Dollars and Sex (4 page)

The first important economic factor is the increasing importance of university education. According to the U.S. Department of the Census, the share of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in postsecondary degree programs increased from 24 percent in 1973 to 41 percent in 2009. Much of that increase in enrollment was due to the increased university attendance of women; between 1999 and 2009, the number of full-time female students increased by 63 percent compared to an increase of only 32 percent for full-time male students. This more rapid enrollment of women wasn't just because women were catching up to men: since 1988, women have made up the majority of postsecondary students. In the past forty years, the share of university students who are female has doubled from 30 percent to 60 percent, and by 2010, 36 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 29 had completed a bachelor's degree compared with only 28 percent of men.

This steady rise in university enrollment has had some important consequences for those who are not able to take that step. The first consequence is that as a greater proportion of the population becomes university educated, individuals who do not have a postsecondary education have
become increasingly marginalized and, to a certain degree, stigmatized. The stigma of not having an education extends into the workplace as employers progressively have come to expect workers to have a university education, even for jobs that could be productively filled by high school-educated workers. The result is that workers without a postsecondary education are shelved in low-paying, and extremely low-skilled, jobs.

Low-skilled jobs have what economists call a very flat earnings profile—the wages low-skilled workers are paid increase very little as workers gain years of experience. Because of this, low-skilled workers are not penalized for workforce interruptions (such as taking time out of the workforce to care for small children) in the same way as high-skilled workers. High-skilled workers, who see their pay increase as they gain years of experience, both lose their current income and see a decrease in future income when they take time out of the workforce to care for their children.

The second consequence for workers on the low end of the growing educational divide is that the gap between the wages paid to skilled and unskilled workers has increased substantially over time. Firms are investing more in technologies that complement the talents of educated workers at the expense of technologies used by less-educated workers. This means that not only are the wages of educated workers increasing but also the wages of low-skilled workers are falling. In fact, by some estimates, the wage of an average worker with less than a high school education fell by 30 percent for men and 16 percent for women between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s.

Given that education has become so important both for finding employment and for earning a living wage, you might be tempted to think that young women and men would carefully avoid any circumstances that might prevent them from staying in school—circumstances like having a baby. If that were the case, premarital sex and promiscuity among adolescents and young adults should have fallen as education has become increasingly important. The reason it hasn't is that for many young people there is no hope of ever continuing in school regardless of the choices they make. This is true, of course, because postsecondary education is not freely available to everyone.

We will return to this relationship between promiscuity and education in more detail in
chapter 7
, when we talk about the sexual behavior of teenagers. Suffice it to say for the time being that a young adult's willingness to be promiscuous is tied to the cost of tuition in college—when tuition fees are high, youth tend to engage in riskier sexual behavior. This observation explains, in part, why the teen pregnancy rate is so much higher in the United States than it is other developed nations with more affordable postsecondary education.

Of course, tuition is not the only reason why some students can reasonably expect never to go to college, and for those youth, those who don't anticipate a bright future, the costs of promiscuity are significantly lower than for other students who do look forward to a good education and a higher income.

One of the reasons women have abstained from sex in the past was fear that having a sexual history would send a bad signal to any potential future husband. It said:
This woman will not be a faithful wife
. Premarital sex has become the social norm, perhaps, but marriage prospects still play a role in the sexual choices made by unmarried woman and men.

WOMEN (OR MEN) WITH CHILDREN NEED NOT APPLY

Ten minutes on a dating site should be sufficient to convince anyone that having had a child before marriage will limit a lonely single's options on the marriage market. I have seen more than one online dating profile in which the prospective lover had written something along the lines of “What part of ‘N
O
W
OMEN
W
ITH
C
HILDREN
' don't you people understand?”

I don't read many women's online dating profiles, so I don't know if women are as upfront as men are in stating their preferences for a childless partner, but I do know that many women, especially younger women, will not date a man if he has had a child. Being a father suggests to women that a man has fewer resources and time than otherwise unencumbered suitors.

As a friend once said to me, “Why would I date a man who is off buying his children snowsuits when he could be spending that money on me?” (Honestly, I don't make this stuff up.)

If a child is the result of a causal fling, rather than a committed relationship, even potential partners who otherwise wouldn't have minded having those children in their lives think otherwise. The problem for women is that having had a child both before marriage and outside of the context of a serious relationship suggests to potential future husbands that a woman is promiscuous. For men who have children with whom they are not involved, it suggests to future wives that they are both promiscuous and unwilling to live up to their obligations.

People might reasonably avoid promiscuity for fear that it will later affect their marriage prospects. Given that, a reasonable explanation for the increase in promiscuity is that people feel they are less likely to ever marry regardless of their behavior, or at least if they do marry it will be so late in their life that a few years of promiscuous behavior in their youth will seem less important.

As I said in the introduction, the general feeling among the current generation of youth is that marriage is not necessary to ensure future happiness. According to the Pew Center for Research, among 19- to 29-year-olds who had no children and had never been married, only 66 percent say they want to marry at some point in their lives. Most of these young men and women are likely to marry at some point in their lifetimes; the share of the population that marries at some point in their lives has stayed fairly stable over the decades at around 90 percent. But over the past fifty years, the marriage rate (the share of the population that is married at any one point in time) has fallen for everyone.

No one group has been affected more by the decline in marriage rates than the group of men and women who are both low skilled and, as a result, low paid. If we go back to our previous example that I used to illustrate the economic costs of promiscuity, and assume that our fictional woman would have had only a 48 percent chance of marrying, even without a mistimed pregnancy, then really the expected cost of promiscuity for her is something like this:

Even without an improvement in the effectiveness of contraceptives, her cost for premarital sex has fallen by more than half, making it even less likely that she will choose to wait to have sex in the hopes of marrying a man with a good income.

Of course, this is a simplified view, but many other factors that we might consider will only increase the incentives men and women have to be promiscuous. For example, knowing that they will not marry until they are in their late 20s or early 30s makes it more likely that men and women will
have not only one premarital sexual partner but several before they meet the person they will eventually wed. The ease with which couples can now divorce has reduced the need to find a partner who has the characteristics we would look for in a faithful mate, such as virginity, because the credible threat of ending the relationship makes it easier to enforce fidelity. More independent decision making by young adults has effectively eliminated the chance that the families will force them to marry their sexual partners against their wishes, freeing us to have sex with people whom we hope will make good sexual partners but know would make lousy spouses.

Just the fact that young adults are expected to live away from their parents for a period before they marry, if they are spending time in postsecondary education for example, increases promiscuity in that it reduces parental supervision and some of the shame associated with having premarital sex.

All of these economic factors, and no doubt others, have contributed to a change in social norms that have freed many to engage in riskier sexual behavior. But while promiscuity among heterosexuals is increasing, it seems that one community is actually experiencing a decrease in promiscuity: gay men.

SAME-SEX ATTRACTION, A LOVE STORY