Tag: marriage

Same-sex marriage makes me better off

I laughed out loud a bit reading this article on how same-sex marriage is actually good for straight women. With only the title to guide me, all I could come up with in terms of expectations was that there would be some long rant about how if gay men can marry, maybe that will reduce the stigma associated with being gay which means that fewer gay men will marry straight women, or that women who had foregone marriage in solidarity would now be able to get married. Let’s say I was pleasantly surprised when the article rather took on equality within marriages as opposed to making some tenuous, crazy link (what was I thinking?!).

Key (first time I laughed out loud) quote:

As same-sex couples marry, things get better for us, too. Remember the scary (and since-discredited) stories about how a woman is more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband after she turns 40? Or the one about how suitors are fleeing from Maureen Dowd because they’re afraid of her Pulitzer Prize? The poll showing evangelical women in patriarchal marriages are happier than Sarah Jessica Parker? Well, same-sex marriage shows that people can make long-term, loving, sexual bonds with each other even where neither is naturally inclined to tell the other what to do.

It’s a cheeky way of putting it, of course, and I’m railing inside against the insinuation that women harp on their partners, but I like how the author takes a historical perspective on women’s rights within marriage. She starts with how marriage stripped a woman of civic personhood and describes various efforts to maintain women in that lesser role until it evolved to where we are today.

As an economist, of course, I think she skipped one of the most salient examples of justifying inequality in marriage. The man who is credited with essentially founding family economics, Gary Becker, argued, and rather convincingly, that gains from marriage, in an economic sense, at least, came from specialization. Men earned higher salaries in the market than women did, so men should work for pay in the market and women should stay at home. It’s a lesson in comparative advantage taken from trade theory (one of my least favorite lessons in teaching principles). If you’re relatively better at something than your partner, you should each specialize in one thing and then trade to maximize gains. This makes your feasible consumption higher than if you tried to do both kinds of work yourself. Interestingly, it doesn’t really matter if you’re technically better at both things, you can still gain by agreeing to specialize and trade. Becker’s work doesn’t rule out that women might actually be better at both market work and home work, but since men did (and still do) earn higher wages than women, they’re going to be relatively better at bringing home the bacon than doing laundry and cleaning.

The scary part is that at face value, it almost seems reasonable. It’s only in reading the work carefully that it smacks of machismo. Becker’s ideas echo (although his work precedes some of it) several other scholars (of sorts) and others mentioned in the article whose work was used to justify keeping women from working and at home, cooking, cleaning and raising the kids. A lot of scholarly work has, unwittingly or not, served the interests of those desiring to maintain unequal marriages.

So, will same-sex marriage make us all more equal? It’s an interesting hypothesis, and one that might even be testable, but I’m not sure we have all the information yet. Legalizing same-sex marriage doesn’t mean same-sex marriage ‘works’ in the sense the author is proposing and we certainly don’t have the same kind of happiness data on same-sex marriage, yet. It’s also problematic that our most recent census won’t count any of these people as married, but the next one will (all these problems again of how we define family). However, there is hope. The process of state-by-state legalization of same-sex marriage means that we have something of a natural experiment. Though not randomly assigned (although you might argue that Iowa’s same-sex marriage law was more random–put in place by the judiciary–than New York’s–put in place by the legislature), the different timing of these laws means that we can measure how other things change within the states. I imagine, as the data become fuller, that lots of papers will come out about how same-sex marriage influences gay ‘brain drain’, women’s wages, etc. It’s exciting to think about.

Changing a marriage paradigm

A few days ago, I mentioned the problem in the DRC of using rape as a weapon of war. Unfortunately, that weapon’s popularity only seems to be increasing, as my twitter feed overflows with news bites of 60 women raped in the DRC, 11 women raped in Sudan, etc.

In Syria, rape is being used as a weapon of war not only to wear down and instill fear in the masses, but also in the name of shame. In Syria, like in many Middle Eastern countries, women who are raped are thought to bring extreme shame upon their families, and are often murdered in ‘honor killings’ to restore the honor of the family.

A small group of men in Syria has publicly declared their intention to marry some of these rape victims in what I’m sure they see as resounding self-sacrifice to the cause of the revolution and a new Syria. I think it is laudable that men are leading the way to change a paradigm in Syria, but it’s also troubling that no one seems to have asked the women about their preferences.

Sex for money is about more than the sex or the money

With Canada looking to decriminalize prostitution, and Sweden touting the success of its increased penalties for pimping and trafficking (the link’s a bit old now), it only makes sense, as economists, to ask why people would engage in transactional sex at all.

Psychologists and anthropologists, I’m sure, have plenty of their own answers. Economists, surely, could come up with a theory of prostitution (if they haven’t, I should get on that). Without too much effort, most people could name the most likely characteristics of women in the sex trade–low self-esteem, from families with a history of abuse, low educational attainment, etc. But there is also reason to ask why women would stay in the sex trade, which is actually a very different question than why do women enter the sex trade. At least one recent paper has explored the relationships between purveyors and consumers of transactional sex. They found, interestingly, that complex relationships form between the two parties, even to the point of providing extra income in times when sex workers couldn’t work or were experiencing a negative “shock”–i.e. illness, death of a family member or an STD outbreak.

The authors of the paper, which comes out of Busia, Kenya, a community rife with development economists testing their theories, found that transfers, or gifts of money, from regular customers increase by 67-71% on days around when a sex worker reported illness and 124% on days around death of friend or relative. In some sense, these regular customers are providing a form of insurance against negative shocks, or events that prevent them from working. The customers are still not providing full insurance for these shocks, meaning though they’re essentially gifting money to their favorite sex worker in order to make the burden of not working or of the extra expense less burdensome, they’re not making up a whole day’s pay, or covering the entire cost of a funeral.

But the question of whether sex workers are fully insured by their relationships with regular customers is less important than whether they are covering themselves better than they would be covered in other professions. Full insurance in poor communities and developing countries is unlikely to come by anyway, so it makes more sense to compare different insurance mechanisms. Here, economics actually does a pretty good job. We are good at comparing two situations in which only one small part of the equation is different (or rather, when we can assume that only one important part is different–if the other different bits are unimportant to the story, we don’t care that they are different, we assume that they do not affect our outcomes). So long as the average amount of the gift is more than the average amount of the transfer she would get had she not been in the sex trade, there is an incentive to enter or remain in the sex trade (the authors here don’t distinguish much between entering and remaining, though I think that’s an important topic for another day). The authors also show this difference to be quite large. Even if a transfer covers only 19% of the cost of a funeral–the average amount reported by the sex workers–that’s far more than zero. On the margin, at least, the incentive seems significant enough to induce women to enter the sex trade as the only arrangement with full insurance, or perhaps just more insurance, is likely marriage.