Live data from Hacker News

Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

flowingdata.com

81–90 of 445 posts

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#81

Boy, sure are a lot of professions married to teachers.

Teacher's a great pairing for any profession that might involve moving around quite a bit. Teaching jobs are available everywhere and you're probably not going to miss out on big bucks by being in one place versus another. Higher pay here, lower pay there, sure, but after CoL it mostly evens out.

It's also damn near the only career in the US that provides roughly European levels of time off, and, crucially, pretty good (by US standards) parental leave. Time it right and you can be off for four months or so with your newborn, which is a very rare benefit in the US (yeah, I know, some super-rich tech companies offer such perks, but those are uncommon jobs).

Teacher's schedule also means that parent can usually handle afternoon-but-before-5 kid stuff, if the other parent's schedule's standard and inflexible.

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#83
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more, I'm beginning to think that a society in which there is widespread use of birth control and in which the majority of women enter the labor force and work full time in an office is not going to be able to maintain replacement level fertility rates. In which case, the future belongs to societies where women don't work and birth control is stigmatized. It could be that there is a reason why the world was…

Eh, Rome had widespread use of abortifacients, only falling after they had harvested those plants into extinction.

Do you have some data on how widespread and effective it was? Perhaps this also contributed to Rome's population problems - it needed to rely on the provinces to supply labor and manpower for a substantial portion of the Empire, and eventually the capital was moved away from Rome entirely. Constantinople was also basically empty by the time it was conquered, having a population of only 50,000 people when the Turks arrived, from a high of one million.

But I think in such ancient societies, the struggle is a little different. E.g. when you are being ravaged by wars and plagues, you need more than replacement level fertility. You need huge fertility that can recover massive population loss in a short period of time. After Hannibal decimated the population of Italy, Rome recovered remarkably quickly. They just made more Romans. Later on, that stopped working and they needed manpower from the provinces.

In modern societies, we've licked most of the other stuff and so can keep going much longer as fertility declines, to the point where we start noticing only when rates hit below replacement. Traditional societies would see population loss long before fertility rates fell below replacement.

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#85
post #22

Many anecdotal guesses are validated by this data. Doctors and agricultural workers are the obvious standouts, but I see a few more too. Us programmers stick together. Quite a high rate of marrying within the community. Lawyers show a similarly high number. A criticism of the study, is that it does not normalize by how many of these professions are in the general population. So, it appears as though software analysts…

> Doctors and agricultural workers are the obvious standouts Doctor is one of the few profession that's available in the countryside, where 90% of the jobs will be in the agricultural sector. > So, it appears as though software analysts don't like intermarrying. However, the truth is that there simply aren't enough of them around, they are simply more likely to run into software engineers, so that's whom they marry m…

The data shows physicians predominantly marry other physicians and ag workers tend to marry other ag workers. Not that physicians and agricultural workers inter-marry

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? There isn’t much paperwork and you will save on taxes.

> you will save on taxes ... if you pair a high earner with a low/no earner

This is correct. When I was still in grad school and the better half was working as an engineer I pretty much got the ultimatum that we needed to get married for the tax break. We had been living together for 7 years.

But then we were both working and living in SF as engineers and I did my taxes on my own for the first time about 3 years in from graduate school. I was shocked that the penalty for being married vs. not was $3000. I immediately turned to my wife, and said, "split, and split the difference?". (She understood that I was joking.) And then I discovered that you can't fix it that way, you still get taxed at the same rate. Or did. That was 30 years ago. (We're still married, humor is important.)

But after that while working at Sandia I had a PhD friend getting married to another fresh PhD, and I did tell him, do take a look at the tax hit.

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#88
No surprises that those in exploitative working conditions - not payment, but time - end up intermarrying the most: chefs, doctors, nurses... all of them have one thing in common: extremely long shifts, frequent overtime and double shifts.

When living with a "normal" 9-5 person, that person will build up resentment for not seeing their partner, for differing sleep schedules, frequent travel and whatever else comes with that job. Someone in a similar work environment however knows the struggles themselves and since they also have the same problem as their partners, there is less chance of resentment directed to the partner - hard to get annoyed by your partner working a spontaneous double shift when you have been in the same situation a week earlier!

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#89
post #66

I'm a software developer. I don't know about the rest of the community but for me someone being in tech is, if not a disqualifier, something very close to it. I have no real reason or justification! I guess maybe I'm just techy enough as is and prefer other qualities in a partner.

This was one of the reasons I moved to NYC many years ago over Silicon Valley. No doubt the career opportunities in SV would have been greater but the diversity in company (both friendly and romantic) has a lot going for it.

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am! Everywhere I've worked the gender imbalance is so extreme that it'd be impossible unless all the guys are married to each other.

Well it topped out at ~14%. At least it suggest women in programming quite heavily preferred their counterpart coders.

Preferred, or just ratio is so skewed that they married who they interacted with all the time. Men could not do that as much as the were not enough women.

In this regard women devs get added bonus of working tech. Relatively high salary and likely have higher family incomes as both partners work in high earning field. Where as male devs would often marry partners earning less.

Post reply on HN