Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

flowingdata.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 445 posts

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#101

Post by beerandt »

bumby wrote: post #77
beerandt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except many couples meet in school, where they'd be exposed to a disproportionate number of potential spouses within their own field of study, and maybe to a lesser extent others in related programs within the same college. Which would also be skewed by things like length of study and personality types attracted to particular interests. Eg, Doctors and lawyers often don't want to get married until after school, at wh…

I’ve read that one reason wealth inequality is worse today is because high-education-high-income individuals want to marry other HEHI individuals whereas in the past this wasn’t the case. If the claim about the past is true, it seems to undermine your point

Why? In the past (pre 1960s/70s/80s) spouses largely didn't meet in college/university level education or at the workplace, or if they did, it wasn't as peers.

But my point isn't so much that people meet in college, so much as there isn't really a good way to adjust statistical measurements to account for the popularity of a particular field/job, as was suggested up thread.

There are way too many related, interdependent, conflicting variables, with common field of study being a major one, even for the smaller disciplines.

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#102

Post by leetcrew »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #73
bedobi wrote: 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.

I once dated a lovely beautiful nerdy funny intelligent successful software engineer. Our first five dates were awesome. So much agreement and joy and commonality. Instant connection and camaraderie. Further on we realized we didn't bring enough to relationship. We didn't want the"gender I'm attracted version of myself". We each wanted somebody to bring new perspectives, challenge us in ways that work and nerdy frien…

I had a similar experience dating someone in the field, though it went on a bit longer. for me it was just kinda rough to come home from a day of working on software to talk to my SO about their problems with software. great person, but it was an exhausting relationship.

on the other hand, most of my friends also do software stuff and we enjoy complaining to each other about work. I guess maybe the difference is you can say "not now" to a friend more easily than a partner.

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#103

Post by TMWNN »

rsj_hn wrote: post #65
TMWNN wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I've wondered the same thing. Anti-sexual harassment training, and more broadly the discouraging of socialization between men and women, has also reduced the opportunity for men and women to marry. The flip side of the male executive no longer being able to chase his secretary around a desk to try to pinch her on the butt is another executive not being able to politely court the secretary he is in love with (and…

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…

>There could be other creative solutions, like reimagining higher education to give people time to marry and have kids before college.

This is essentially the advice of the "Princeton Mom": Find and marry your spouse in college. https://www.today.com/popculture/marry-smart-princeton-mom-s...>

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#104

Post by chrisseaton »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #100
chrisseaton wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it appears as though software analysts don't like intermarrying What happened to 'software analysts'? Is that even a career today? Sounds like something straight out of the 80s. Is it a 'product owner'? But the real explanation is that realistically 90% of people meet their spouses in university.

> But the real explanation is that realistically 90% of people meet their spouses in university This is very exaggerated. It seems like people who find their partner in university are in the minority these days.

Is that the case? I guess my university experience is 10 years out of date but that's how it was back then.

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#105

Post by thrower123 »

xhevahir wrote: post #70

I'd be interested to see a historical comparison. Supposedly the (male)doctor-marries-(female)nurse pattern of several decades ago--or the executive/secretary one, to give another example--has given way to a situation where Americans tend to marry within their own profession/class.

If you look at some of the trades and more artisinal professions (plumber, electrician, hvac, welding, jeweler for some examples), the top matches are often things like "non-medical secretary", book-keeping and accounting, office managers, retail supervisors, etc.

That suggests to me that there's still a lot of cases where they've got their spouse running the office or the business end of a small business. That was almost a stereotypical arrangement for couples of my parents' generation.

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#106

Post by dmurray »

screye wrote: 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…

> This study captures P(running into a profession) x P(preference for that profession). I would love to them model P(running into a profession), so that we could get the much juicer preferences of each group for various professions.

The page links to a different visualization of the same data, [0] which attempts to control for the prevalence of a job within the population.

Maybe it doesn't go far enough for you but that's a pretty big first step in that model.

[0] https://flowingdata.com/2017/08/28/occupation-matchmaker/

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#107

Post by maerF0x0 »

bedobi wrote: 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.

Funny enough, my anecdata has been the inverse. Thats is being a software engineer has been sufficient evidence for people to walk away without even getting to know me. Which is definitely interesting because I've had people say "I cant believe you're an engineer, you're nothing like the other engineers I know" outside my work context.

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#109

Post by asdff »

chrisseaton wrote: post #67
screye wrote: 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…

> it appears as though software analysts don't like intermarrying What happened to 'software analysts'? Is that even a career today? Sounds like something straight out of the 80s. Is it a 'product owner'? But the real explanation is that realistically 90% of people meet their spouses in university.

According to FB only 28% of married couples meet in college.

Re: Which jobs most often pair together among married couples

#110

Post by missedthecue »

TehShrike wrote: post #91

I was disappointed they didn't include "homemaker" or "unemployed" so you could see which professions supported a family by themselves.

I think you'd see a lot of professions of people who culturally value a homemaker, not anything about the highest paying careers. My guess is that the list you describe would be dominated by the trades, trucking, and small business ownership.
Post reply on HN