Cute butts and housework: A gynocentric theory of assortative mating

In the 1992 screenplay for Sleepless in Seattle Tom Hanks's character, Sam, a recently widowed single father, is facing the dating pool after 14 years. “I want to know what it's like over there, ” he asks his friend Jay. The answer comes back, “… Pecs and a cute butt. … You can't even turn on the news without hearing about how some babe thought some guy's butt was cute. … The good news is, split the check” (Arch, Ephron, before women had their current level of economic opportunity, there was much less variation in women's economic potential. Unless poised to inherit wealth, wives were to be judged on the basis of their family, social class, race, religion, education, beauty, wit, obedience, cooking, and so forth. That is, they were judged on physical, social, cultural, and psychological factors more than economic ones. But I suggest that the same regression results shown in Table 3 could have an alternative explanation. Women's increased labor market participation and improved economic independence have led them to place less weight on men's economic value when choosing a husband. I will call this interpretation the gynocentric model. Viewed as a mathematical result, Sweeney and Cancian's (2004) increased coefficient is consistent both with men placing more importance on women's economic value and/or women placing less importance on men's economic value (a copy of the statistical proof is available from the author). Within the framework of mate matching, Sweeney and Cancian's estimation procedure finds changes in the relative weight that men and women place on each other's economic value, but they do not interpret the change as a relative one; they see it as an absolute shift upward in the weight that men give to women's economic value as future wives. How do we know which interpretation of the result is correct—their androcentric model or the alternative gynocentric model? We cannot distinguish between the two hypotheses using the information given for two reasons. First, the regression coefficients on wives' premarital wage actually combine the underlying coefficients of interest (men's view of women and women's view of men) as discussed above. Second, to reach their conclusion, Sweeney and Cancian (2004) would need to show both an increase in the regression coefficient from the early cohort model to the late cohort model, and an increase in the explained variation (as measured by the R2) from the early to the late model. However, we cannot use the change in R2 as a measure because the estimates of men's earnings for the later cohort are faulty. To explain this second point in more detail, if Sweeney and Cancian's (2004) interpretation of the results is correct, the amount of variation explained should increase in the later cohort's model. If men are placing more weight on women's premarital wages, these wages should explain more variation in husbands' future earnings. Alternatively, if women now place less weight on men's future earnings, women's premarital wages should explain less of the variation in husbands' future earnings. In Sweeney and Cancian's (2004) Table 3, we see that indeed the percent of variation explained does go up over time, which would be consistent with the authors' interpretation of the results if their data for husbands' earnings were accurate. Their estimates of husbands' expected earnings and occupational status are problematic, however. The estimate for the later cohort is constructed using census data from the 1960s, together with the assumption that men's earnings have been constant over time. Therefore, the explained variation for this model is also related to men's earnings from the late 1960s and is not related to men's earnings from the new marriage market and the social context of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The method for computing men's earnings is consistent with the authors' assumption, but their assumption is incorrect: Men's wages have not been stable over time, even though it appears in Table 1 as if they have been stable. Sweeney and Cancian's (2004) Table 1 indicates that, in the present data, husbands' future earnings have virtually no deviation from a mean of 10 across time. But in reality, between 1963 and 1989, the average weekly wage of working men increased by 20%. Further, this increase masks increasing wage inequality. Wages for the least skilled fell by about 5%, whereas wages for the most skilled increased by about 40% (Juhn, Murphy, also see Bluestone they only evaluate each other (i. e. , only men evaluate women) on the basis of market signals. Their model does not capture how people sort on work-family balance and compatibility issues. The assumption is that people are homogeneous in how they value household production such as housework and child care. Just as we have good reason to expect different findings based on social class, we also have good reason to expect different findings based on gender ideology. Sweeney and Cancian (2004) argue that they do not need to worry about this issue because men's household labor contributions have not changed much over time, and because men still do not do much household labor. But change over time is not relevant here. Men's family work does matter in the later cohort, and there is variation in men's housework. Many men do contribute to household labor, and the housework literature is full of models that explain which types of men do more or less of it. Sweeney and Cancian's model does not allow us to separate the effects of wage value and household production value. This separation is crucial because for women who hope to share family work, finding men to provide it is an important part of their search for a mate. It is women's perception that they want and can find a “good man” that we need to account for in the model, not necessarily the reality of how many are available at the point of partner choice. If we had data on gender ideology for this analysis, we could measure the relative ideologies for different dyads. On one hand, the most common would likely be an egalitarian wife and a transitional husband. This dyad would incorporate both the androcentric and gynocentric hypotheses: both men's increased weight on women's economic value and women's decreased weight on husbands' economic value relative to their household production. A traditional woman who wants to be supported by her husband, on the other hand, should seek a man according to his earnings potential. This pairing supports Sweeney and Cancian's (2004) formulation. Traditional women may be missing from the analysis because the authors excluded every woman who lacked wage data at the premarital point. Women who were not working as they searched for a breadwinner husband could fit into this group. Their omission hurts the authors' argument, which would be bolstered by the inclusion of “wannabe” homemakers. Alternatively, if we had a traditional man with an egalitarian or transitional wife, only the gynocentric hypothesis would hold. All of these effects of gender ideology would be further complicated by the simultaneous analysis of social class or of other noneconomic factors not yet considered, such as race, fertility, health, culture, and so forth. The fundamental economistic and androcentric formulation of their model sheds doubt on the finding that women's position in the labor market has become a more important determinant of her position in the marriage market. Researchers should put women, who have changed the most during this period, at the center of the analysis. Do women want cute butts and housework? The answer awaits future analyses. Thanks to Dr. Simon Potter, New York Federal Reserve Bank, for help working through the algebra.