Their measure of "promotion" is also idiosyncratic. They COULD have used promotion as just "rank in the party list," i.e. an actual promotion in rank within an employer or institution, the party. But rather, they use tournament outcomes, i.e. winning an election.
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ONLY in dual earner households do we see the "women's promotion leads to more divorce but men's promotion leads to less divorce" finding. But since it doesn't generalize across family structures, we should be careful in interpreting it.
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And ESPECIALLY since the most "traditional" households, in terms of division of labor, don't show these patterns, we should really, really, REALLY be hesitant to suggest that this is about *specifically gendered* assumptions about division of labor. cc
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Astoundingly, the authors don't even mention the traditionalist graph there, or the interesting finding re: reverse-specialized households. They focus on just the dual earner graphs, and declare their theory supported.
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Their next robustness check is also interesting! They find that after a wife is promoted in traditionalist households, the husband tends to scale back his market labor.pic.twitter.com/Sm9kul5vaZ
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Which really belies the idea that what's going on is women getting promoted causes dudes to have anxiety and initiate a divorce. Seems like the husbands hit with the biggest "shock" here.... are pretty okay with it and appreciate not having to work as much?
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Their next robustness test looking at transitions in household type also show that women transitioning from traditional to dual-earner households have lower divorce rates than women already in reverse-traditional households who remain in them.
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i.e. it's not about traditionalists being bothered by women getting promoted
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SO, what we can see is that in terms of MARKET LABOR, there simply is no evidence to support the veiw that traditional gender norms of any kind were to blame here. But market labor division is just one way to measure!
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Another classic indicator of traditional gender norms is difference in marriage age! And it turns out, when the politician-spouse is younger than the non-pol spouse, getting promoted increases divorce.... REGARDLESS of politician sex!pic.twitter.com/UNjx7212OX
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The effect is bigger for women, but that may just be a small sample size of younger husbands becoming politicians. For same-age couples of EITHER politician sex, there's no effect. For politician-older, there's also no meaningful effect.
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So basically what we can say is: if one spouse of EITHER sex is 4 years younger or more and they get a huge promotion, it boosts odds of divorce. So it's age-based hierarchies, not sex-based hierarchies!
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The ONLY robustness check that supports a sexism hypothesis is this parental leave one, but then there's the finding showing that in couples where the man took more leave, the man getting promoted was less likely to be divorced which is tricky to interpret.pic.twitter.com/vBtpKA165x
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In other words, the whole effort to portray this as being fundamentally about anxiety men feel about their high-earning spouses just seems woefully misplaced.
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I don't have a good comprehensive theory of what's going on here. I think it's worth pointing out again that age imbalances were predictive across sexes, while traditionalist work arrangements were actually LESS likely to result in excess divorce for promoted women.
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Finally, let me note on the Monitoring the Future survey
@DKThomp cites: when individuals respond to surveys like that, we should not assume their main motives are the topic at the forefront of our minds.Show this thread -
As just one example that comes to mind since I have a newborn in my lap, if more and more young people hold the belief set 1) expanded maternity leave is unlikely and 2) breastfeeding is important, then for any given set of preferences and values around women's work....
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Then respondents will necessarily tend to express preferences for women to work less. I'm not saying 12th graders are thinking about breastfeeding; but my point is....
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it's trivially easy to come up with coherent and not-fantastically-absurd models where RISING unconditional valuations on women's career advancement nonetheless manifest in FALLING conditional valuations, if other factors are changing too!
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For example if, as is in fact the case, the number of children young people say they want to have is rising, and if they believe maternal work makes it hard to have those kids, they might value work at the same amount or more than prev, but just value more kids even more!
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Or if, as is in fact the case, the intensity of parenting is rising and young people believe that "good parenting" requires a large amount of work, and that workplace sexism yields more income for men, then they would tend to express less egalitarian work prefs.
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Give me a few more minutes and I can give you several more plausible preference sets. My point is, it could be that progress on individual preferences and desires around women's work has stalled. Or maybe not.
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The chart in the OP suggests hard opposition to egalitarian work norms is still falling at a decent clip, so color me skeptical of the idea that we're seeing a stall in changes in gender norms.
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End of conversation
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