They certainly don’t go much for cohabiting in Italy or indeed the USA among young adults. Cohabitation is pretty much the same everywhere else. Marriage is not so common in Sweden generally among young people.
Today’s women who are well-established in their careers in their 30s and 40s are doing better than their mothers who are also tertiary educated in terms of closing the gender wage gap. The gender wage gap in the chart below is unadjusted. It is the raw gender wage gap for women aged 35 to 44 and for women aged 55 to 64.
In Canada and the USA there is been no progress at all. In New Zealand, the gender gap between male and female tertiary educated workers is a little larger for today’s prime age women graduates than for older female workers who completed a tertiary education.
I suspect that gender gap be no smaller for today’s career women as compared to two decades ago has something to do with compensating differentials.
Today’s career women want it all: both motherhood and a career. They trade-off work-life balance for wages.
Women choose university degrees and occupations that are more agreeable to a balancing motherhood and a career.
Marriage used to be a pairing of opposites: Men would work for pay and women would work at home. But in the second half of the 20th century, women flooded the labour force, raising their participation rate from 32 percent, in 1950, to nearly 60 percent in the last decade. As women closed the education gap, the very nature of marriage has changed. It has slowly become an arrangement pairing similarly rich and educated people. Ambitious workaholics used to seek partners who were happy to take care of the house. Today, they’re more likely to seek another ambitious workaholic.
The rich and educated are more likely to marry, to marry each other, and to produce rich and educated children. But this virtual cycle turns vicious for the poor.
CHART: Interesting trend in share of married US households, from 80% in 1948 to < 50% by 2010 and <49% in 2011-2014 http://t.co/qbI5VBRvKB— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) July 02, 2015
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
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