Comments on The Marriage Advantage -- for Men

• Hmmm
• Posted by daniel , Patient-Family Advocate at The Advocate for Patients and Families, Inc. on November 10, 2007 at 11:00am EST

• At the risk of putting myself on a limb, I noticed other than "married men tend to engage in less risky behaviors than non-married men" that there was no mention of the possiblity that mens sexual urges, desires and needs for those special moments of intimacy seemed to be totally lacking in the dialogues contained herein. I am uncertain as to why this angle was seemingly and so simply blown off, Perhaps another study might bring these conclusions to a head.

  Sincerely

  Daniel Lehrman, MSW
  through the courtesy of previous training from:
  Domena Renshaw, MD
  Loyola University
  Stritch School of Medicine
  Sexual Dysfunction Clinic

• Support?
• Posted by j. on August 30, 2005 at 7:27am EDT

• This article seems to overlook some obvious other possibilities: Do married men get support from their spouses than married women? Are women more likely to financially support their doctoral student husbands than vice versa? Do women do the majority of the home chores/childcare?

  If women do take better care of their husbands than men take of their wives, that would explain a lot of the disparity. It's easier to finish a dissertation when you have fewer distractions like money worries and mundane chores.

• Posted by D. Berkowitz on August 30, 2005 at 7:33am EDT

• I wonder how having children impacts these outcomes? I have first-hand experience that being married while working on a graduate degree is beneficial. The married, and usually older/more mature, members of my Masters program fared better academically than the single/younger members [whether our social life was better is debatable]. Having children is what has kept me from starting any additional graduate work until the present. Now that this kids are getting older and daycare issues are waning, it is time to get back into the classroom.

• Article (or study) overlooks other explanations
• Posted by Eric on August 30, 2005 at 10:29am EDT

• Or, it could just be that being older helps one complete a doctorate, and that age has greater benefits for the (frequently less mature) men, than women. Marriage is a proxy for age, usually. The article doesn't say what other characteristics the author controlled for, so it's unclear to me whether the study is flawed or the reporting is shoddy.

• Marriage Advantage
• Posted by A. Albarran , Grad Student/Career Employee at UC San Diego on August 30, 2005 at 10:30am EDT

• This paper also overlooks any mention of another category of full-time doctoral student-those that happen to be 100% career employees. My Ed.D. cohort consists of 7 students, 2 males, and 5 females. Two of the females are married. Both of the females have double income families. Both males are married with families, One has a double income, and one supports a stay-at-home mom and children through a single income. All 7 members of the cohort work 100% in education related careers.

  During the last three years, I have encountered more men than women who were in a similar position (full-time doctoral student/100% career employee supporting a family on a single income) but succumbed to the pressures of life circumstances eventually becoming an attrition statistic. What can be said of men that support their stay-at-home wives and children and are in doctoral programs? Some men may receive more support for the "mundane chores" but are not necessarily exempt from the "money” or other worries in life.

• Advantage?
• Posted by Walkin' guy on August 30, 2005 at 10:30am EDT

• I'm just starting my second year in graduate school. I'm also starting my second year of marriage. The marriage, and my spouse's expectations, have put a serious damper on my academic achievement. Simply put, time spent with spouse (and Spouse needs a lot of time) is time spent away from work.

  Quality and quantity of work lead to academic employment. Without quality work, my employment prospects in this lousy market get worse.

  So in my experience, spouse + graduate school may equal divorce. Quite the opposite finding in my case.

• Posted by Jonas! , Mastermind at The CardBoard Box Mansion on August 30, 2005 at 10:30am EDT

• He writes that the likely explanation for the marriage advantage to men is similar to the explanations for why marriage helps men generally. Married men tend to be more productive (across professions), stay in better physical and mental health, and are less likely to engage in “risky behaviors,” Price writes.

  Actually, a better explanation is that people who engage in those behaviors are less likely to get married.

• Gender differences in completion of doctorate
• Posted by Dora Finamore , Assistant Professor at Northcentral University on August 30, 2005 at 10:31am EDT

• The gender difference may be a result of married men having more stability, support, and distractions, especially in the social arena. For men, the emotional, and perhaps financial support from a spouse, can make a difference in motivation, committment, and responsibility to complete the doctorate. Research supports the marriage advantage for men, while demonstrating a difference for women in general. When I completed my doctorate I was married with a young child. It was tough because I also had the burden of most other responsibilities even with a supportive spouse. Interesting...

• Posted by Gina Hiatt , Dissertation and Faculty Coach on August 30, 2005 at 10:39am EDT

• Another overlooked possibility is that the men who don't marry by that life stage are not as "mentally prepared" in some way to finish graduate school. In other words, the causality could go in the other direction. The only way to test this would be to take a sample of male graduate students and force half of them to marry. I can't see that passing the IRB!

• Posted by Danonymous on August 30, 2005 at 12:39pm EDT

• I was in year 7 of an undergrad when I met my wife...faltering. (Sad yes) After that, I got through my first masters in a year and a half and well into my PhD in no time. It's amazing what another affected person can do to your focus.

  I'm not average, I'm sure. Just too smart and unmotivated (under-ambitious) for my own good. Add another person to the equation, and that ambition kicked in.

• Marriage advantage???
• Posted by Single Woman PhD on August 30, 2005 at 7:56pm EDT

• When I was in grad school in the early 90s, I was told to NOT get married because over 80% of grad school marriages end in divorce. I'm not sure where that stat came from (sorry), but one year in my PhD program I saw proof: there were 10(yes, ten) men in my English dept. who left their wives.

  I also question, as did others, if married male PhD students finish faster because they have a wife who cooks and cleans and does other "chores" for them. One of my male professors would brag that his wife typed his dissertation (I'm not so sure he typed hers when she decided to get her doctorate). I think many pieces of data are missing from this article (and perhaps the actual study). The premise, of course, is interesting, but I'd like to see more data.

• Another statistic
• Posted by Separated going through divorce on August 31, 2005 at 4:37am EDT

• Can't agree more with the comments posted..Would like to find out how randomly you selected your subjects. I heard the stats on rates of divorce being higher among doctoral students than other graduates when I started the doctoral program (several years back!!). I agree that the demands placed on a married man is much higher. What about the mental health of your partner? Could one control for that too? Having a supportive, understanding and helpful spouse is more important. If at the end of the school day one has to deal with an unsympathetic partner, I just don't think being married just gets you a doctorate..One's ability to cope with stress is as important as anything else. We live in a culture where it is easy to walk out of a relationship because one spouse is tired of the other being eternally educationally institutionalized without understanding how one contributes to that state of affair. I think marriage enrichment should be a course that should be offered to both partners if divorce rates are higher among the doctoral students. As they say, Prevention is better than cure..

• Confirmation Bias
• Posted by Alex on August 31, 2005 at 10:46am EDT

• Control group? Sample size? Did anyone notice that 10 departments at 10 universities equals one department at each university? What department? Some departments have but few PhD students! If the departments are all, say, clinical psychology departments, can we honestly say that it generalizes to physics or philosophy?

  Generally speaking, people like themselves. So why wouldn't a person that enjoys their marriage want to say that everyone should be married? I appreciate the thought, but this study doesn't merit all the jumping to conclusions written in these responses. Statistics and research methods classes people: go back and do it again!

  Are these numbers really significant? One term earlier graduation for programs that take years... Wow. So they wanted to finish earlier because they had kids. No kidding? Since we don't know what departments, we don't know if this is the sort of program that demands more qualitative or quantitative work. What about quality of work? None of this was mentioned.

  What disturbs me the most is the prejudice. Whether the reporting was too vague or the research more of a pilot study, I am shocked at the pirana-fest here. Got hate? Let's throw diversity to the wind in favor of beating down single males, eh?

  This reminds me of relatives pressuring me into marriage. It isn't a good idea. The next thing you know, you're married to some psychopath (or, if you're pc, someone with anti-social personality disorder). If this study has any meaning at all, it isn't just marriage, people; it's the prejudice you've just shown.

  If anything, we should be asking ourselves, how are we failing to enable single males to be successful in graduate school? We ask this for any other group, yet here it seems the hate-fest instead is ok? No. It's not ok.

  Perhaps we should all refer to the source of all this angst, the Bible, wherein we all all supposedly married in our "youth." Obviously, those of us not married in our "youth" (people in Biblical times usually didn't live to see 32) must be immoral failures. I'm 32 and never married and I'm in no hurry to be married to satisfy someone else's prejudices. If and when I meet the right person and the right sequence of events happen such that lead to marriage, so be it. I completed my master's degree with an improvement of over .6 (half a letter grade) from my undergraduate GPA to my graduate cumulative GPA. I also know the kind of hate that gets directed to single males in some graduate school programs. I went through hell to finish that degree with that performance. Thanks for sharing the hate, but next time I'll sue.

• SPEAKING OF PSYCHOPATHS
• Posted by Althea on October 31, 2005 at 4:33am EST

• I agree, what the world needs is more empowering of single men, they have suffered for so long.

• Posted by nerd on May 31, 2006 at 3:55am EDT

• Ok, for everyone's sake, I read the paper.

  First of all, it's not regression analyses. Rather, the author uses bootstrapping, simulation, comparison of means & etc. This means we are not sure how much of the variation in terms of doctoral outcomes is explained by marital status.

  Second, the author uses marriage before starting the doctoral program. So there could be a self-selection effect although the author downplays the effects of that. But I think most people would agree that having a partner helps one to learn emotional management. So it would be great to see how the results would be changed by variables such as marriage initiated while in doctoral program and girlfriend/boyfriend.

  Third, the author control for the student’s gender, marital status, GRE verbal and quantitative score, race, age, and whether he or she had a master’s degree prior to entering graduate school. He also control for the student’s field of study and institution. Looks pretty comprehensive but I feel the author can do better by including nationality, spouse characteristics, actual number of RA hours worked and number of kids.

  Fourth, the data actually includes advisor, publications, and characteristics of the first job. But the author did not use these variables in the analyses. In my field, the fifth year funding is actually dependent on satisfactory performance. The publication record normally looks better on the fifth year. So finishing too early could be an indication that the faculty don’t want to invest in the doctoral candidate. Also, married people with kids would want to finish earlier but might land up in a lower status school. I heard that in the sciences, if one want to get a tenure-track job at a R1, it is necessary to do a post-doc. This would be even more impossible for the married man.

• Not Too Surprising
• Posted by M.P. (Wylie) , Dr at The Union Institute & Univesity on October 20, 2006 at 4:20pm EDT

• One of the greatest qualities of a successful marriage is couples' supporting one another's growth and endeavors. It's not surprising that married men did better in achieving graduate degrees in a shorter period of time and moved into tenure sooner and yet not too surprising that women's results were not quite as high. Sometimes higher education pursuits can actually be the breaking point in an unstable marriage, especially when couple's aren't receiving the important need of giving one another support. It would be interesting to know the average of how many marriages have actually broken up during the time one spouse was in the field of completing a graduate degree. It certainly was not the "cause" of the break up of our 22-year marriage, but it did bring clarity to the fact that my partner did not support me in growing and achieving. In the midst of my studies to accomplish a Ph.D., I went through a divorce, continued to care for my five children, worked a 30-hour workweek, and took on the responsibility of funding my own education. By the way I'm a woman and yes it was harder and did take longer, but today it was worth every effort and sacrifice along the way. Blessed are those who achieve higher degrees with the loving support of a spouse and blessed are those who achieved it on their own without the support of a partner.