More mercenary mate selection? Comment on Sweeney and Cancian (2004) and Press (2004)

How much do women and men emphasize earning power in selecting a spouse? Has this changed in the last 30 years as the gender and class systems have changed? These questions are raised by Sweeney and Canaan's (2004) article and Press's (2004) comment on it. The discussion exemplifies healthy dialogue involving economic, sociological, and feminist perspectives. I'm pleased to be able to participate. THE CHANGING GENDER AND CLASS SYSTEMS The big change in the gender system in the last 30 years is women's increased employment. As women's employment continuity becomes more like men's and employers discriminate less in hiring, women have higher earnings and more economic independence. Men have increased their household work and time with children nontrivially, but these increases are small compared with the increases in women's employment. This asymmetry is seen in many areas of gender change. For example, girls are given Legos more than boys are given dolls. As Press (2004) puts it, women are changing but men are staying the same or only changing part-way. The big change in the class system in the last 30 years is that men's earnings have become much more unequal. After adjusting for inflation, those at the very top earn more than in the 1970s, whereas the men in the bottom half of the distribution now earn less than in the 1970s (Bernhardt, Morris, Handcock, & Scott, 2001). Women's earnings too have become more unequal, though less so than men's. This results from three factors: the diminution of gender discrimination (when women were constrained to fewer occupations, the variance in their earnings was artificially truncated), faster increases in employment growth among better educated women (Juhn & Murphy, 1997), and the same disequalizing class forces that have made men's earnings more unequal. HOW HAS MEN'S IDEAL MATE CHANGED? Sweeney and Cancian (2004) believe that the increase in women's employment and earnings has led men to emphasize women's earning power more than previously in selecting a mate. Using longitudinal individual-level data, they show that the association between women's premarriage hourly wage and the long-term earning potential of the men they marry has increased between two recent cohorts-the first marrying mostly in the 1970s and the second mostly in the 1980s and 1990s. (Although the measures used to tap women's and men's earning power are different, for reasons they explain, it captures the essence of the argument to think of the measures for each gender as tapping earning potential.) This is true whether we look at zero-order correlations or coefficients from a regression that adjusts for some other characteristics of the two spouses, and is robust to several methods of predicting men's economic trajectory. In sum, Sweeney and Cancian (2004) have shown that the highest earning men are increasingly married to the highest earning women, and the lowest earning men to the lowest earning women. They interpret this to imply an increase in men's emphasis on women's earnings when they choose a wife. They suggest that the greater employment of women increases the emphasis that men place on earnings in choosing a wife. Let us consider in more detail why this might happen. If spouses pool their money, men have always had a pecuniary incentive to choose high-income wives, so why the shift? One possibility is that men's potential gain from prioritizing women's earnings is greater today because women's earnings are higher and more variable (the latter because of shifts in both the gender and class systems). In this case, incentives, not cultural values, have shifted. Economists would call it a "price" effect. Or, perhaps the reason is a shift in cultural preferences. In the old days, any pecuniary gain from a high-earning wife was offset by some shame associated with not being the sole breadwinner. Now, with acceptance of women's employment, the shame is diminished, maybe even replaced with pride or a sense of sharing in her success. …