1/17/2007

Why are more women living without husbands?

Fox News has a nice discussion of this. With fewer women having kids, that is part of the explanation. I would like to really see how much of this is due to elderly women greatly out living their spouses. My guess is that there are a lot of 60, 70, 80, 90 year old women who are either unwilling, uninterested, or whatever in terms of getting remarried. Women so greatly out number men in those higher age categories, I would guess that it really makes a difference and that group has been growing a lot. Women are marrying later and my guess is that part of that is the result of no fault divorce laws.

Some of what is read into this finding is a joke. How do they know or prove things such as this?
At the other end, women are living longer as widows and, after a divorce, are more likely than men to delay remarriage, sometimes delighting in their newfound freedom. . . .


Interestingly:

Only about 30 percent of black women are living with a spouse, according to the Census Bureau, compared to about 49 percent of Hispanic women, 55 percent of non-Hispanic white women and more than 60 percent of Asian women. . . .


UPDATE: I finally got a hold of the New York Times article upon which this Fox News story was based. Apparently, women were defined as women from age 15 and higher. My guess is that few women from 15 to 20 are married. Presumably 100 years ago that was much higher. I am not sure that tells us anything about women not wanting or needing men. If you limited the survey to women 19 and older, clearly less than 50 percent of women would be without a man. When you combine that with the fact that women are living much longer than men, I am again not sure what to make of these basic numbers. A more meaningful statistic would be something such as women 19 or 20 to 75.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Dad29 said...

NewsBusters debunked this asinine NYTimes story already.

Seems that the population sampled was every woman aged 15 (!!!!!) and over in the USA.

1/18/2007 8:18 AM  

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