Pg. 3: U.S Census Bureau’s American Community Survey showed that there is 33% more women than men for college grads
Gender ratios got messed up because women have been going to college at a higher rate than men since the 1980s and a lot more in the late 1990s
This college men deficit is made worse by increased reluctance of college educated Americans to marry those non college-educated
Educational intermarriage was actually more common in past
Pg. 8: More challenging for women in the east than the west, there is no divide when it comes to urban vs. rural
Pg. 9: according to Census data, number of age 30-34 non-married college educated women had a 31% increase
Hanna Rosin thinks it’s largely by choice women don’t need a traditional husband but Birger doesn’t agree
What does Birger think?
Birger thinks women mindset didn’t, the market did
Pg. 9: Birger makes his argument for why the number of never-married women increased 31% between 2007 and 2012
The pop culture influencing teens argument doesn’t make sense because the data doesn’t actually show an increase in sexual activity
Pg. 13: make an informed decision about city and industry if you are looking to date marriage-minded men and women
Don’t have to change zip code to expand dating pool, can also dip toe into the non college-educated
Title IX 1972 (banning gender discrimination at public educational institutions) leveled the playing field
Men, unlike women, with a high school diploma had good opportunities
Women were entering middle class by going to college
But because there has been an increase in college attendance for women globally, this can’t be explained by Title IX
Pg. 30: 60 years ago, there was less economic incentive for girls to apply to college or aim for a career
The college wage premium helped women more than men. This was irrelevant in the 1950s because a lot of women were not completely college or attending college just so they could find a husband, they didn’t really have a career in mind
Harvard U economist Claudia Goldin believes that the contraceptive pill is actually the explanation for the rise of women in college
The surpassing men part is due to women having a development advantage when it comes to college prep, but it’s not just developmentally, they also have an economical advantage. One reason for some men holding back from college is industry trends. Nursing is the fastest growing profession. High demand from nurses means more women attending college
New York Times article 2013 hookup culture about UPenn women - putting their energies into academics, internships, and preparing for careers (time-management strategy)
Do women not date and get married because they enjoy casual sex or is it because the man deficit discouraged college-educated women from prioritizing love and romance because it’s harder to get now?
Pg. 47: natural selection is better for those mating more??
Pg. 51: Marcia Guttentag is a professor at Harvard U, published a pioneering scholarly work on gender ratios in 1983 even though animal behavior and animal sex ratios have been studied for far longer
Guttentag’s book “Too Many Women”: the main idea was that the number of opposite sex partners available for each of the sexes have effects on sexual behaviors, sexual mores, on marriage and divorce patterns, child rearing conditions and practices, family stability.
Original story: she had a hard time understanding the rise of suicide and depression among women in the 1960s and 1970s
Before World War II, immigrants were mostly male
Before the sex revolution, pop lyrics were about monogamy, but by the 1960s, they were talking about women being passed around and discarded
Pg. 53: it’s changed from more marriage-age women than men in the 1960s and 1970s
More women than men born in the Baby Boom
What is the “marriage squeeze”?
Pg. 54: there were two upsides to this sex ratio change. First, the quality and variety of sex improved (length of foreplay and intercourse). Second, women attained political rights and economic parity
Pg. 55: Guttentag believed that the sexual revolution and the feminist movement were fueled by these lopsided gender ratios
Pg. 57: before, gender ration impatience was caused by the effects of the baby boom and the traditional age gap of marriage. Now, the men deficit is a by-product of the gender gap in college enrollment and it affects the white collar population differently than blue collar
Pg. 72: Kristina Durante did a study about female desire for a lucrative career and if it is affected by male scarcity. Might be the reason why millennial women have been closing the pay gap
Agape Match founder Avgitidis founder says women should move to the suburbs
Pg. 104: some states have an undersupply of women in the non college educated dating market
Men deficits are above average and below average in some states
Pg. 112: states with the most blue collar men are Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, Nevada, Utah
Pg. 112: Seattle is slightly better than other cities but not by much
Pg. 114: fifty year decline in manufacturing and insecurity in blue collar workforce, making blue collar men with stable incomes in short supply and white collar women less likely to seek them out
This makes these men also stuck in a dating market that is also tough like the one that college-educated women are in
Women are heading off to college and not returning home, creating a women deficit in blue collar communities
Pg. 153: the reason why it’s harder for a 40 year old woman to find a match than a man. Why?
Pg. 154: the argument for why it doesn’t make sense for women’s dating struggles to be attributed to older men dating younger women. In order for it to make sense, there should be a large cadre of early to mid twenties college educated men who are starved for female companionship because the women their age are being poached by older men. But these men aren’t struggling.
Pg. 155: people think that 40 year old women saying they are having a hard time dating is false. They say that this is a way for the mainstream media to scare women and sell dating books and magazines. The starting point was a Newsweek cover story published in 1986 called “The Marriage Crunch.”
Pg. 155: the Newsweek article was about the marriage squeeze afflicting Baby Boomer women, the same phenomenon Guttentag studied
Looking at the article, a writer declared that the marriage squeeze was a myth after interviewing the women from the piece. He didn’t actually see in the data the real reason baby boomer women were actually getting married. It was because the men re-mated, the same behavior that men responded to the imbalanced marriage market
Pg. 160: the reason why women in their 30s are attractive and marriageable and the men aren’t
Pg. 164-165: the reason why he doesn’t approach!!!???
To look at gender ratios within various professions fi to US Bureau of Labor Statistics website
A mixed-collar marriage could be a solution to a modern dilemma - the career woman who needs help with domestic duties
In order to make matches more viable, increase the earnings and job security of working-class men
“So what changed in the 1960s and 1970s? The usual suspects are feminism and the passage of federal anti-discrimination laws like Title IX and the Equal Pay Act of 1963. But as I said, women began attending college in greater numbers not just in the U.S. but all across the developed world - even in countries where women’s push for equal rights evolved more slowly. Goldin offered a much different explanation, one driven by a much different kind of catalyst. She credited the pill” [pg. 31]
“Writing in Slate in 2008, Bloomberg News editor Mark Gimein used auction theory to explain why, as singles hit their thirties, the number of attractive women seemed to increase even as the pool of appealing men seemed to decline. “In this auction,” Gimein wrote, “some women will be more confident of their prospects, others less so.” In the jargon of auction theory, the first group are “strong bidders” and the latter “weak bidders.” Conventional wisdom holds that the strong bidders would be far more likely to win this kind of competition, given that women with good looks, social skills, or other perceived strengths are generally considered to be more of a catch. But that’s not how real auctions play out, according to Gimein. “In fact,” eh wrote, “game theory predicts, and empirical studies of auctions bear out, that auctions will often be won by ‘weak’ bidders, who know that they can be outbid and so bid more aggressively. In the marriage market, the strong bidder frequently holds out for the ideal mate - not unlike the billionaire art collector at Sotheby’s who passes on the Berauds and Boudins in order to vie for the lone van Gogh. “With a lot at stake in getting it right in one shot,” wrote Gimein, “it’s the women who are confident that they are holding a strong hand who are likely to hold out and wait for the perfect prospect.” This explains why a disproportionate number of the women who are still single in their thirties are so attractive and marriageable, while a disproportionate number of the remaining men seem to be unattractive, socially awkward, emotionally damaged, or unemployed. Gimein concluded that the good men really are taken. They married young - “to women who most salient characteristic was not their beauty or passion or intellect, but their decisiveness” [pg. 160]
“Why does this happen? Jose-Manuel Rey, a mathematics professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, used statistics, probability theory, a fictious case study involving a guy named Guy in order to explain the phenomenon. In Rey’s scenario, Guy is sitting at a coffee reading the newspaper when he spots Carol, a beautiful woman to whom he’s attracted, sitting at a nearby table. For Guy, there are three possible outcomes: 1. He talks to Carol, she responds positively, and he gets her phone number and a proper date the following Friday. 2. He does nothing and continues enjoying his coffee. 3. He talks to Carol, she’s not interested, and he winds up feeling miserable about being rejected. The problem for Carol - assuming she too is interested - is that Guy cannot consider these three possible outcomes in a vacuum. He can only consider the context of all the other men at the coffee shop who also may want to approach Carol - which makes this, in Rey’s words, “an interactive decision problem.” Rey runs through some fancy math to reach his conclusions - read it all at http://plus.maths.org/content/carol-syndrome- but the bottom line is that the more admirers Guy perceives Carol to have, the less likely it is that Guy or any other man will approach her. Guy and the rest of the men in the coffee shop all assume that the third outcome - being rejected - is the likeliest one simply because there’s only one Carol and so many of them. The odds are not in any one man’s favor. “Carol’s perception that she scares men away is not a delusion after all, “wrote Rey. “It is not a matter of bad luck but a collateral effect of interactive rationality. A paradoxical consequence is that Carol’s attractiveness acts as a repellent. This surprising phenomenon -which we call the Carol syndrome - is a by-product of psychological social interaction” [pg. 164]
“Let’s start with a question lots of people probably think they know the answer to: Why is the marriage market for a college-educated, 40-year=old woman worse than it is for a comparable 27-year-old woman? Based on demographics, the 27-year-old should actually have a harder time finding a guy, since she graduated into a more lopsided dating market. The 40-year-old completed college at a time when there were 17 percent more women than men graduating from college; the 27-year-old graduated when the gender gap had ballooned to 33 percent….The popular explanation is that older men forgo age-appropriate women in order to date younger women, whereas 40-year-old women either have less interest in dating younger men or less ability to entice them. The end result is a smaller pool of potential matches - and thus reduced marriage odds -for the 40-year-old woman….thing is, if older women’s dating struggles were completely a funciton of older men dating younger women, then there should be a second cohort of struggling daters. There should be a large cadre of early-to-mid twenties, college-educated men who are starved for female companionship because the women their age are all being poached by older men” [pg. 155]