indicative if 1) Women who start out earning their husband start initiating divorces at higher rates, while men stay constant or decrease the rate of divorce. However, to differentiate that from the hypothesis that all people moving up in the income spectrum have an tendency to split up with their current partner to find a new one, it would also be useful to see 2) Men who start out earning their wives do not start initiating divorces at higher rates, while women stay constant or decrease the rate of divorce. You could also see how a switch in income ordering affects divorce rates in homosexual couples to factor out the gender aspects. Another, less direct metric would be seeing who uses income filters in online dating more, though few sites seem to offer it nowadays.
- CrazyStat 7y ago
  Is this really more "open-minded"? Or is it just reflecting the traditional cultural expectation that men should be the primary earner? One could as well make the opposite: women are more open-minded because they will gladly marry a man who makes more than them.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dx87 7y ago
    I don't agree with them about it being open-minded, but flipping the situation in your example doesn't compare. Marrying up is going to improve your networth, marrying down is going to lower it. Being unwilling to marry down, but being willing to marry up, is just common sense to even the most closed-minded person.
    - Pfhreak 7y ago
      Common sense and culture don't always align. In traditional American culture, until recently, it was expected that men earned the income and women kept the house.
    - CrazyStat 7y ago
      You're dramatically underestimating the power of societal expectations. Heterosexual couples in the US where the wife earns more than the husband lie about their incomes [1] to reduce the difference in earnings. Going against societal expectations is not "just common sense" to most people. Full disclosure: my wife earns way more than I do, though that was not what we expected when we got married. [1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/07/wives-earning-more-than-husbands.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/07/wives-earning...
  - dbspin 7y ago
    Hypergamy isn't culturally mediated. Women marry 'up' cross culturally, irrespective of their income. In fact, a lack of higher income male partners is associated with later marriage / reluctance to marry, among highly educated / paid women. The corollary is men preferring young, more attractive partners cross culturally. You can infer what you like from these results, but they've been highly substantiated.
- esotericn 7y ago
  This falls out of the distribution of incomes even before any "preference". From a UK perspective, men outearn women on average, there are fewer female CEOs, many well paying fields are 70% male, etc. If you pick a point on the income spectrum, there are more men in the country earning above that figure than women, and so unless you have incomplete pairing (same sex relationships likely don't change the ratios enough to matter) this is a trivial result.
- air7 7y ago
  Maybe "open-mindedness" isn't the right term, as was pointed out, because perhaps men are actively pursuing low-income women. However one clue is the difference in the steepness of the preference: > On a list of 149 countries’ Gini indices provided by the CIA World Factbook, this would place the female dating economy as 75th most unequal (average—think Western Europe) and the male dating economy as the 8th most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war—think South Africa). [0] One can also look at pop culture for hints on the differences in societal desired traits of the opposite sex. Compare TLC "No Srubs" [1] to Bruno Mars "Just The Way You Are" [2] [0] https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-the-dating-economy/ https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-t... [1] https://genius.com/Tlc-no-scrubs-lyrics https://genius.com/Tlc-no-scrubs-lyrics [2] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/brunomars/justthewayyouare.html https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/brunomars/justthewayyouare.h...
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > It's interesting that men are more open minded than women and will gladly marry a woman who makes less money that he does. Men are not more open-minded, they just on average place less importance on womens’s earning potential, largely due to both men and women being influenced by traditional gender roles in which the male is expected to be the sole or primary earner while earning income is a secondary-or-less-significant role for women, and indeed seeing it as an important selection criteria can be seen as an indication that a man is unable or unwilling to perform his expected role.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> why do female dancers have a thing for male welders? One thing to note is that it is likely that welders are some of the highest paid blue collar workers in America. The other thing to note is that careers in the arts are for the most part about passion, not money. Thus it is not super surprising that someone with a career that does not pay a lot, would want to pair with someone that has a well paying career that is spread out through the country.
- baron816 7y ago
  My guess is a lot of welders are marrying strippers.
  - bsder 7y ago
    I suspect that a welder probably has zero access to a "professional dancer" other than that. I'm a white collar worker, and that would probably be even my only access to a "professional dancer".
    - blaser-waffle 7y ago
      Not sure why the downvotes. Outside of my cousin, who did a lot of serious ballet as a younger lady, I can't think of anyone who does dancing on a pro or semi-pro level without allusions to champagne rooms.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  .. does that include the retina burn compensation ?
- listenallyall 7y ago
  Flashdance fetish?
- mc3 7y ago
  One danger is looking for correlations in a dataset means you will find them. It could be by noise. I can't even see what the percentages are in the visualization, when you move the mouse it changes the view, it is quite annoying. Let's say you have a room full of developers and 15% of them have their birthday in May. Do you make conclusions from this? What is the chance of that happening purely by chance given that all developers had a pretty-much equal chance of being born on any given month.
stared 7y ago
For another interactive data visualizations, I enjoyed: - "Most Female and Male Occupations Since 1950" https://flowingdata.com/2017/09/11/most-female-and-male-occupations-since-1950/ https://flowingdata.com/2017/09/11/most-female-and-male-occu... - "Singles, 18-64" - on gender imbalance in various cities in the USA (in particular, San Francisco and New York) http://jonathansoma.com/singles/ http://jonathansoma.com/singles/
- baron816 7y ago
  > New Orleans used to be a great place to find an unmarried girl in her twenties, but now they've all migrated north to Jackson, Mississippi. There’s a whole lot under the covers here. Low marriage rates and high incarceration rates among young black men probably created a high ratio of single young women in New Orleans and Jackson. Depopulation among the black community post Hurricane Katrina likely explains the relative decrease in single women in New Orleans.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    Living in New Orleans, you beat me to it.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  I'm a bit confused by the "Singles, 20-34" map in your second link. How can there be more single men than women essentially everywhere if there is roughly an even balance of men and women (which there is?) I don't know of any weird dip in the female birthrate 20-34 years ago.
  - projectramo 7y ago
    More men are born than women but women live longer on average so the ratio stays around even.
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      While the gender ratio for a particular age gets increasingly skewed. Past a certain age, it's mostly old women. Since, on average, men tend to marry women a few years younger than them, older women face a rather tough dating market and it gets worse with every passing year that they fail to die.
majos 7y ago
Yikes. > Male Dancers and Choreographers partner with: Unemployed, with No Work Experience in the Last 5 Years
- djannzjkzxn 7y ago
  This seems unsurprising if you know male dancers. It’s almost entirely gig work. The difference between an employed dancer and his unemployed friend is that the employed one is having a good month.
keithnz 7y ago
there's separate entries for "Computer Programmer" and "Software Engineer" with similar, but not quite the same results.
- baron816 7y ago
  Yeah, these job categories seem awfully out of date.
yomly 7y ago
This is cool but the hotlinks to the visualization seem to break UX on mobile. Often I get jerked to the visualization as my reward for my thumb landing on a link when trying to swipe to read. This is frustrating given that my screen is small and the link density is high...
fisxoj 7y ago
The second author on the piece, Dorothy Gambrell, also publishes interesting data at Very Small Array (http://www.verysmallarray.com/ http://www.verysmallarray.com/) and has been writing the webcomic Cat and Girl (http://catandgirl.com/ http://catandgirl.com/) pretty much forever! She's real neat.
hhs 7y ago
If interested, this was discussed in 2016 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11081575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11081575
heartbeats 7y ago
>Unemployed, with No Work Experience in the Last 5 Years >Eligibility Interviewers, Government Programs Huh.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I thought it was interesting/funny that the top male-male coupling for software developers was to "recreation and fitness workers". Apparently we want someone to help keep us in shape after sitting all day.
bsder 7y ago
Can EVERY MALE PROFESSION really be marrying secretaries, middle/elementary school teachers and nurses as this data suggests? It would seem like you should eventually have a supply problem, no?
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago
  There are about 4-5M female nurses+teachers in the US. Both jobs that require major scale, and that happen to be 75-95% done by women.
Aperocky 7y ago
There are too many job categories, the whole page would have been much better if things are grouped more generally, like 'Teacher', 'professor', 'office clerk', 'secretaries and admin', 'middle manager', 'senior management', 'programmer' etc. 'Truck driver' makes perfect sense.
tejasmanohar 7y ago
Is it just me or is it hard to get any meaningful insight on the strength of each correlation from the visualization?

87 points by Reedx 7y ago

baron816 7y ago

> why do female dancers have a thing for male welders? Are they exotic dancers?

fortran77 7y ago

It's interesting that a man will gladly marry a woman who makes less money that he does, while a woman tend not to.

czr 7y ago
how do you differentiate open-mindedness from a closed-minded preference in other direction (i.e. straight men who specifically want to out-earn their spouses)?
- codingmess 7y ago
  That's just a feminist lie. Most divorces are initiated by women, and the dominant reason for divorce is money issues. Not what you would expect to see if the feminist narrative was true.
- scarmig 7y ago
  You can see if there's a change in who initiates divorces after the couples switch their income ordering. It would be particularly indicative if 1) Women who start out earning their husband start initiating divorces at higher rates, while men stay constant or decrease the rate of divorce. However, to differentiate that from the hypothesis that all people moving up in the income spectrum have an tendency to split up with their current partner to find a new one, it would also be useful to see 2) Men who start out earning their wives do not start initiating divorces at higher rates, while women stay constant or decrease the rate of divorce. You could also see how a switch in income ordering affects divorce rates in homosexual couples to factor out the gender aspects. Another, less direct metric would be seeing who uses income filters in online dating more, though few sites seem to offer it nowadays.
CrazyStat 7y ago
Is this really more "open-minded"? Or is it just reflecting the traditional cultural expectation that men should be the primary earner? One could as well make the opposite: women are more open-minded because they will gladly marry a man who makes more than them.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dx87 7y ago
  I don't agree with them about it being open-minded, but flipping the situation in your example doesn't compare. Marrying up is going to improve your networth, marrying down is going to lower it. Being unwilling to marry down, but being willing to marry up, is just common sense to even the most closed-minded person.
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    Common sense and culture don't always align. In traditional American culture, until recently, it was expected that men earned the income and women kept the house.
  - CrazyStat 7y ago
    You're dramatically underestimating the power of societal expectations. Heterosexual couples in the US where the wife earns more than the husband lie about their incomes [1] to reduce the difference in earnings. Going against societal expectations is not "just common sense" to most people. Full disclosure: my wife earns way more than I do, though that was not what we expected when we got married. [1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/07/wives-earning-more-than-husbands.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/07/wives-earning...
- dbspin 7y ago
  Hypergamy isn't culturally mediated. Women marry 'up' cross culturally, irrespective of their income. In fact, a lack of higher income male partners is associated with later marriage / reluctance to marry, among highly educated / paid women. The corollary is men preferring young, more attractive partners cross culturally. You can infer what you like from these results, but they've been highly substantiated.
esotericn 7y ago
This falls out of the distribution of incomes even before any "preference". From a UK perspective, men outearn women on average, there are fewer female CEOs, many well paying fields are 70% male, etc. If you pick a point on the income spectrum, there are more men in the country earning above that figure than women, and so unless you have incomplete pairing (same sex relationships likely don't change the ratios enough to matter) this is a trivial result.
air7 7y ago
Maybe "open-mindedness" isn't the right term, as was pointed out, because perhaps men are actively pursuing low-income women. However one clue is the difference in the steepness of the preference: > On a list of 149 countries’ Gini indices provided by the CIA World Factbook, this would place the female dating economy as 75th most unequal (average—think Western Europe) and the male dating economy as the 8th most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war—think South Africa). [0] One can also look at pop culture for hints on the differences in societal desired traits of the opposite sex. Compare TLC "No Srubs" [1] to Bruno Mars "Just The Way You Are" [2] [0] https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-the-dating-economy/ https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-t... [1] https://genius.com/Tlc-no-scrubs-lyrics https://genius.com/Tlc-no-scrubs-lyrics [2] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/brunomars/justthewayyouare.html https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/brunomars/justthewayyouare.h...
dragonwriter 7y ago
> It's interesting that men are more open minded than women and will gladly marry a woman who makes less money that he does. Men are not more open-minded, they just on average place less importance on womens’s earning potential, largely due to both men and women being influenced by traditional gender roles in which the male is expected to be the sole or primary earner while earning income is a secondary-or-less-significant role for women, and indeed seeing it as an important selection criteria can be seen as an indication that a man is unable or unwilling to perform his expected role.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> why do female dancers have a thing for male welders? One thing to note is that it is likely that welders are some of the highest paid blue collar workers in America. The other thing to note is that careers in the arts are for the most part about passion, not money. Thus it is not super surprising that someone with a career that does not pay a lot, would want to pair with someone that has a well paying career that is spread out through the country.

baron816 7y ago
My guess is a lot of welders are marrying strippers.
- bsder 7y ago
  I suspect that a welder probably has zero access to a "professional dancer" other than that. I'm a white collar worker, and that would probably be even my only access to a "professional dancer".
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    Not sure why the downvotes. Outside of my cousin, who did a lot of serious ballet as a younger lady, I can't think of anyone who does dancing on a pro or semi-pro level without allusions to champagne rooms.
mistrial9 7y ago
.. does that include the retina burn compensation ?
listenallyall 7y ago
Flashdance fetish?
mc3 7y ago
One danger is looking for correlations in a dataset means you will find them. It could be by noise. I can't even see what the percentages are in the visualization, when you move the mouse it changes the view, it is quite annoying. Let's say you have a room full of developers and 15% of them have their birthday in May. Do you make conclusions from this? What is the chance of that happening purely by chance given that all developers had a pretty-much equal chance of being born on any given month.

stared 7y ago

For another interactive data visualizations, I enjoyed: - "Most Female and Male Occupations Since 1950" https://flowingdata.com/2017/09/11/most-female-and-male-occupations-since-1950/ https://flowingdata.com/2017/09/11/most-female-and-male-occu... - "Singles, 18-64" - on gender imbalance in various cities in the USA (in particular, San Francisco and New York) http://jonathansoma.com/singles/ http://jonathansoma.com/singles/

baron816 7y ago
> New Orleans used to be a great place to find an unmarried girl in her twenties, but now they've all migrated north to Jackson, Mississippi. There’s a whole lot under the covers here. Low marriage rates and high incarceration rates among young black men probably created a high ratio of single young women in New Orleans and Jackson. Depopulation among the black community post Hurricane Katrina likely explains the relative decrease in single women in New Orleans.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  Living in New Orleans, you beat me to it.
big_chungus 7y ago
I'm a bit confused by the "Singles, 20-34" map in your second link. How can there be more single men than women essentially everywhere if there is roughly an even balance of men and women (which there is?) I don't know of any weird dip in the female birthrate 20-34 years ago.
- projectramo 7y ago
  More men are born than women but women live longer on average so the ratio stays around even.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    While the gender ratio for a particular age gets increasingly skewed. Past a certain age, it's mostly old women. Since, on average, men tend to marry women a few years younger than them, older women face a rather tough dating market and it gets worse with every passing year that they fail to die.

majos 7y ago

Yikes. > Male Dancers and Choreographers partner with: Unemployed, with No Work Experience in the Last 5 Years

djannzjkzxn 7y ago
This seems unsurprising if you know male dancers. It’s almost entirely gig work. The difference between an employed dancer and his unemployed friend is that the employed one is having a good month.

keithnz 7y ago

there's separate entries for "Computer Programmer" and "Software Engineer" with similar, but not quite the same results.

baron816 7y ago
Yeah, these job categories seem awfully out of date.

yomly 7y ago

This is cool but the hotlinks to the visualization seem to break UX on mobile. Often I get jerked to the visualization as my reward for my thumb landing on a link when trying to swipe to read. This is frustrating given that my screen is small and the link density is high...

fisxoj 7y ago

The second author on the piece, Dorothy Gambrell, also publishes interesting data at Very Small Array (http://www.verysmallarray.com/ http://www.verysmallarray.com/) and has been writing the webcomic Cat and Girl (http://catandgirl.com/ http://catandgirl.com/) pretty much forever! She's real neat.

hhs 7y ago

If interested, this was discussed in 2016 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11081575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11081575

heartbeats 7y ago

>Unemployed, with No Work Experience in the Last 5 Years >Eligibility Interviewers, Government Programs Huh.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

I thought it was interesting/funny that the top male-male coupling for software developers was to "recreation and fitness workers". Apparently we want someone to help keep us in shape after sitting all day.

bsder 7y ago

Can EVERY MALE PROFESSION really be marrying secretaries, middle/elementary school teachers and nurses as this data suggests? It would seem like you should eventually have a supply problem, no?

8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago
There are about 4-5M female nurses+teachers in the US. Both jobs that require major scale, and that happen to be 75-95% done by women.

Aperocky 7y ago

There are too many job categories, the whole page would have been much better if things are grouped more generally, like 'Teacher', 'professor', 'office clerk', 'secretaries and admin', 'middle manager', 'senior management', 'programmer' etc. 'Truck driver' makes perfect sense.

tejasmanohar 7y ago

Is it just me or is it hard to get any meaningful insight on the strength of each correlation from the visualization?