[quote=svelte]CAR, I’m gonna guess that you are a stay at home mom.
I think that would explain your skewed perspective. Stay-at-home moms tend to cling to older traditional concepts as you’ve described. But that doesn’t match reality.
Either that or you’re black – and I’ll explain why I say that below, where I’ll back up my position with factual data not generalizations and stereotypes.
[quote=CA renter]… most women would argue that having a husband who makes a decent living is necessary for a good marriage, as well. There are always exceptions, of course, but that doesn’t change the rule.
[/quote]
This is simply not true. Most women would NOT argue that a hubby who makes a good living is necessary for a good marriage. See attached data.
Your statement is only true of the subset of women who are black. It is not true of American women in general, and is especially not true of white American women.
[img_assist|nid=19270|title=Pew Data A|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=335|height=554]
[img_assist|nid=19271|title=Pew Data B|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=612|height=494][/quote]
Scaredy addressed where you’re wrong on this (thanks, scaredy). Even when looking at your own graphs, it clearly shows that having a husband who earns a decent income is very important to most women. It’s also interesting to note that they apparently didn’t include physical attractiveness in the study you’ve linked. You can see from what they *did* include that the spouse’s income is more highly valued by women than by men (women value it at least twice as much as men in the white population). If they had included physical attractiveness, I’m sure that men would have rated that very highly, while women would have rated it at a much lower level (relative to men).
Here is the quote that scaredy was referring to:
“Changing Spousal Roles. In the past 50 years, women have reached near parity with men as a share of the workforce and have begun to outpace men in educational attainment. About six-in-ten wives work today, nearly double the share in 1960. There’s an unresolved tension in the public’s response to these changes. More than six-in-ten (62%) survey respondents endorse the modern marriage in which the husband and wife both work and both take care of the household and children; this is up from 48% in 1977. Even so, the public hasn’t entirely discarded the traditional male breadwinner template for marriage. Some 67% of survey respondents say that in order to be ready for marriage, it’s very important for a man to be able to support his family financially; just 33% say the same about a woman.“
“Finally, we provide detailed evidence on gender di
fferences in revealed mate preferences.
Compared to previous revealed preference studies, we employ a much larger sample and control for a large number of own and partner attributes, which is necessary to guard against omitted variable bias. Our results are overall consistent with many of the previous findings in psychology and economics (e.g., Buss 1995, Eastwick and Finkel 2008, Fisman et al. 2006, Kurzban and Weeden 2005, Regan et al. 2000). In particular, women have a stronger prefer-
ence for income relative to physical attributes, such as facial attractiveness, height, or body
mass index. These results are consistent with predictions from evolutionary psychology (Buss
1989, Buss and Schmitt 1993) and the competing social structure theory (Eagly and Wood
1999).
