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, & Ephron, 1992). The message is clear: It is a whole new world out there in the 1990s because women's requirements for potential mates are very different from what they used to be. On one hand, men have to measure up to compete. On the other hand, there are economic benefits for men now that women are working. Megan Sweeney and Maria Cancian's (2004) new approach to understanding the marriage market focuses solely on "splitting the check" and does not theorize women's evaluation of men-that is, women's new demand for cute butts and sharing the household labor. Put another way, the authors' economistic and androcentric approach neglects crucial sociological insights about changing gender and family relations-as well as rising social inequality-in the post-1965 period. Sweeney and Cancian's (2004) interesting and provocative article, "The Changing Importance of White Women's Economic Prospects for Assortative Mating," asks a very important question for the understanding of family formation after the massive social change of women's increased labor force participation in the 20th century: How does women's new employed status alter their value to potential mates? Their careful, erudite analysis adds to the literature by starting a dialogue-using methods that have not been used before-about how best to specify a model of assortative mating in an era of wage-earning women. The article investigates the effect of women's increased economic activity on their value to men as potential wives. Using data from the 1970 U.S. Census, the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women, and the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, they set out to test the hypothesis that "women's earning capacity has become a more important factor over time" (p. 1017). The authors test this hypothesis by estimating husbands' expected earnings and occupational status as a function of wives' premarital wage rate for two cohorts: those marrying predominantly in the 1970s and those marrying in the late 1980s and 1990s. Unlike previous studies, their data are longitudinal and individual level, allowing them to look at assortative mating without the complexities of divorce, for example, or the endogeneity of spouses' earnings during marriage. On one hand, their model assumes that the "quality" of a husband is his economic value only, and that husbands' earnings are stable over time. A wife's "quality," on the other hand, includes her economic and home production value, the latter of which, it turns out, cannot be measured. Results show that, as expected, women's premarriage wage is positively and significantly associated with men's expected earnings and occupational status in the late cohort when compared with the earlier cohort. Sweeney and Cancian (2004) are correct that the raw correlations they present in Table 2 of the article are insufficient to demonstrate their thesis that men's weights on women's economic value have changed. Many factors could be affecting the wages of men and women, and the raw correlation could be masking the movement of these factors within a single bundled measure. A simple example of this phenomenon is the role of education as a type of capital for women. Suppose that men have always placed the same high value on an educated wife as they do now, but historically there were fewer educated women. Over time, women have increasingly gained access to education, so now, more men can achieve their desire for a wife who is as educated as they are. At the same time, the earnings returns to education have increased. …