The Demographic Dating Market Doom Loop
Recently I recommended Richard Reeves’s recent book Of Boys and Men in one of the digest posts. It’s an argument that men and boys have fallen behind women in many ways, in school and the workplace, and a call for various interventions to address this problem, such as starting boys a year later in school than girls. I was dinged in the comments for the recommendation by commenter Education Realist, who felt that the book’s argument was fallacious, as improvements in women’s educational outcomes are in grades and metrics related to conscientiousness and work ethic, not in test scores and raw processing. There’s a whole conversation that could be had about that, but I do think it’s worth pointing out that, even if this critique is correct, summatively the fact that women are earning so many more degrees than men has social consequences. This is especially true given that efforts to advance women in the workplace have only intensified in recent years. And dating markets are obvious places where this dynamic has teeth.
It will, I’m sure, shock you to learn that research done with dating app data (which has the advantage of being more honest than mere self-described preference) shows that women place dramatically more stock in a man’s education and income level than men do when searching for a woman partner.
To put it in numerical terms, “resource-acquisition ability improved the attention received by men almost 2.5 times that of women.” This dynamic is pronounced despite the fact that two intertwined developments in human social evolution would seem to cut against it: one, the aforementioned rise of women in social status and power, and two, changing social norms that suggest - perhaps optimistically - that we should all become comfortable with women possessing greater social capital than their male partners. Like so many other aspects of progressive belief, it seems that our express attitudes (it doesn’t matter who wears the pants, love is love!) are way out ahead of our actual lived behaviors, where men are far more comfortable being more educated and higher-income than their partners. (With many exceptions.) And you can imagine how this dynamic plays out in specific dating pools: as more hard-charging women flood a given dating market, while the number of eligible men drags behind because of increasing advantages for women in school and the workplace, fewer and fewer women are likely to find themselves with a partner they consider marriageable. To make matters worse, since this dynamic hands men an advantage in the romantic marketplace, they may put off partnering for the long term even further, playing the field for years more because it favors them, and in doing so making matters even worse for ambitious women.
Reeves cites data that suggests that something like 30% to 40% of the decline in marriage rates is driven by the inability of women to find mates that they see as stable, smart, good earners, or otherwise up to their standards. We can certainly lament the degree to which dating markets still reflect the notion that men have to provide while women don’t - it’s a kind of regressive attitude far fewer people still explicitly hold than they once did - but that expectation remains a reality. And anecdotally, there certainly seems to be a lot of men who want only to play video games and watch porn, even if they are employed. So career women are faced with a growing structural disadvantage of insufficient suitable partners, which is exacerbated as they age because of men’s continuing preference for younger women. (Another reality we may lament but can’t really deny.) My guess is that this dynamic falls heaviest on Black women, perversely, because they’ve been doing so well lately.