Men Have Abandoned Marriage and Parenthood
Is it because of politics, religion, or something else?
In December 2023, Christine Grillo wrote a letter to the editor of the Washington Post - it was titled, “Women don’t need to be on the marriage track.” She is a self-described, “White, Gen Z, liberal woman” who took umbrage with a prior editorial in the newspaper which encouraged women to compromise a bit to find a mate. What I found interesting about the editorial and the response was that the onus was on women in both instances. They should be the ones to change their attitudes about marriage.
But, I’ve taken a good hard look at the data and here’s what I’ve found: men are the real problems here. They have basically abandoned two of the major life milestones in an incredibly rapid fashion - marriage and family. Even if women seek to find a spouse, the pool of prospective suitors has largely dried up. And when it comes to children, good luck. Men are walking away from that possibility, as well.
Let me show what I mean with the data.
The Cooperative Election Study asks people about their marital status and one option is simply labeled, “never been married.” That’s the key metric for most of this post because it tells us a whole lot about at what point in the life course that marriage is more likely than not. I calculated the share who had never been married by age in both 2008 and 2022 for men and women. That resulted in the curves below.
It makes sense that the "never married" rate drops rapidly among those in their twenties, as many people are walking down the aisle during this time period. The drop in the lines was much steeper in 2008 than in 2022, indicating that people are delaying marriage more now than they used to.
Here's a simple benchmark to track this: look at when the line drops below 50%—that's the age at which most people get married. For men in 2008, it was about 29 years old. For women, it was about 25. In 2022, for men it was 34 years old, and for women, it was 29. In just fifteen years, the average age of first marriage for both men and women jumped by about 4.5 years. If this trend continues, by 2040, the average man won't walk down the aisle until his late thirties.
But also notice that women are consistently more likely to get married compared to men. That was true in both 2008 and 2022. Among thirty year olds in 2022, about 65% of men had never been married compared to 48% of women. Also notice how the marriage gap basically disappeared after 55 years old in the left graph. It still persists in the graph on the right.
Let’s dig below the surface, though. Politics has to be playing some type of role in this gap, right? So I took the last three years of the CES and broke the sample down into liberals, moderates, and conservatives.
Let's point this out straight away: liberals tend to get married later than conservatives, a fact that should surprise no one. Among 40-year-old male liberals, about 37% have never been married, compared to only 30% of their conservative counterparts. However, it's interesting to note that the percentage of liberal men who have never been married only drops by 6% between the ages of 40 and 50. For both moderates and conservatives, the decrease is about twice as much.
Again, it's worth noting that women are less likely to remain single compared to men. Nearly 75% of 40-year-old liberal women have been married at least once. Among conservative women, 85% have walked down the aisle by the time they reach their 40th birthday. In contrast, nearly 30% of conservative men have never been married at 40 years old. While political ideology cannot be discounted, gender appears to play a significant role in this discourse.
But what about the factor of religion? Perhaps if we control for Christian versus non-religious individuals, the gap might diminish.
It appears that religion does indeed narrow the marriage gap, but this is only true for individuals who claim a religious affiliation. The gender gap among Christians of any denomination is relatively modest, with a difference of 2-3 years across much of the age spectrum. The gap widens slightly between the ages of 35 and 45, but even then, it's only about five percentage points, a trend that holds true for other faith traditions as well. Generally, the gap between men and women of the same age within these groups is relatively small.
However, the "nones" — those who claim no religious affiliation — stand out as an exception. Women in this group are significantly more likely to marry than their male counterparts, with gaps of at least five percentage points across various ages. For example, half of the female nones were married by their 30th birthday, whereas it took until the age of 35 for the majority of male nones to marry. A 40-year-old male Christian is approximately 10 percentage points more likely to be married than a male none of the same age.
But let’s add parenting to this picture now. The CES asks people if they are currently the parent/guardian of a child under the age of 18. Which means that we can’t say with certainty whether someone has ever been a parent, we can only assess if they are currently parenting a minor child. But even this measure reveals a fascinating difference between men and women at similar ages.
Among 30 year old men, only a third were currently parenting a child. Among 30 year old women that figure was 50%. Among women who were between the ages of 35 and 40 years old, nearly 60% had young children. Among men of the same age, it was just 47%. There’s no age between 18 and 45 years old where a man is a likely to be a parent compared to a woman.
So, not only are women much more likely to get married they are also much more likely to become parents, as well. In essence it’s like women are trying to maintain some of the traditional familial institutions in American society while men have decided that this is not the direction they want their life to go.
But I wanted to take one more look at this to illustrate just how big these shifts are from a historical perspective. So, I divided the sample into birth cohorts (these are five year windows in which people were born). The theory here is that these people basically experienced life in a very similar way. It’s a better way to approach this than generations. Then I calculated the share of men and women who have both never been married and are not currently parents to children. I tracked this from 2008 through 2022. The results are below.
The data presented in the top rows highlight a significant generational shift, underscoring the fact that older generations were quite different from the younger ones. However, it's important to note that these cohorts were older when they participated in the surveys. For instance, during the 2008 survey, the 1965-1969 cohort was in their late thirties to early forties, exhibiting a small but noticeable gender gap where men were more likely to remain single and childless compared to women. This gap appears to widen with each successive cohort, indicating a changing societal trend.
For instance, look at the early 1980s birth cohort (those are my people). In the early waves of the CES, they were young - between the ages of 24 and 28. So, it makes sense that they hadn’t really married or had children yet. But, trace that male line for the next five years or so. The share of men who were not married and weren’t parents only dropped by about 15 points at a time when that generation was moving into their early thirties. And it’s declined even slower from that point. Even into 2022, 30% of men born between 1980 and 1984 had never been married and didn’t have kids. That figure for women in the same cohort was just 17%.
Look at the cohort from the early 1990s. What’s great is that they were really young adults when the CES began, with the oldest members just turning 18 years old. By 2015, half of women in this cohort had either gotten married or had a child. For men in this cohort, they still haven’t hit this threshold. Fifty-one percent were never married and had no kids in 2022. Think about that for a minute. HALF of men aged 28-32 are unmarried and childless.
While it's evident that women are more likely to marry and have children than men, the underlying reasons for this disparity have not been fully explored. To address this, I focused on individuals aged 35-50, a range where most people are likely to have married and started families. The analysis aimed to determine the likelihood of being unmarried and childless, considering various factors such as race, income, education, political ideology, and religious affiliation. This approach helps to shed light on the complex interplay of factors influencing marital and parental status.
Any estimate to the right of the graph predicts a greater likelihood of not being married and having kids. There are some factors that make one less likely to be those two things: having a higher income, being politically liberal, and claiming no religious affiliation. I think that all makes sense given the prior analysis that I just described. One factor makes one less likely to be forever single and childless - being white. Meaning non-whites are more likely to not get married/not have kids.
But there’s one really weird result that’s worth ruminating on - education. For men, having a higher level of education makes one less likely to stay single and never have kids. Said another way - educated men settle down. But for women, the coefficient is in the opposite direction. Meaning more highly educated women are more likely to be single and childless between the ages of 35 and 50 after controlling for race, income, ideology and religion. In essence, education works completely different for men and women.
But I wanted to take one more pass at that so I specified an interaction model between income, education, and gender. That’s below. Again, I am predicting the likelihood of never being married and not currently being a parent.
Okay, this really tells a big story. The differences for men based on education aren’t that significant. For male college graduates with low incomes, they are more likely to not be married/have kids. But once you get to about $75k per year, the differences between education basically disappear for men. It’s low income, college educated men that are opting out of getting married and starting a family but moving up on the income spectrum seems to rectify that.
For women, that same story isn’t true. We do see that college educated women with low incomes tend to be single and childless, however look at that $70k-$80K benchmark. For women who make that amount and have a high school diploma, about 8% are single and childless. For college educated women at the same income level, nearly 20% are single and childless. In fact, there’s no level of income where education doesn’t matter for women - they are consistently more likely to be single and have no children at home compared to women in the same income bracket with a high school diploma or less.
There’s a lot to chew on here. Men are less likely to take the traditional steps into adulthood than women - they don’t get married at nearly the same rate and they shirk parenthood, as well. But the factors that lead to this reality for men and women just aren’t the same. Education seems to close this gap completely for men. It never does for women.
There’s a lot more to be written about this, of that I’m certain.
Code for this post can be found here.
I want to speak to one subset of your data; college educated black women. My church has many college-educated women who are not married and the reason is simple--there aren't enough single college-educated men in their community for them to consider as spouses. There are several interracial marriages in our church, where college-educated black women have married college-educated white men, but that is relatively uncommon. I know this isn't a large component of your data but it is an interesting problem, the mismatch between the number of highly educated professional women and the number of men with the same characteristics.
Any idea how the CES words the "currently parenting" question? Or put another way, are men answering no because 1) they don't have kids or 2) their kids don't live with them? Both are problems for a flourishing society but it makes a difference whether the exhortation should be "get married" or "don't get divorced".
Edit: found the language, and unfortunately, it doesn't clarify anything. I could still see respondents interpreting the question either way.