Unequal Marriage: The Incidence of Marriage among Black and White Women across Marriage Markets, 2009-2011

• In Event: 516 - Section on Sociology of Population Paper Session. The Demography of Family Inequality

Abstract

Despite its lackluster track record, marriage promotion remains central to U.S. welfare policy. But research on marriage markets – especially the relative shortage of available men for Black women to marry, first reported in the 1980s – has not figured prominently in recent policy debates. To reinvestigate this issue with new, more recent data, we examine how the quantity and quality of unmarried men contributes to the likelihood of marriage for Black and White women, for the first time using the marital events data from the American Community Survey. We incorporate both unmarried sex ratios and the relative status of unmarried men and women within each racial group, using multilevel mixed linear regression models for Black and White women. We find higher marriage rates in markets with more single men, and in those in which women have fewer resources relative to men. Further, because White women’s markets are much more favorable for marriage than Black women’s are – with more single men, and more single men with high levels of resources – the marriage market variables account for a substantial share of the Black-White difference in marriage rates. In addition, education has strong positive effects on marriage for both groups. We conclude that marriage promotion efforts are targeting women – Black women, and those with low levels of education – who face structural barriers to marriage in their local marriage markets.

Authors

• Philip N. Cohen, University of Maryland-College Park

• Joanna Pepin, University of Maryland-College Park