Why Do Feminists Keep Claiming Women Lack Agency?

It's too common anymore to think it's anything but intentional: a feminist sees an outcome in the world she doesn't like, and then blames this state of affairs on men, i.e. the patriarchy. Differences in the numbers of men and women in STEM fields? Didn't get the job she wanted? Must be men. Income inequality between spouses? Men again (never mind that women have demonstrably higher income standards than readily exist in the real world).

So now Ellen Lamont in The Atlantic has discovered (again) that the New Feminist Woman has largely not arrived on the scene. Surprise, surprise: women want men to pay for things, among other unapproved behavior (emboldening mine):

And yet in a throwback to an earlier era, many women I spoke with enacted strict dating rules. “It’s a deal breaker if a man doesn’t pay for a date,” one woman, aged 29, told me. A 31-year-old said that if a man doesn’t pay, “they just probably don’t like you very much.” A lot of men, they assumed, were looking for nothing more than a quick hookup, so some of these dating rituals were tests to see whether the man was truly interested in a commitment. A third woman, also 31, told me, “I feel like men need to feel like they are in control, and if you ask them out, you end up looking desperate and it’s a turnoff to them.”

On dates, the women talked about acting demure, and allowing men to do more of the talking. Women, they said, were more attractive to men when they appeared unattainable, so women preferred for the men to follow up after a date. None of the women considered proposing marriage; that was the man’s job. “I know it feels counterintuitive … I’m a feminist,” the first woman said. “But I like to have a guy be chivalrous.”

As ever, the problem with such articles is the lack of actual data rather than anecdotes. Yet finally, we are talking about women's choices as much as men's. Do they not matter? Are we talking about equal outcomes or equal opportunities?

Whaddya Know: American Women “Marrying Down” In Terms Of Education

A terrific new study out from the Institute for Family Studies, showing that college-educated women, contra the suppositions from Dateonomics, are actually marrying “down” in large numbers in terms of education. It’s not yet large numbers, but the trend is undeniable:

Of particular interest is the 23-32 group of women on the right side. Just under 40% of women with a bachelor’s degree are marrying men without one, which is astonishing. Of course, given the tiny number of marriages occurring among millennials, this could easily be the product of a systemic bias problem:

That is, the relative few women marrying men without college degrees are marrying from the cream of the blue-collar or undegreed ranks. It does not seem a scalable trend.

A Girl's Gotta Have Her Standards

Ahem:

These synthetic husbands have an average income that is about 58% higher than the actual unmarried men that are currently available to unmarried women. They also are 30% more likely to be employed (90% vs. 70%) and 19% more likely to have a college degree (30% vs. 25%). Racial and ethnic minorities, especially Black women, face serious shortages of potential marital partners, as do low socioeconomic status and high socioeconomic status unmarried women, both at the national and subnational levels.

On Female Preferences In Men's Earning Power

I have for a while repeatedly gone back to a 2014 Pew Research study (usually via this HuffPo story) showing that 78% of women polled want a spouse with "a steady job". I've pretty much read that as meaning women are much more interested in male earning power than any other attribute of a potential spouse. But it came up in conversation yesterday on Twitter that maybe this is a weak interpretation:

"A steady job" is not necessarily the same as high earning power.
When the question is phrased as "have/make a decent amount of money," the results are different:https://t.co/8YpmtD7RnP

— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) November 20, 2018

This is a pretty good point, and the YouGov survey she links to puts money far down the list of women's concerns (last, by volume):

While I think this is an important distinction, it's also important to know what women do rather than say. And while I cannot make any unambiguous claims here, it seems there is a gap between what women claim they want, versus who they actually end up marrying — or even dating. I've previously covered the latter in the context of Tinder, a male-centric dating site that reduces its users to a photo and a swipe — the "hot or not" visual approach that men use as a first-cut means to assess women. That men can get away with this is largely due to demographic influences: women only infrequently marry down in either earning power or educational status, creating an artificial shortage of "eligible" men. More, a marginally-employed husband increases the annual divorce risk by one-third, and an unemployed husband increases the risk of either partner dissolving the marriage (emboldening mine):

We noted the asymmetric nature of gender change, such that, despite increases in women’s employment, there is little toleration for men not remaining employed breadwinners. A deviation from this norm appears to make either partner more likely to leave.
...
Consider this broad-brush interpretation of our findings: men’s nonemployment increases divorce because it violates norms, while women’s employment increases divorce by providing a way to support oneself outside marriage for women deeply unsatisfied with their marriages, not because it violates norms. Both of these effects probably emanate from the greater change in women’s than men’s roles; women’s employment has increased and is accepted, men’s nonemployment is unacceptable to many, and there is cultural ambivalence and lack of institutional support for men taking on “feminized” roles such as household work and emotional support. Women’s employment is translated into exit rather than voice in many cases because the changes that would most increase women’s marital satisfaction would entail men “feminizing” their roles in a way that many are still ambivalent about and institutions don’t support. Men’s breadwinning is still so culturally mandated that when it is absent, both men and women are more likely to find that the marital partnership doesn’t deserve to continue.

It's probably worth a deeper dive into the US Census Bureau's Current Population Survey to see how these numbers are affected by recency of marriage.

Revisiting Tinder: The Even Worse News For Unmarried Young Women

David M. Buss in Edge has a thought-provoking essay about the dating crisis among educated young women, something I've treated elsewhere recently. Largely manufactured by women's dating preferences (and a reduction in the number of young men coming out of universities as a fraction of the whole graduate population), he has a take on it that I didn't really appreciate: the nature of male sexuality means such young women face competition from below their own socioeconomic level as well:

Additional elements of the mating mind exacerbate it. A key cause stems from the qualities women seek in committed mateships. Most women are unwilling to settle for men who are less educated, less intelligent, and less professionally successful than they are. The flip side is that men are less exacting on precisely these dimensions, choosing to prioritize, for better or worse, other evolved criteria such as youth and appearance. So the initial sex ratio imbalance among educated groups gets worse for high achieving women. They end up being forced to compete for the limited pool of educated men not just with their more numerous educated rivals, but also with less educated women whom men find desirable on other dimensions.

But wait: Susan Patton's much-smirked-at advice to apply effort to find a husband while one is in college has some sensibility behind it, too? Because,

The depletion of educated men worsens when we add the impacts of age and divorce to the mating matrix. As men age, they desire women who are increasingly younger than they are. Intelligent, educated women may go for a less accomplished partner for a casual fling, but for a committed partner they typically want mates their own age or a few years older, and at least as educated and career-driven. Since education takes time, the sex ratio imbalance gets especially skewed among the highly educated—those who seek advanced degrees to become doctors, lawyers, or professors, or who climb the corporate ladder post-MBA. And because men are more likely than women to remarry following divorce and to marry women increasingly younger than they are—three years at first marriage, five at second, eight at third—the gender-biased mating ratio skews more sharply with increasing age.

Yikes. That's pretty fearsome odds, but on the other hand, one wonders just how much women past a certain point in their lives might want to quit the game altogether, or bat for the other side (i.e. take up lesbianism).

Tinder Is A Symptom

The Washington Post today has a terrific article on how Tinder is a consequence of an enormous and largely underreported gender imbalance in college-educated young people. I knew it was big, but these numbers go way beyond anything I had imagined (emboldening is all mine):

As I argue in “DATE-ONOMICS: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” the college and post-college hookup culture is a byproduct, not of Tinder or Facebook (another target of modern scolds), but of shifting demographics among the college-educated. Much as the death toll of WWI caused a shortage of marriageable men in the 1920s, today’s widening gender gap in college enrollment has created unequal numbers in the post-college dating pool.

In 2012, 34 percent more women than men graduated from American colleges, and the U.S. Department of Education expects this gap to reach 47 percent by 2023. The imbalance has spilled over into the post-college dating scene. According to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are now 5.5 million college-educated women in the United States between the ages of 22 and 29 vs. 4.1 million such men. In other words, the dating pool for straight, millennial, college graduates has four women for every three men. No wonder some men are in no rush to settle down and more women are giving up on what used to be called “playing hard to get.”

Wow. Jon Birger's piece comes in response to a Vanity Fair essay, "Tinder And The Dawn Of The Dating Apocalypse", which posits that the Internet itself is to blame for this state of affairs. But Birger's got it right: men wouldn't be in this position if there weren't a "surplus" of women. And I use those scare quotes for a reason, because men in their twenties are, as ever, in a slight surplus as of the last census (about 51% of that age group, PDF). For all the talk of equality, women still gravitate toward men making more money than themselves, and of higher social status. Marrying down is just not something one does.

In that light, there is another dating crisis, but one that doesn't get nearly as much attention: that of the displaced males without college educations (and consequently, with little hope of earning a decent living) who have silently been erased from this picture. Young women still value male financial contributions above any other single criterion in a potential mate. If young women have it hard in the dating game, at least they can pay for cat food. Meanwhile, a generation of young men lies ignored.