Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice begins with the proposition that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” although it later transpires that it is the women in the story, who are actually desirous of rich husbands.
Anyway, the same idea in one form or another has been repeated at various times before and since. Notably by Frank Pedersen, of the University of Delaware in 1991, who suggested that people would change many aspects of their behaviour as a consequence of competition introduced by sex-ratio fluctuations; for men, this apparently would result in greater fidelity, greater commitment to a career, and increased investment in children, when women are scarce.
There has however been little or no attempt to provide any evidence for this theory until recently, when a paper ‘Driving a hard bargain: sex ratio and male marriage success in a historical US population’, was published in the journal Biology Letters by PhD candidate Thomas Pollet and Dr Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University, who suggest that a man’s wealth is particularly important, if he wants to settle down, according to their study of the “marriage market”.
The researchers examined data from the American 1910 census, claiming that in this period, demographically, the United States had not settled down. And therefore the differences in sex ratios found throughout the states would enable them to compare the socioeconomic status of married and un-married males.
The study took a sample of one man in 250 from the census and assigned him a socioeconomic status score of between zero and 96, based on a scale drawn up in 1950 (which was the closest available to the census date).
Then, mathematical models predicted that when men and women are in equal supply, the men who are married will have a slightly higher socioeconomic status than unmarried men. Whilst when men and women are in unequal supply, the marriage prospects of a male pauper would be “drastically reduced”.
Here we show that if men are abundant, this will influence the market value of their desired traits, that is, women can demand more.
As the sex ratio increases, married men are predicted to need up two or three times the socioeconomic status of unmarried men.
According to the researchers, and by way of illustration, in states where the sexes were equal in number, 56% of low-status men were married by the age of 30, as opposed to 60% of high-status men. When there were 110 men for every 100 women (in Arizona, for example), the women were more choosy, and only 24% of low-status men were married by 30 compared with 46% of high-status men.
Mr Pollet said:
Thus, much about the varying ethos of male and female behaviour across populations and across time could in principle be explained with reference to the sex ratio, these questions are ripe for future investigation, but our study has clearly established the more limited fact that sex ratio fluctuations in modern humans can put one sex in the driving seat and allow them to drive a hard bargain.
On the other hand, the researchers could just have re-discovered that women aren’t as willing as men to live in harsh environments, since (to use the example of Arizona in 1910) conditions would have been rather more desert-like than today (especially without air-conditioning), and most likely full of prospectors, and miners (who are statistically more likely to be men) trying to find the next gold rush, rather than marry a woman.
The study also assumes that marriage is the ultimate ideal for a man, and confuses being rich with having social status. These factors may turn out to be small limitations, but it seems to me that the study would be comparing the marriage prospects of New York bankers from rich families with the more modest livelihood of a Cowboy, or the unpredictable career of a Prospector / Miner.
It also appears to me, that wealth aside, many of the professions a less well off man might choose for his career could expose him to risks that would shorten his life expectancy considerably. I.e., if he doesn’t live long enough to hit 30, because he’s killed in a mine collapse, shot by Red Indians or crippled in some sort of riding accident, then his chances of getting married automatically go to zero.
A better way to examine the American Census data, especially since American Censuses are not subject to a 100-year closure period, as in the UK, could be to compare the 1910 census with the 1920 census and the 1930 census. The 1920’s were a period of great prosperity for America, whereas 1930 would be a year after the start of America’s great depression. So, comparing these periods of time would seem (to me) to give a rather truer picture of whether of not relative prosperity changes a man’s probability of marriage.
Posted by Jonathan in History, Sociobiology