Men put on their best behaviour when attractive ladies are close by. When the scenario is reversed however, the behaviour of women remains the same. These findings were published February 2, 2012, in the British Psychological Society's British Journal of Psychology via the Wiley Online Library.

The research, which also found that the number of kind and selfless acts by men corresponded to the attractiveness of ladies, was undertaken by Dr Wendy Iredale of Sheffield Hallam University and Mark Van Vugt of the VU University in Amsterdam and the University of Oxford.

Labels: culture, gender, gender differences, men, women

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People from disadvantaged backgrounds gain financial security by attending college but paradoxically lower their odds of ever marrying, a U.S. researcher says.

Cornell University sociologist Kelly Musick says men and women from the least advantaged backgrounds who attend college can end up stranded between social worlds, reluctant to "marry down" to partners with less education and unable to "marry up" to those from more privileged upbringings, a university release reported Tuesday. ...

"College students are becoming more diverse in their social backgrounds, but they nonetheless remain a socio-economically select group," she said. "It may be difficult for students from less privileged backgrounds to navigate social relationships on campus, and these difficulties may affect what students ultimately gain from the college experience."

College attendance negatively affected marriage chances for the least advantaged individuals, lessening men's and women's odds by 38 percent and 22 percent respectively, while among those in the highest social stratum men who attend college increase their marrying chances by 31 percent and women by 8 percent.

Labels: class, culture, gender differences, Marriage, poverty, universities

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...Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Dads and the Changing American Family focuses on the generations that came of age after the 1970s, when power was, in a sense, being transferred from fathers to daughters. Daughters gradually emerged as the, on average, more tractable sex in school and in other settings that mattered to post-industrial skill acquisition. Our Fathers, Ourselves implies — and it should be said here that it is an implication lying at the edges of her book rather than a fleshed-out argument — that a generation and more of enabling fathers may have incited their daughters to this success. The end result has been as dramatic as it has been unexpected: the daughters are now out-professionalizing, out-earning, and academically outperforming their brothers in the competitive races of this century.

Drexler’s book uses a mix of quotations from her interviews with adult daughters who reflect on the roles their fathers have played in their success, scholarly material, and her own often folksy commentary. This mélange makes for a loose, sometimes rambling style, albeit with suggestive nuggets interspersed throughout. Chapters are divvied up according to fatherly patterns — fathers who listened and fathers who encouraged risk-taking, for example. She interviewed 75 women in total, adult daughters in their twenties and thirties, for the most part (some were older), whom she identified, by their sheen of confident savoir faire — in other words, their appearance of having the capacity to make life work out for themselves, to be resourceful, and to have their eye on some sort of ball. Drexler uses the word “sextant” to suggest navigational skills. A fair proportion of the women in her interview set were earning six-figure salaries at young ages.

One could quibble here interminably about Drexler’s selection criteria and methods; about the impossible-to-untangle entanglement of nature (innate disposition) and nurture (in this case, fatherly influence or lack thereof); or indeed about her definition of success, let alone her ability to identify it from the stuff of appearances. But, leaving such quibbles aside, as a human-interest story rather than as science, her study is worth considering for what it does have to say about power, gender, generational transfer, and the races we run. It flirts with tremendously timely issues — like why girls are outperforming boys at this historical moment.

Labels: boys, childhood, children, culture, Fathers, fathers and daughters, gender, gender differences, girls, motherhood, parenting

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Labels: "emerging adulthood", class, culture, gender differences, Mark Regnerus, Marriage, men, premarital sex, women

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During his first-period broadcast Monday, the Norwood High athletic director Brian McDonough congratulated Will Higgins for breaking the meet record in the 50-yard freestyle the previous day at the Massachusetts South Division fall swimming and diving championships.

McDonough chose not to mention that it was a girls swimming championship.

“I didn’t want to get into that,” he said.

Anthony Rodriguez, another boy on the Norwood girls team, heard a grace note in McDonough’s omission.

“If people hear that you set a record, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s awesome,’ ” Rodriguez said. “But if they knew you were competing against girls, they wouldn’t have as much respect for you.”

Higgins, a senior, and Rodriguez, a sophomore, are among roughly two dozen boys competing on girls teams in Massachusetts because their schools do not have boys swimming programs. They are able to do so because of the open access amendment to the state constitution, which was voted into law in the 1970s and mandates that boys and girls must be afforded equal access to athletics.

Boys have been members of girls swim teams since the 1980s, but until recently they were mostly a sideshow. It has only been in the last year or two that boys have swum well enough to draw attention — and people’s ire. The epicenter of the debate is the 50-yard freestyle, an event in which strength can trump talent or technique.

At the Division I state championships on Saturday at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there are eight boys in the 28-swimmer field in the 50 freestyle. Although Norwood’s Higgins was ruled academically ineligible Friday and will not compete at the state meet, two of the top four seeds in the 50 freestyle are boys, giving rise to the possibility that a boy could be the girls state champion. ...

Paul Wetzel, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, said the state’s swimming committee would meet after the season, and among the topics on the table would be Higgins’s record swim.

Labels: adolescence, boys, culture, gender, gender differences, girls, schools

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The Williams Institute, a prestigious gay-legal think tank located at the University of California Los Angeles, has just released some fascinating statistics. In a comprehensive study, researchers Lee Badgett and Jody Herman surveyed the number of same-sex couples that married or state-registered in civil unions or domestic partnerships. They also looked at the gender and age of those who did so. And most interestingly to me, they also looked at the number of couples that are formally ending their relationships, in comparison to the divorce rate for straight couples. The study can be found on Williams Institute website [pdf].

Here is a summary of what these researchers concluded:

1. Nearly 150,000 same-sex couples have either married or registered civil unions or domestic partnerships, which constitutes about one-fifth of same-sex couples in the U.S. (or rather, a fifth of those who acknowledged themselves as such in recent United States Census reports).

2. About 1% of the total number of currently-married or registered same-sex couples get divorced each year, in comparison to about 2% of the total number of married straight couples. Note that the percentage of couples that get divorced eventually is close to 50%, but only 1% or 2% of them get divorced in any particular year.

3. Couples are more likely to legally formalize their relationship when marriage is an option, as opposed to a marriage-equivalent domestic partnership or civil union registration in states where only those options are allowed.

4. Nearly two-thirds of registered or married same-sex couples are lesbians, and only about a third are gay men.

5. A smaller percentage of same-sex couples register or marry in comparison to straight couples, but if current trends continue the marriage/registration rates will be similar in about ten years.

Labels: civil unions, culture, divorce, gay couples, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender differences, men, relationship dissolution, women

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On an unseasonably cool August Sunday morning in Topanga Canyon, just north of Malibu, a family of four arrives at the Inn of the Seventh Ray, an all-cage-free, everything-local restaurant that's typical of the neighborhood. This brunch is a welcome respite from the errands and worries that increasingly fill their days. Jaiya Ma, the center of the clan, is a 34-year-old with dark, wavy hair and caramel skin. Her life is wide open; she falls in love easily, suffers willingly. Next to her is Ian Ferguson, a thin 44-year-old with a shaved head and a goatee, feeding bits of eggs Benedict to their energetic 2-year-old son, Eamon. Ian and Jaiya have been lovers for four years. Sitting across from Jaiya is Jon Hanauer, an extremely fit 48-year-old wearing wire-rimmed glasses, who serves as Eamon's primary caretaker. He and Jaiya have been in a committed relationship for almost a decade. ...

Matt Bullen is cautious about exposing his 9-year-old to the family's lifestyle. "It gives me nightmares that our family is from some awful seventies adult movie where my son comes down a swirling staircase and sees all kinds of shenanigans going on," he says. He and his wife, Vee, have sought to be "age-appropriately honest" with their son. When the boy saw his father kissing Terisa and asked about it, Matt explained to him, "There are ways of loving that you just can't understand yet." Some of the teachers at his school know about his parents' lifestyle, and he is reportedly happy, well adjusted, and obsessed with soccer. Having more adults in his life, Matt claims, has helped his son's development.

But Jon's demeanor sometimes seems to betray a current of bitterness. When Jaiya caught baby fever soon after turning 30, she begged Jon for a child. He refused, saying he wasn't ready for fatherhood, so she turned to Wyatt (not his real name), her brash young lover at the time. Jaiya miscarried; Wyatt walked out. Later, she and Jon discussed pregnancy again, and again he demurred. "I pushed her into having other relationships," he admits. But seeing Jaiya twice pregnant by other men has stung, and Jon's time with Eamon has made him realize that he desperately wants a child of his own. But after her miscarriage and her difficult pregnancy with Eamon, Jaiya doesn't want any more kids.

Labels: children, culture, gay marriage, gender differences, men, parenting, polyamory, polygamy

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American women face an increasingly tough marriage market, Kate Bolick writes in her recent article in The Atlantic, “All the Single Ladies.” Women continue to outpace men in educational attainment, employment rates, and earnings, with the result that many men are seen as unmarriageable, while the shrinking population of desirable men is increasingly promiscuous. Bolick wants to know what a single lady is to do about it, and her answer is female companionship. ...

In Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, a detailed study of low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas describe how poor, unmarried mothers choose their child’s last name. If the mother’s romantic relationship is intact and satisfying, the child may be given the father’s name; otherwise it will be the mother’s. Thus in a limited but important sense, this segment of society is not only matriarchal, but increasingly matrilineal.

The full implementation of this pattern, so to speak, is seen in the Mosuo community in China, which Bolick also briefly discusses. The Mosuo have a matrilineal and matriarchal social structure and do not practice marriage (though many are monogamous). Women head households, while men lead an apparently carefree and subordinate existence in homes ruled by their mothers or sisters. Sexual contacts between men and women are initiated and terminated at the will of either party, and do not affect family and residential arrangements; the children resulting from these contacts belong to the mother’s household.

Matriarchy and promiscuity sustain one another. For as long as women expect support from the fathers of their children, male promiscuity will lead to distress and declining fertility as women fail to find committed partners. This is the world Bolick inhabits along with other New York singles. But when women give up on men’s playing an important role in the household and turn to one another instead, accepting the financial and emotional costs of raising one another’s children, promiscuity becomes, in a sense, safe. It also becomes inevitable, as men, who become increasingly less likely to meet the standards set by female heads of household, are no longer willing or able to sustain long-term commitment.

Labels: children, culture, Fathers, gender, gender differences, Marriage, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, sex, women

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...One of the biggest takeaways from your research was that sperm banks and egg agencies present sex cell donation to potential donors in very different ways. What was so different?

Both sperm banks and egg agencies call this a donation, even though the women are being paid and the men are being paid. The difference is that the egg agencies are framing the egg as a gift from one woman to another, and so they look for altruistic women who want to help infertile couple have families. They frame sperm donation as an easy job for men. There are a lot of jokes and cartoon drawings of sperm in advertisements that say "make some cash," but they're not talking about recipients; they're not talking about families.

Did you discover a difference in how men and women feel about donating after they’ve done it? If so, how does the marketing play into that?

One big thing is that the egg agencies encourage recipients to send thank you notes and thank you gifts to the donors. And the result of that is women talk with a lot of pride about being egg donors, and having given this gift. They feel good about their donations and about the creation of a family. That was true of women who were older and younger, women who had kids and didn’t have kids.

With the men, no one is sending their sperm donor thank you notes or giving them gifts. The men used sort of alienated or objectified language. They described themselves as being resources and assets for the sperm bank. In that sense, sperm banks don’t spend a lot of time with donors talking about recipients or thanking them for what they're doing. ...

You also found that sperm donors think of themselves as fathers but egg donors don't think of themselves as mothers. Why is that?

Because there is so much emphasis on the recipients in egg donation, egg donors don’t think of themselves as mothers. They give this egg in the hopes of giving another woman the experience of motherhood, so they point to the recipients as the real mother.

Sperm donors -- because there's not a lot of talk about recipients -- have it in their minds that they are fathers to all these children that are out there. Men and women are each providing half the genetic material for an embryo, but they think of their relationship to the offspring in very different ways. ...

Egg donor after egg donor, in different parts of the country, used this phrase: "Just an egg." They'd say, "What I'm giving is just an egg." They're distancing themselves from the label of mother, because otherwise they would be the worst kind of mothers -- they would be the kind of mother who sold their child for $5,000. They have a pretty vested interest in saying, "I'm not a mother. I'm not a mother. I'm not a mother."

Labels: children, culture, donor conception, economics, Fathers, gender, gender differences, men, motherhood, women

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Instead of watching the debate tonight, I had dinner with friends in Littleton. The restaurant had approximately 34 televisions going and all were tuned into the Denver Broncos preseason game. I love Colorado.

So I missed the little brouhaha over Byron York's question to Michele Bachmann, embedded above. When I think of the top, say, 1,000 questions I'd like to hear Fox News ask GOP presidential contenders, asking Michele Bachmann about her views on submissive wives wouldn't rank on my list. And you could tell the audience thought it an unconscionably rude or idiotic question.

What I find surprising, though, is how little the culture understands about what the New Testament teaches Christians about marriage. So as a wife in a Christian marriage, allow me to explain. Marriage is my most important vocation. It is the means by which God blesses me and my husband. Ephesians tells us that marriage is an image of Christ and the church. ...

The fact is that the husband's given role -- that of complete sacrifice for his wife -- is much more difficult than the wife's role of submission. But something tells me we won't be seeing anybody ask the Catholic or Evangelical male candidates whether they can be president while holding a Biblical view of marriage that requires this complete sacrifice for their spouse. On the one hand, that's a good thing. On the other, it shows just how much that vital role -- the one that sustains a Christian marriage -- has been neglected and forgotten.

Labels: Christianity, culture, gender, gender differences, Marriage, men, religion, women

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For the Bible’s authors, it was pretty clear how marriage works.

Men lead.

Women follow.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s run for the White House put this traditional Christian view of submission in the spotlight. Bachmann, like many conservative Christians, believes that wives should submit to their husbands. That’s led some to ask whether she’d have to obey her husband when it comes to public policy. ...

Scripture doesn’t give husbands a right to be jerks, said the Rev. Jeremy Rose, pastor of the Axis Church in Nashville. And it doesn’t mean women have to do whatever their husbands say.

Instead, Rose said, men are supposed to love their wives and put their wives’ needs first when making decisions.

“If you quote that verse to your wife, you are not in a good place,” said Rose, 32.

If the Roses disagree, it’s Jeremy’s view that prevails, although he said he breaks the news as gently as possible.

He believes that men are in charge in the church and in their homes, a view known as complementarianism. It often appeals to younger men like Rose, teaching them to grow up and be better husbands and fathers.

And he’d be fine with a woman president. So would his wife, Jill Rose, 31. She thinks that most people don’t understand what the Christian idea of submission means.

“Men and women are created equally,” she said. “People have this stigma of the male chauvinist domineering over the wife, and that’s not what the biblical perspective is at all.”

Instead, Jill Rose said, the Bible passage about submission is about trust and respect, something that was missing in the early days of the Roses’ marriage. Jeremy Rose spent most of his time at work or out hunting, playing sports and hanging with his friends. His wife drove herself to the hospital to deliver their second child while he wrapped up a softball game.

“It was a very low point,” she said.

Things changed after Jeremy Rose took a class at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. The class focused on an often-overlooked part of the Ephesians passage. Women are to submit, according to the passage, while men are to love their wives in sacrificial ways.

Labels: Christianity, culture, gender, gender differences, Marriage, men, religion, women

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Labels: Christianity, culture, gay marriage, gender, gender differences, Marriage, religion

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Marriage and divorce are both "weight shocks" that can cause men and women to gain or lose weight, according to a new study by Ohio State researchers. But a closer look found the risk of extreme weight gain (21 pounds or more) was greater for women within two years of marriage, and greater for men within two years of divorce.

The study results, released today, didn't examine the underlying reasons for these trends, but the authors believe the traditional household roles for women may be at work in both cases.

“Married women often have a larger role around the house than men do, and they may have less time to exercise and stay fit than similar unmarried women,” said co-author Zhenchao Qian, whose study was presented this weekend at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association. “On the other hand, studies show that married men get a health benefit from marriage, and they lose that benefit once they get divorced, which may lead to their weight gain.” ...

The new study was based on responses of more than 10,000 people to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a nationally representative sample of men and women aged 14 to 22 in 1979. The study has limitations, including that it couldn't determine whether people's eating habits immediately before their marriages or divorces were already setting them on paths for weight change. The study only looked at weight change two years after a marital transition, so it's unclear whether people continue to lose or gain weight following marriage or divorce.

Labels: culture, divorce, gender differences, Marriage, men, women

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This is part of an ongoing Salon series of conversations about monogamy.

Whether in need of examples to bolster the fight for same-sex marriage or boost one's spirits in the face of disillusioning high-profile failures of monogamous marriage, one need only look to Judith Stacey.

The sociology professor at New York University is something of an expert on alternatives, having spent more than a decade studying everything from "monogamish" arrangements among gay men in California to polygamy in South Africa to nonmonogamous, matriarchal households in southwest China. The result is her fascinating book, "Unhitched." It doesn't simply offer a mind-bending cross-cultural perspective -- you can find that in any Anthropology 101 textbook. Instead, Stacey uses her observations to underscore just out how stifling and unstable the Western romantic ideal of marital monogamy can be for some people, as well as the vast array of romantic arrangements that are already out there in the world. ...

I'll tell you about a very different society that I write about in my book, and that's the Mosuo people of southwestern China, an ethnic minority culture that does not insist on or value monogamy, nor does it care about biological paternity. It's a maternal extended family system in which adult children stay in the mother's extended family compound. They have "night visiting," there's no double standard of sexuality, men and women are each free to have as many or as few lovers as they wish. They can have exclusive long-term lovers, they can have multiple partners, they can be chaste, whatever. And all of the children that are born to the women belong to that family's household; the biological mothers and fathers don't live together. They don't have marriage, and the children are brought up by basically aunts, uncles and grandmothers. ...

I do think we can learn a lot from that culture. One of the things that's interesting is that because you don't have marriage, you don't have divorce or singlehood or widowhood or orphans. Everyone has a family and family security. In a culture that is so divorce-prone, I think there is a lot to learn from being able to imagine different ways of providing childcare and stability.

It seems harder to challenge our notion of romantic love than monogamy.

Absolutely. As I've written in the book, it's curious that the notion of fidelity should come to mean sexual exclusivity when it's really about faithfulness. I think it should mean integrity. For many, many people, including many of the gay men I studied, monogamy is absolutely essential and they wouldn't have it any other way. But plenty of others, including my gay male friends who have had 30-year, 40-year relationships, feel that sex can involve very little emotion and that it's OK to have a few escapades on the side without threatening their relationships. That idea is threatening to a lot of people. I've had some disagreements with a number of feminists who are afraid I'm giving men permission ...

Labels: adultery, beyond marriage, culture, gender differences, Judith Stacey, Marriage, monogamy, open relationships, polyamory

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Cuddling and caressing are important ingredients for long-term relationship satisfaction, according to an international study that looks at relationship and sexual satisfaction throughout committed relationships, but contrary to stereotypes, tenderness was more important to the men than to the women.

The Kinsey Institute study involved more than 1,000 couples from five countries -- the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Spain and Japan.

Also contrary to expectations of the researchers, men were more likely to report being happy in their relationship, while women were more likely to report being satisfied with their sexual relationship. The couples, more than 1,000 from the United States, Brazil, Germany, Japan and Spain, where together an average 25 years. ...

Participants in the study were 40- to 70-year-old men and their female partners, either married or living together for a minimum of one year. The study included around 200 couples from each country. The men and women answered gender-specific questionnaires and were assured that their responses would not be shared with their partner. ...

For men, relationship happiness was more likely if the man reported being in good health and if it was important to him that his partner experienced orgasm. Surprisingly, frequent kissing or cuddling also predicted happiness in the relationship for men, but not for women. Both men and women reported more happiness the longer they had been together, and if they themselves scored higher on several sexual functioning questionnaires.

Labels: Brazil, cohabitation, committed relationships, culture, gender, gender differences, Germany, heterosexual couples, Japan, Marriage, men, sex, Spain, women

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...Although best known for his It Gets Better project, an archive of hopeful videos aimed at troubled gay youth, Savage has for 20 years been saying monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating a sexual ethic that he thinks honors the reality, rather than the romantic ideal, of marriage. In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community’s tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.

Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest. Some people need more than one partner, he writes, just as some people need flirting, others need to be whipped, others need lovers of both sexes. We can’t help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them. In some marriages, talking honestly about our needs will forestall or obviate affairs; in other marriages, the conversation may lead to an affair, but with permission. In both cases, honesty is the best policy.

“I acknowledge the advantages of monogamy,” Savage told me, “when it comes to sexual safety, infections, emotional safety, paternity assurances. But people in monogamous relationships have to be willing to meet me a quarter of the way and acknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom, despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted.”

The view that we need a little less fidelity in marriages is dangerous for a gay-marriage advocate to hold. It feeds into the stereotype of gay men as compulsively promiscuous, and it gives ammunition to all the forces, religious and otherwise, who say that gay families will never be real families and that we had better stop them before they ruin what is left of marriage. But Savage says a more flexible attitude within marriage may be just what the straight community needs. Treating monogamy, rather than honesty or joy or humor, as the main indicator of a successful marriage gives people unrealistic expectations of themselves and their partners. And that, Savage says, destroys more families than it saves. ...

“The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitar­ian and fairsey.” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”

In their own marriage, Savage and Miller practice being what he calls “monogamish,” allowing occasional infidelities, which they are honest about. Miller was initially opposed to the idea. “You assume as a younger person that all relationships are monogamous and between two people, that love means nothing can come between you,” said Miller, who met Savage at a club in 1995, when he was 23 and Savage was 30. “Dan has taught me to be more realistic about that kind of stuff.

“It was four or five years before it came up,” Miller said. “It’s not about having three-ways with somebody or having an open relationship. It is just sort of like, Dan has always said if you have different tastes, you have to be good, giving and game, and if you are not G.G.G. for those tastes, then you have to give your partner the out. It took me a while to get down with that.” When I asked Savage how many extramarital encounters there have been, he laughed shyly. “Double digits?” I asked. He said he wasn’t sure; later he and Miller counted, and he reported back that the number was nine. “And far from it being a destabilizing force in our relationship, it’s been a stabilizing force. It may be why we’re still together.”

While his marriage opened up gradually, Savage says that “there’s not a one-size-fits-all way” to approach nonmonogamy, especially if both partners committed to monogamy at the start. “Folks on the verge of making those monogamous commitments,” Savage told me in one of our many e-mail exchanges, “need to look at the wreckage around them — all those failed monogamous relationships out there (Schwarzenegger, Clinton, Vitter, whoever’s on the cover of US magazine this week) — and have a conversation about what it’ll mean if one or the other partner should cheat. And agree, at the very least, to getting through it, to place a higher value on the relationship itself than on one component of it, sexual exclusivity.”

Not that heeding our desires always simplifies matters. One recent writer to Savage Love thought he would enjoy seeing his wife fool around with another man, and initially did: “Almost every kinky kind was being had and enjoyed.” But when his wife had vaginal intercourse with the other man, something happened. “It was as if all the air in the room was sucked out through my soul,” he writes. Savage’s reply is pragmatic: “If there’s a sex act — say, vaginal intercourse — that holds huge symbolic importance for you or your partner, it might be best to take that act off the menu.” The answer, to Savage’s way of thinking, is smarter boundaries, not hard-line rules about monogamy.

For most people, sex cannot be so transactional; it is bound up with emotional need — to feel we excite our partner above all others, to believe that we have primacy in their lives. The question is whether it’s possible to act on our desires sensibly, as Savage would have it, while maintaining the special equilibrium we trust our marriages, or long-term partnerships, to preserve. Do we know our relationships well enough to go outside them?

Labels: adultery, children, culture, Dan Savage, divorce, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender, gender differences, Judith Stacey, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, parenting, women

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Nearly half (43 percent) of college-educated Generation X women — those currently between the ages of 33 and 46 — are childless, a new study finds, and the statistic is likely to lead to a new wave of wondering why women still feel they have to choose between families and careers.

Three-quarters of these childless women are in established relationships, which means that the fact that they are not parents is probably not for want of a partner.

The data are part of an analysis by the Center for Work-Life Policy that is not scheduled to be released until the end of July, but The Sunday Times of London “jumped the embargo,” says the center’s director, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, and the striking number has been picked up by newspapers and Web sites over the past few days.

As The Sunday Times reported this past weekend:

Lauren Leader-Chivee surveyed 3,000 male and female graduates in America and conducted supplementary interviews there and in Britain: “We have found very similar trends in both countries,” she said.
Previous studies in Britain have only hinted at similar trends. For instance, in 2007 a study by the Institute of Education at the University of London tracked 5,000 women born in 1970 and discovered 40% of British women graduates were still childless at 35.

By contrast, among female graduates born in 1958 32.7% were childless at 35.

Labels: children, culture, economics, gender, gender differences, motherhood, women, work/family policy

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...Yet if Swedish executive suites boast 17 percent women and the United States and Britain 14 percent, in Germany it is 2 percent — as in India, according to McKinsey’s 2010 Women Matter report.

One of the countries in most need of female talent — at 1.39 the German birthrate is among the lowest in Europe and labor shortages in skilled technical professions are already 150,000 — Germany is a place where gender stereotypes remain engrained in the mind, and in key institutions across society. ...

Married couples pay a joint tax rate closer to the lower rate the two would pay individually. This effectively subsidizes income inequality between husband and wife, noted Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank. And most schools still end at lunchtime, which has sustained the stay-at-home-mother image of German lore.

To that, add a women’s movement that from 19th-century Social Democrats focused more on protecting women and mothers from harsh capitalism than on the fierce egalitarianism of American, British — or Soviet — counterparts.

“We are still very far from a situation where it’s as normal for women as for men to want both a career and family — even among young women,” said Angelika Dammann, the first and only female board member at software giant SAP. “When you have children, you’re expected to stay home for a significant period; otherwise you are considered a bad mother.” ...

As family minister in Ms. Merkel’s first term, Ms. von der Leyen introduced a 14-month, generously paid shared parental leave in 2007. Two months are reserved for the father; if he does not take them, the government pays for only 12.

She also sponsored a law promising every 1-year-old the right to a nursery place from 2013, and favors all-day schooling — although actually enacting this is up to each of Germany’s 16 Länder, or states.

“Laws help change mentalities,” Ms. von der Leyen has argued.

But Germany lags far behind countries like the United States — where government aid for child care is scant compared with Europe — in getting women into full-time work and senior positions.

Labels: child care, feminism, gender, gender differences, Germany, men, women, work/family policy

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A study of employment and divorce suggests that while social pressure discouraging women from working outside the home has weakened, pressure on husbands to be breadwinners largely remains.

The research, led by Liana Sayer of Ohio State University to be published in the American Journal of Sociology, was designed to show how employment status influences both men's and women's decisions to end a marriage.

According to the study, a woman's employment status has no effect on the likelihood that her husband will opt to leave the marriage. An employed woman is more likely to initiate a divorce than a woman who is not employed, but only when she reports being highly unsatisfied with the marriage.

But the results for male employment status on the other hand were far more surprising.

For a man, not being employed not only increases the chances that his wife will initiate divorce, but also that he will be the one who opts to leave. Even men who are relatively happy in their marriages are more likely to leave if they are not employed, the research found.

Taken together, the findings suggest an "asymmetric" change in traditional gender roles in marriage, the researchers say.

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, gender, gender differences, Marriage, men, women

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"Made for Life" is the second video of the Marriage: Unique for a Reason series will be officially released and available for order. Building on the anthropological foundation established in the first video, “Made for Each Other,” “Made for Life” considers the Church’s beautiful teaching about the “supreme gift” of marriage, children, and the importance of fathers and mothers.

In “Made for Life,” real married couples talk about what it means to be open to life; why children are a gift; the heroic examples of adoptive parents and single parents; the importance of fathers and mothers; why sexual difference “doesn’t end at conception”; and much more.

The “Made for Life” video is accompanied by a Viewer’s Guide with further reflections and questions for discussion, and a Resource Booklet for Priests, Deacons, Catechists and Teachers.

Labels: Catholic Church, children, gender differences, Marriage, religion

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