With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it’s a good time to take a look at data on marriage in the United States. It’s been a hot topic lately not just among demographers and sociologists, but also among economists and others who are worried about economic inequality. Although it’s now old news that marriage rates in the United States are declining, with people waiting until later to marry and an increasing number not marrying at all, the class differences that have appeared in marriage rates have not been as widely discussed. DASIL has created two visualizations that let you explore aspects of these changes from the 1970s to the present.
Less-educated Americans are now less likely to be married than more-educated Americans. The visualization above shows marital status by education and gender for Americans 1976 to present, based on data from the General Social Survey.
Americans who are not married tend to have lower incomes than those who are. This visualization shows the median income of Americans age 18 and over by marital status, race, and gender, 1974 to present, based on data from the Current Population Survey.