JOANNA R. PEPIN

Yesterday, the New York Times published an op-ed piece by Stephanie Coontz titled “Do Millennial Men Want Stay-at-Home Wives?” In it, Coontz highlights research I co-authored with David Cotter which is featured in a set of reports by the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF). Based on nationally representative survey data of high school seniors (Monitoring the Future), we show that youths’ attitudes about gender in families became more progressive from the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s, after which the trend reversed course. 

Although the New York Times used a click-bait title for the op-ed, the main story is not that millennial men are becoming more traditional in their gender attitudes at a greater rate than millennial women. A paper included in CCF’s online symposium used data from the General Social Survey to investigate 18-25 year olds’ beliefs about male breadwinner/female homemaker arrangements, which Coontz reviews in her New York Times op-ed. This data showed a slight divergence in young men’s and women’s beliefs about gender in families. Concerns were raised that the sample sizes were small, and then data released this week from the 2016 survey – after Coontz’s piece went to press – show the opposite pattern. Emily Beam provided a nice overview of this discussion. Unfortunately, her explanation is now getting misinterpreted too, such as in this piece in Fortune, declaring “Relax, Millennial Men Don’t Actually Want to Keep Women in the Kitchen.”
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The take-away from our research of high school seniors’ attitudes is that millennial men and women are mostly in agreement about gender dynamics in families, and they are less progressive than we thought – and less progressive than they were two decades ago. The surprising trend in youths’ attitudes about gender in families is not that young men hold more conventional beliefs than young women, but that both men and women are espousing less egalitarian beliefs than before. Cotter and I describe the trend, presented below, in our response paper in the CCF symposium.

​The second misinterpretation from our findings is that youth do not support women’s and mothers’ employment. The comment section of the New York Times article shows people rehashing the “mommy wars” debate – do people prefer a stay-at-home mother arrangement or a dual-earner partnership. This is understandable given the New York Times headline and our emphasis on the increasing agreement that the male breadwinner/female homemaker model is best for everyone. However, Monitoring the Future data show a much more complicated story. In fact, results show young men and women increasingly support women’s equality at work and are less likely to believe mothers’ employment harms children. 

We argue that these seemingly contradictory attitudes are evidence of beliefs in “egalitarian essentialism” – pairing beliefs that men and women are inherently different with commitment to equal opportunity.
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If you want to dig deeper into our findings, please check out our working paper, available on SocArxiv.

Millennials now make up about an equal share of the electorate as the Boomer generation, which has generated much commentary on millennials' participation in the upcoming election. Based on data from American high school seniors, I find that 88% of millennials predicted they probably will vote in a public election. 

I used the yearly reports of high school seniors' attitudes collected in the Monitoring the Future Survey, an ongoing survey of American students' attitudes and behaviors conducted since 1976. The limitation of this data-set is that it doesn't include youth who dropped out of school before twelfth grade, which varies over time. 

About 90% of Boomer (seniors 1976 - 1982) and Generation X (seniors 1983 - 1999) members reported they will probably vote in a public election, when asked while they were high school seniors. Thus, the 88% of millennials (seniors 2000+) predicting they will someday vote is slightly down from previous generations of American youth. 

​To put this into perspective, 83% of millennial high school seniors reported they think they will eventually choose to get married. By contrast, 78% of Boomers predicted they would eventually choose to get married, while 80% of Generation X reported they expected to marry. In context of actual marriage behavior, even as attitudes about expecting to marry are increasing, a small but increasing number of people will never get married. These disparities highlight a cautionary tale that expectations of future actions do not necessarily predict actual behaviors. Notably, voting expectations remain higher than predictions of future marriage across the three generations.

Past research shows Black men and women are less likely to vote or to marry compared with Whites. These differences in behavior reflect racial variation in predictions of future marriage and voting behavior. The Monitoring the Future data show young Black men and women are less likely to report they expect to marry or to vote in a public election compared to their White counterparts.
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The differences in attitudes between Black and White youth are narrowing. Young Black men and women are increasingly likely to predict they will get married in 2014 (71%) than they were in 1976 (57%).  Black youth's expectations about voting in a public election remain largely unchanged. 

White youth are also increasingly likely to predict they will eventually marry but they are less likely to expect to vote in a public election in 2014 compared to 1976. By 2014, White youth were about as likely to think they will eventually marry as they were to expect themselves to vote in a public election.
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Note: Public data about other racial and ethnic minorities are not available in the Monitoring the Future data-set and thus this analysis is limited to White and Black youth.

[This post is cross-listed at families as they really are.]

I'm taking a women's studies class this spring (yay!). For our first assignment, we were asked to research the etymology of a word central to our research interests. I chose the word marriage. I thought the assignment might be an interesting blog post. So, here it is.

Although marriage is a universal social institution throughout recorded history, with one exception (the Na people of China), there is no consensus on a definition of marriage.[i] When researching the etymology of marriage, I started where I always do, with historian and family scholar Stephanie Coontz. In her book “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” she details in Chapter 2 the historical challenges of defining precisely what “marriage” means. Across societies and time, marriage has included (but has not been limited to) the union of: two families; one man and one woman; one woman and one ghost; one man and many women; two people who have a child together; and one woman and all brothers in a family. More recently, union regulations have centered around age, race, and sex (i.e., age limits, Loving v Virginia, Obergefell v. Hodges).

Although marriage regulates social rights and obligations, nearly every function of marriage has been achieved by a mechanism other than marriage in one society or another. According to Coontz, stories that marriage was invented either for the protection of women or to keep women oppressed, are probably not true. More likely, Coontz argues, marriage was an informal social mechanism to organize the daily tasks of life, sexual relationships, and child rearing. As greater economic disparity grew, marriage transitioned from functioning as a vehicle for creating community connections into a means to consolidate resources and transmit property. The meaning of marriage shifted dramatically in the twentieth century, moving from an institutional marriage to a companionate marriage.[ii] Essentially, spouses were assumed to be each other’s friend, a role not central to earlier definitions of marriage.[iii] The second transition was from companionate marriages to individualized marriages. In this conceptualization, the emphasis is on personal development whereby marriage leads to fulfillment and growth.

It is challenging to untangle contemporary definitions of marriage from definitions of wife and husband. Wife is a noun, defined in relation to another. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, wife means “the woman someone is married to.” Wives often take on adjectives such as military wife, political wife, housewife, and so on.[iv] Author Anne Kingston reports the first appearance of the word wife in the Bible is in Genesis 2:18 “And the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” Translated, quite literally, as a helpmate. Husband, on the other hand, is either a noun or a verb, meaning “a male partner in a marriage,” “to save,” “a frugal manager,” or “to till the ground, to cultivate.”

Last year, the definition of marriage was central to the Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which ultimately granted same-sex couples the right to marry in the U.S. While a somewhat oversimplified interpretation, the case hinged on the Justices’ acceptance that the definition of marriage evolves over time.[v] Justice Kennedy wrote, on behalf of the majority: “The history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. Changes, such as the decline of arranged marriages and the abandonment of the law of coverture, have worked deep transformations in the structure of marriage, affecting aspects of marriage once viewed as essential. These new insights have strengthened, not weakened, the institution. Changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a Nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations.” Kennedy added “This view of marriage as timeless and unchanging was contradicted by an abundance of scholarly work.”[vi]

For further fun, I decided to see what google images appear with the search term "marriage definition." Some of my favorites, because they are insightful, funny, appalling, or thought-provoking are posted below. Full disclosure, I skipped the hate filled images.

​The last two years have brought renewed attention to the social problem of domestic violence. Controversy erupted in 2014 when video of National Football League (NFL) player Ray Rice violently punched his fiancé (now wife) and dragged her unconscious body from an elevator. Most recently, Deadspin.com released graphic images of the injuries NFL player Greg Hardy inflicted on his ex-girlfriend. In both instances, NFL officials insisted that if they had seen the visual evidence of the crime, they would have implemented harsher consequences from the onset. After both of these incidents, some have asked why images of these men’s violence were a necessary prerequisite to public outrage. It’s a good question.

Why are violent images so much more compelling than other evidence of men’s violence against women? A partial answer is found by looking at whose story is privileged and whose account is discounted. The power of celebrity and masculinity reinforces a collective desire to disbelieve the very real violence women experience at the hands of men, especially of men we revere. This month we witnessed 13 Black women collectively share their story of being raped and sexually assaulted by a White police officer, Daniel Holtzclaw, in Oklahoma. Without the combined bravery of the victims, it is unlikely any one woman would have been able to get justice. A similar unfolding happened with Bill Cosby. The first victims to speak out against Cosby were dismissed and treated with suspicion. The same biases that interfere with effectively responding to rape and sexual assault hold true for domestic violence interventions.

Another part of the puzzle of understanding our varied responses to domestic violence is found in the way domestic violence is portrayed. The language we use matters to how we perceive and make sense of social issues. Anti-sexist male activist Jackson Katz points out that labeling victims of sexual crimes “accusers” reverses public support for alleged victims to alleged perpetrators. The media’s common use of a passive voice when reporting on domestic violence inaccurately emphasizes a shared responsibility of the perpetrator and victim for the abuser’s violence and generally leaves readers with an inaccurate perception that domestic violence isn’t a gendered social problem. Visual evidence of women’s injuries at the hands of men is a powerful antidote to this misrepresentation.
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In my own research, forthcoming in Sociological Spectrum, I found that the race of perpetrators also matters to who is seen as accountable for their violence. I analyzed 330 news articles about 66 male celebrities in the headlines for committing domestic violence. Articles about Black celebrities included criminal imagery – mentioning the perpetrator was arrested, listing the charges, citing law enforcement and so on – 3 times more often than articles about White celebrities. White celebrities benefited further by their violence being excused and justified 2½ times more often than Black celebrities’ domestic violence. For example, White celebrities violence was more likely to be described as a mutual escalation or explained away due to mitigating circumstances, such as inebriation. 

​Accordingly, visual imagery of Ray and Hardy’s violence upholds common stereotypes of Black men as violent criminals. Similarly, White celebrity abusers, such as Charlie Sheen, remain unmarked as a source of a social problem. It’s telling that the public outcry to take domestic violence seriously has been centered around the NFL, a sport in which two-thirds of the players are African American. The spotlight on Black male professional athletes’ violence against women draws on racist imagery of Black men as criminals. Notably, although domestic violence arrests account for nearly half of NFL players’ arrests for violent crimes, players have lower arrest rates for domestic violence compared to national averages for men in a similar age range. 

​If the NFL is going to take meaningful action to reducing men’s violence against women, not just protect its own image, the league will have to do more than take action only in instances in which visual evidence of a crime is available. Moreover, race can’t be separated from gender in their efforts. 

Modeled after a Danish reality television series, television program Married at First Sight (MAFS) portrays itself as a social experiment -- 6 individuals agree to marry a stranger selected for them by four experts.

I was excited to tune into this show for many reasons, one of which being the appearance of sociologist Pepper Schwartz as one of the four experts. Schwartz is a public sociologist who focuses on intimacy and relationships -- topics that interest me both as a former couples' therapist and now as a junior sociologist. It's also not every day that a sociologist can leverage their expertise to influence the public, and Schwartz has been quite successful in this endeavor.

Merits of the show
Throughout the episodes of MAFS, the experts offered helpful advice, useful to the "couples" as well as the audience tuning in to watch the show. They informed viewers of some social science research findings, such as explaining the "paradox of choice": that people are less likely to be satisfied in their relationships when they perceive many alternative partners. The show was at its best when they explained how they matched people and why it mattered.

Levkoff and spiritual advisor Greg Epstein were also active on social media, providing useful relationship advice to viewers engaging with the show. #MarriedatFirstSight was trending nationally on Twitter during the finale of Season 2, demonstrating the show has a large platform on which to provide educational messages that can strengthen relationships.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
Although MAFS undoubtedly has some benefits, I was troubled by the indiscriminate advice offered by the experts. The most glaring omission was the complete absence of a couple and family therapist! This oversight left the other experts to act as the couples' therapist in a field in which they do not have expertise. While some of their interventions with the couples were helpful, there were times the experts' actions were misguided, harmful, and at worst, dangerous. 

A day before the series finale aired, it was reported that the woman in one of the couples, Jessica, had filed for a protection order against her new husband, Ryan. I don't think it's a case of "hindsight is 20-20" when I state that most domestic violence victim advocates (a job I've previously held) would have been able to tell you that Ryan was displaying signs of abusive behavior within the first couple of episodes. While well-meaning, the strategies used by the experts to intervene were harmful and dangerous. Throughout the season, the experts cast Jessica's "lack of speaking up for herself" as her part of the problem in making their marriage work. This wrongly suggests that Jessica has some part to play in Ryan's choices to be abusive. They should have validated her instincts that it was not safe to speak up, investigated why she felt that way, and held Ryan accountable for actions that further limited Jessica's agency. I applaud efforts to increase women's self-determination, but it is harmful to present Jessica's hesitation to speak up as part of generalized "communication problems." Many of the experts' interventions were perfectly appropriate prompts that could help many couples -- but completely ineffective and harmful for couples when one partner is abusive.

Without any specialist on staff, a psychologist and sociologist were expected to step up and deal with Ryan's increasingly abusive behavior. The show featured a tense video chat with Schwartz to calm the situation. When Schwartz later visits their home to check in with the couple, she admits she is dreading the encounter. I'm not surprised -- working with a person who is abusive to their partner is intimidating and difficult for people with the training to do so. I have no reason to believe Schwartz, or anyone else on the show for that matter, had any domestic violence or family therapy training. 

A (good) family therapist would have known to interview and speak separately with each individual. How can a victim possibly speak openly and honestly when her abusive partner is present and can (and will) use what she says against her later? One of the most egregious errors was when host Kevin Frazier asked Ryan and Jessica to just shake hands and hug to bring an amicable end to their relationship. Would we ask any other victim of a crime to hug their perpetrator? There were brief moments of trying to hold Ryan accountable for his actions, but they were few and far between and often in situations that made it more, not less, dangerous to Jessica.

Beyond the unexpected (but not uncommon) domestic violence depicted on the show, there were so many missed opportunities to use teachable moments to educate the audience about having healthy and respectable relationships. A couple and family therapist could have provided information about how to fight fairly, the importance of building a friendship, why the way you start an argument matters for how you end it, and so many other skills for communicating. Instead, viewers were left with vague calls for "communicating" better and really "working hard." What does that even mean?! A trained therapist wouldn't have attempted to talk two people into trying to save their marriage as a last-ditch effort -- they could have curiously and purposefully helped the individuals figure out what they wanted from each other and from themselves and assisted with devising a plan to achieve those goals.

Can this work?
The American version of this show has now completed two seasons. Two of the three couples from Season 1 are still married, while none of the three couples from Season 2 decided to stay married. The premise of the show received a lot of backlash, with some asserting it trivializes the sanctity of marriage. Many responded by pointing to research that demonstrates arranged marriages are less likely to end in divorce than love marriages. This is a false equivalence. Involving extended family in the route to marriage is not comparable to outsourcing your matchmaking process to supposedly objective strangers. To begin with, arranged marriages have the support of extended family, whereas many of these couples do not. There is also no question that the types of people who opt for an arranged marriage based on cultural tradition are quantifiably different than the types of people who agree to go on national television and marry a stranger selected for them by four other strangers.

If the show really is a social experiment, and not just dramatized reality television (I guess at best it might be both), the experts are going to need to re-examine their approach. For instance, on the Season 2 finale, viewers watched the experts lecture ex-couple Sean and Davina about taking responsibility instead of blaming others, but wedidn't get any accountability from the experts themselves. Repeatedly, the experts asserted that they could only do the matching but the individuals had to do the work. No doubt the couples have to work at building a relationship, but the failure of a lasting partnership was certainly not all on them. The experts reacted defensively to the failed relationships, expressing surprise that two total strangers matched perfectly on paper turned out to be full of contradictory and complicated beliefs and emotions, and in end, human. More concerning are the accusations that the experts were negligent in their matching (casting?) process, failing to adequately hold up their end of the bargain by conducting comprehensive background checks and personality assessments.

Could this show have merit? Sure. I'm still intrigued by the idea that science could successfully match people with compatible and loving partners.

In the end, I think MAFS could be educational as well as entertaining. The layer of domestic violence dynamics from Season 2 is certainly a useful teaching tool. More in-depth responses to the domestic violence portrayal will come in another blog post, there's just so much there.

Note: While I viewed many episodes of MAFS Season 1, most of my analysis for this piece is based on Season 2.