January 31, 2011

Has there been a change in the gender gap?

In my 1997 National Review article "Is Love Colorblind?" I calculated, based on 1990 Census data, that in interracial married couples featuring one black spouse and one white spouse, the husband was black and the wife was white 72% of the time. Judging by this graph in the New York Times using 2009 data (warning: smaller sample sizes in years not divisible by 10), this proportion has fallen from 72% black husbands to 68% black husbands over the last 19 years.

In contrast, in 1990, 28% of the white-Asian married couples featured an Asian husband. By 2009, that figure had risen to 29%. 

Hence, we see some narrowing of the famous gender gap (famous among my readers, and among people with eyes in their heads), but not much overall. 

Of course, there could be more complicated things going on within subgroups. I'd be particularly interested in looking at native-born v. immigrants. And what about all the people cohabiting without benefit of clergy? Also, the Asian group has shifted significantly toward South Asians since 1990.

In my 1997 article, I couldn't find data on Asian-black marriages (e.g., Tiger Woods' parents, although Tiger's dad was 1/4 Chinese), but I surmised that the gender gap ratio was extreme, which would support my theory of causation for the gender gaps (racial differences in average levels of masculinity and femininity -- P.S., before responding huffily to this, please read "Is Love Colorblind?" so you can at least engage in an informed discussion). The NYT reports than in 2009, of the tiny number of Asians married to blacks, 7/8ths are Asian wives married to black husbands.

In 2009, overall, 95% of married non-Hispanic whites are married to another non-Hispanic white. So, interracial marriage (and its side effects, such as the gender gap) continues to have more impact on minorities.

50 comments:

Mr. Mcgranor said...

I do not have a problem with miscegenation. Although i do not except amalgamation as the rule; but an exception. Autonomy is a rite-of-passage in liberty.

RandyB said...

Black-Asian marriages?

How many black fathers live with their 12-year-old children?

How many Asian mothers of a 12-yo, don't have a husband present?

Felix said...

Funnily enough, this past Friday I went with a Chinese chick to "Uchida Plays Mozart" at the Chicago Orchestra on cheap student tickets. I swear, out of the hundreds of couples I saw there, fully 15-20% consisted of white male-Asian female. I mean, there were a lot of Asians there, both men and women, yet there were far more Asian girls with white dudes than with Asian dudes.

It was kinda strange, when me and my Chinese girl would pass other WM/AF couples and exchange glances, probably thinking that all four of us could switch around partners with no great change in the dynamic. lol.

Anonymous said...

I do not have a problem with miscegenation. Although i do not except amalgamation as the rule; but an exception. Autonomy is a rite-of-passage in liberty.

I often wonder what libertarian types in the HBD sphere would do about interracial marriage...

ATBOTL said...

Why are we talking about interracial marriage in 2011? We should be talking about interracial procreation.

Anonymous said...

RandyB said...

Black-Asian marriages?

They're more common in the military. Especially US forces based in Korea.

Anonymous said...

Ah, Steve, nitpick time... it should be "Has THERE been a change in the gender gap?"

Anonymous said...

(Fix your spelling, Steve. "Their" should be "there.")

A friend who loves your work and hates grammar-Pol-Pots.

RandyB said...

Black-Asian marriages?

They're more common in the military. Especially US forces based in Korea.
-----------------------------
Fair enough. As Steve's pointed out, we could get rid of almost all alleged racism if no one had an IQ below 90.

goober said...

"Why are we talking about interracial marriage in 2011? We should be talking about interracial procreation."

Why do white nationalist types think that all black men are impregnating all the white women?

I would bet most out-of-wedlock births are within the race since lower class types aren't exactly living in mixed neighborhoods.

The marriage stat is still has a lot of relevance since it points to the acceptance of interracial pairings.

It is one thing to fool around with someone from another race for a short-term fling, and it is a completely different animal to bring that person home to meet your parents & family and drop the bomb: "We are getting married."

Plus, people generally co-habit before mairrage, so it also tells us something about serious interracial couples.

Mr. Mcgranor said...

Libertarian as opposed to authoritarian. I am not one of those laissez faire and i do not belong to the license party.

Anonymous said...

Again Mr Sailer why do you ignore the fact that :

1) A large proportion of these Asian/White marriages are warbrides to US servicemen or mail-order brides

2) A huge amount of Black/Asian marriages are US servicemen getting Asian brides (see Tiger Woods, Hines Ward) or mail order brides from the Philippines

3) When you look at US-born Asians males and females (versus immigrant Asians), the intermarriage gender gap closes significantly.

According to your assumptions in the Colorblind article, are US-born Asian males more 'masculine' than Foreign-born Asian males in the US?

Anonymous said...

Regarding the white/Asian thing, what I see these days (in California) is mostly Asian-Asian couples. I still see some white M/Asian F couples, and rarely (though with a bit more frequency) I see Asian M/white F couples. But the number of Asian-Asian couples has spiked dramatically to my eyes.

Point of reference for data purposes: I'm a white gentile man who dated an Asian woman for many years, and two close friends in different states are Asian women married to white gentile men. We're all early 40s. I think for younger folks it's trending differently though.

What does it mean? It could either mean that everyone's just evening out; or it could mean that Asian men are feeling their oats a bit, and/or that Asian women are subtly sniffing the scent of whites losing their alpha status. Or maybe it means something else, you'll have to ask the young people.

Anonymous said...

I know a lot of inter-racial couples on the West Coast. Black-Asian is pretty rare, almost always - as Steve states- BM-AF. Further the AF's are usually Filipinos or SE Asians. Chinese, Japanese, Korean AF rarely go for the AA male. First, there aren't that many BM's - percentage wise - on the West Coast. Secondly, if an AF wants to marry outside her Asian Community, White men seem safer and more respectable while still being "different".

Denis P. said...

My speculation would be that figures in areas where you have a large number of second-generation Asian-Americans would show a sharp increase in the percentage AM-WF pairings. The reason for this is simple - changes in dietary habits and nutrition have had a huge impact on the physical stature and height of Asians raised in Western countries, which is a key determinant of male sexual attractiveness.

I've noticed this to be especially the case in my home country of Australia. When I was growing up in the 80's and 90's, AM-WF were extremely rare. Since the start of the new century, however, I've noticed that this particular permutation has undergone a sharp and staggering increase - especially in major cities like Sydney and Melbourne. The reason for this? Asian-males born in Australia are now as tall and stocky as their Anglo-celtic compatriots, while at the same time enjoying all the perceived model-minority advantages (if they're Chinese or Korean at least) of greater intelligence and higher income.

I've also noticed that AM-WF couples tend to differ qualitatively from WM/AF couples in Australia - the former tend to see pairings of individuals who both hail from educated/upper-middle class backgrounds, while a susbtantial portion of the later consist of erstwhile sex tourists with mail order brides.

Anonymous said...

Steve -

Completely off-topic, but one of the great movie composers of the 20th Century, John Barry, just died.

He may or may not have written the guitar riff for the James Bond franchise, but he definitely wrote that haunting theme for Body Heat, which was possibly the single best movie score of my lifetime.

Seems like he deserves a thread here at iSteve, or maybe an article at Taki's.

Anonymous said...

Steve,

You really need to separate out the immigrants from US-born Asians. The gender imbalance is not that great for Asians born here.

"36% of young Asian Pacific American men born in the United States married white women, and 45% of U.S.-born Asian Pacific American women took white husbands"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage#Asian_and_Caucasian

Group / white outmarriage rates by gender

Chinese M 30% F 40%
Japanese M 27% F 32%
Korean M 40% F 60%

http://www.asian-nation.org/interracial.shtml

Look at the third column, USR + USR (both partners raised in US). Note Japanese Americans tend to have been in the US the longest of all Asian groups and their outmarriage rates are almost gender neutral.

Anonymous said...

"Chinese M 30% F 40%
Japanese M 27% F 32%
Korean M 40% F 60%"

This makes a lot of sense, especially since Koreans have usually been considered the tallest and most attractive of the East Asians (not including the growth-stunted North Koreans, obviously).

Anonymous said...

For someone as daring as you are, you have resisted making generalizations about interracial daters. You could say that white women who date black men tend to be on the lower totem pole of attractiveness. They tend to be a bit overweight and I would venture to guess that they have often been rejected by white men. You can say the same about white men who are with asian women. They tend to have at least one of the following traits:

1. short
2. fat
3. bald
4. nerdy
5. most likely rejected by attractive white women.

It would seem that the most attractive whites go for other attractive whites.

Why haven't you written about this? Could it be that you might offend your audience? I thought you were a truth teller.

Anonymous said...

The testosterone theory is bunk, because it it is so, then most Asian women would marry the "more masculine" blacks instead of the "less masculine" whites.

The fact that most Asian women marry the less masculine whites shows that they are marrying into the majority group instead of the more masculine group. It is more of a brand name decision than anything.

Steve Sailer said...

"what I see these days (in California) is mostly Asian-Asian couples."

Yes, I think that's the main trend in California: away from exogamy. Out-marriage rates among Asians have fallen since 1980, and I would bet they've fallen fastest in California (at least among East Asians).

It ties into the decision of Asian parents to move to the same neighborhoods -- e.g., Asians in SoCal used to be fairly widely dispersed across the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys, but over the last three decades, they've mostly given up on the SFV and concentrated themselves in the SGV where they have become predominant in certain school districts.

Anonymous said...

Time for some original research!

By my calculation Asian women are 51 time more attractive than black women. Pretty large margin, what?

Go to Google and search for "Asian tube". Tube is a code word for video porn. You get about fourteen million hits. "Black tube" gets only 270,000 hits (almost nothing).

Black women just aren't sexually attractive.

Albertosaurus

Anonymous said...

@Anon

Again Mr Sailer why do you ignore the fact that :

1) A large proportion of these Asian/White marriages are warbrides to US servicemen or mail-order brides


Razib Khan has argued that the typical white male in a white male/Asian female relationship is a beta. My guess is that Sailer would rather not contemplate this reality.

Truth said...

"By my calculation Asian women are 51 time more attractive than black women...Go to Google and search for "Asian tube". Tube is a code word for video porn"

That settles it, Albert; by my calculation you are now the largest moron in the lower 48, plus Hawaii. Sarah gives you a little run in Alaska.

corvinus said...

I think Razib Khan is right about the white men who date Asian women being "beta". Although you might expect white GIs billed to East Asia to be sucking up Japanese, Okinawan, and Korean women like crazy, it doesn't happen nearly as often as one might think. Instead, they usually seem to end up with the more high-caliber white women from back home. And why not, since troops are, in theory, drawn from the best of a given country's men?

Another clue that I think this is so is judging from the fact that a disproportionate number of young half-Asian men I've run into are gay, much more than the the 2% that seems to occur among monoracial European or Asian men.

The 95% intramarriage rate for whites is biologically-based (despite all the propaganda) and not going away soon. It will drop in the future, sure, but not by a large amount.

Anonymous said...

Razib Khan has argued that the typical white male in a white male/Asian female relationship is a beta. My guess is that Sailer would rather not contemplate this reality.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if most White men in relationships with Asian females were in terms of their social behaviour and personalities more like Asian males than most White men are.

This is probably also true for Black men who date White women (they're more like White guys in terms of behaviour and appearance than Black men typically are) - they're less alpha (or Black) in their behaviour.

People largely seek out socially compatible (read: share values and ideas) mates who remind them of more attractive and interesting versions of the (insert appropriate sex) people they grew up around. This isn't news.

Felix said...

Razib Khan has argued that the typical white male in a white male/Asian female relationship is a beta.My guess is that Sailer would rather not contemplate this reality.

And do you know why Sailer would rather not contemplate this reality, retardo? Because the "typical" man in any relationship, whether with an Asian female or a white one, is a beta. As such, this reality is about as worthy of being contemplated as the reality that an army has more privates than generals.

corvinus said...

Black women just aren't sexually attractive.

Uh... this is not correct. A majority of black American women are grossly obese and have horrible fashion sense and demeanor. Correcting for this problem, actually, black women seem to be somewhat more sexually attractive at a base level than Asian women.

I remember reading somewhere that the intermarriage gender gap between African immigrant men and women is negligible, about 7% for both.

Anonymous said...

Go to Google and search for "Asian tube". Tube is a code word for video porn. You get about fourteen million hits. "Black tube" gets only 270,000 hits (almost nothing).

In that, ahem, industry, "ebony" is generally used instead of "black."

Peter

Anonymous said...

Lots of people on here claiming second generation Asian americans can take white women. False. When this happens, it's rare and with a mediocre (at best) white girl. We know you're all obsessed with the prestige of a white girl, but you might want to forget about it and be satisfied with do her math homework instead.

Anonymous said...

You know what kind of white men are dating and marrying Asian women? NERDS and geeks. High IQ engineers, physicists, IT, and asperger math studs. Dorks, to be sure, but mix the avg Asian IQ 102-105 + avg white geek 115+ and you're going to have a bunch of super smart white/asian kids very soon.

Black women have insanely high STD rates, act masculine, angry and loud, are usually ignorant and unintelligent, but find one without those flaws and she can easily qualify as sexy.

Anonymous said...

who's attractive who isn't? Opinion. Black, white, yellow. Opinion. Although all races do skew towards a GENERALLY Caucasoid preference, given a chance. That I do notice, with a lot of variation of preference concerning details like hair and eye color or fine degree of melanin.
However, objectively I can see that people are "attractive" in that they have regular features (in racial context), clear skin,(whatever color)and good build. But am I automatically attracted? Not necessary. Finding someone attractive and being attracted are two different feelings. The stats that Sailer has reflect how people act when they are pretty much free to do as they wish. I don't think it's going to change much, unless there is a very stark change in the demographics.

Anonymous said...

I stand corrected.

ironrailsironweights has pointed out that I should have Googled for "ebony", not for "black". When you do that you find the disparity to be only 2 to 1 rather than 50 to 1.

I always learn something useful on iSteve.

Albertosaurus

Anonymous said...

Asians are more prejudiced than Americans and have a preference for lighter skin. They also tend to be medium/high SES. All these factors keep them away from blacks.

Whites and Asians are similar in SES and IQ, but whites are higher in testosterone. So a lot of Asian girls go for college-educated white guys.

Black professionals do pretty well with whites, blacks, Carribean Latinos, and mixed race girls when they want. Sometimes, they can do okay with Asians. An educated, charismatic, muscular/athletic black guy can do pretty well.

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

"A large proportion of these Asian/White marriages are warbrides to US servicemen or mail-order brides"

Not in my experience. This probably used to be the case, when the number of American-born Asians was low, or when Asian immigrants were rare (pre-1965). No longer. I was friends with 15-20Asians in high school, in a community where Asians were relatively rare (<5%). All of the women but one (the homeliest) married a white guy. None of the men married a white girl. All anecdotal, of course, but all my experience since - in college, work, and casual observation - has backed it up.

And it used to be that the men I knew who married Asian women seemed more beta than average, in physical if not intellectual terms. John Derbyshire strikes me as a good example of WM/AF relationships - bright and talented; tall, but physically not imposing.

Anonymous said...

"The testosterone theory is bunk, because it it is so, then most Asian women would marry the "more masculine" blacks instead of the "less masculine" whites."


It's true to the extent that it's more likely for an Asian woman to marry a black male than a black male is likely to marry an Asian male.
With rise of hiphop and looser morals, more Asian chicks might shack up with more black men.

Anonymous said...

1) Approximately 225K Asian immigrants were accepted in the US as wives from 1950 - 1979

75K Japanese immigrants were accepted in the US as wives from 1950 - 1979
43K Korean immigrants were accepted in the US as wives from 1950 - 1979
73K Philipine immigrants were accepted in the US as wives from 1950 - 1979

The vast majority of the above marriages of Asian women were to US servicemen. Were some of these marriages were for love? I am sure there were as much as you can love a person who you cannot communicate with as I am willing to wager that all (and I do mean all) of these Asian wives spoke little to no English. Almost all of these marriages to US servicemen were for economic and family reasons.

2) Approximately 925K Asian immigrants were accepted in the US as wives from 1980 - 2003

It gets harder to differentiate between marriages to US servicemen, mail order brides, or Asian male US immigrants going back to their home countries for wives with immigration numbers after 1980.

Source for the above numbers
Asian Americans : Contemporary Trends And Issues
http://books.google.com/books?id=5PSYZMs8TzEC&pg=PA44&dq=asian+war+brides

The total Asian female/White male marriages for the last census in 2000 was about 400k marriages. I cannot tell exactly how many of these marriages were to US servicemen/mail-order brides but why does Mr. Sailer - in his Colorblind analysis - ignore the fact that a large portion of these marriages were to US servicemen or mail-order brides. In addition the term 'Asian' is all encompassing term in the US which includes Southeast Asians like Filipinos/Thais and South Asians like Indians/Pakistanis.

Hapa said...

It appears the anon poster above is correct. The gender imbalance for the very small Asian-Black intermarriage rate (0.22-1.3%) significantly shrinks from 5:1 to 2:1 for native born >1.5 generations.

From Wikipedia:


With African Americans and Asian Americans, the ratios are even further imbalanced, with roughly five times more Asian female/African male marriages than Asian male/African female marriages.[10] However, C.N. Le estimated that among Asian Americans of the 1.5 generation and of the five largest Asian American ethnic groups this ratio narrows to approximately two to one.[16] Even though the disparity between African American and Asian American interracial marriages by gender is high according to the 2000 US Census,[10] the total numbers of Asian American/African American interracial marriages are low, numbering only 0.22% percent for Asian American male marriages and 1.30% percent of Asian female marriages, partially contributed by the recent flux of Asian immigrants.


There are also probably large disparities between which Asians are marrying which Blacks.

Nearly all the Vietnamese, Thai and Philippinos are likely brides not grooms. Most Asian grooms are probably larger more masculine Polynesians and Koreans or successful and well educated Chinese, Japanese or Koreans married to elite mulattoes.

Steve Sailer said...

I think I looked at that data awhile ago. I don't believe the sample size was large enough to be reliable. And, black soldier-Asian wife make up an unrealistic fraction of the black-Asian couples because you have to marry for the foreigner to stay in the U.S. Among couples (married and non-married), black man-Asian woman is hugely more represented on the street.

Steve Sailer said...

Re: War brides.

I first began to pay attention to the dating disparity at UCLA in 1981, and virtually nobody at UCLA was a war bride. Practically zip.

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

"An educated, charismatic, muscular/athletic black guy can do pretty well."

As opposed to an educated, charistamtic, athletic guy of any other race?

Anonymous said...

Re: black man-Asian woman is hugely more represented on the street

If this is the real Sailer, then I am disappointed in his response. Asian/black marriages are small, so even 10k (or 20k or 30k) Black servicemen getting warbrides or brides from Asia would have a greater effect in the marriage numbers. Also as provided by 'Hapa', the black/asian gender marriage disparity - although still large - greatly closes with US-born Asians. This shouldnt be a shock since the same is true with interracial gender gap disparity of marriages with US-born Asian males/females.

Anonymous said...

corvinus said...

Uh... this is not correct. A majority of black American women are grossly obese and have horrible fashion sense and demeanor.

How can this be, if black men are such super-jocks?

Anonymous said...

Re : virtually nobody at UCLA was a war bride.

That is anecdoctal as UCLA doesnt reflect the entire country. Since you dont want to directly answer my 'Asian wives married to US servicemen' numbers, the White male/Asian female marriage numbers are greatly skewed due to the following :

1) Warbrides (Women married to US military men during times of war)
2) Military Marriages (Women married to US servicemen due to a military presence i.e. US bases/installations such as those in the Philippines)
3) Mail-Order brides
4) Asian Adoptees (Asia has been the #1 source for mostly female children adopted by US families)

In 2000, there were 400k White Male/Asian female marriages. As stated in my previous post, approximately 225K Asian women were admitted by US Immigration Services as Wives from 1950 to 1979. If only half (and it is much higher percentage than that) of these 225K Asian women were to US servicemen, you dont think 1/4th of the 400k of these White male/Asian female coming from these type of marriage couplings isnt significant? And the US servicemen marriages to Asian females is MUCH HIGHER than 100k.

In your 'Colorblind' analysis, you want to compare White/Asian interracial marriages between immigrant Asian females coming to the US for economic reasons/US citizenship with Asian immigrant males who speak poor or no English, different culture, typically older and may have come the US already married. Is this a fair comparison?

But we do have group of Asian men and women that are 'equal' - US born Asian men and US born Asian females. And the interracial gender gap closes significantly with this group with it being 50% to 40% as evidenced by the Pew Research study that is somewhere in your blog.

Anonymous said...

Funnily enough, this past Friday I went with a Chinese chick to "Uchida Plays Mozart" at the Chicago Orchestra on cheap student tickets. I swear, out of the hundreds of couples I saw there, fully 15-20% consisted of white male-Asian female.

I suppose it depends on the part of the country you live in. In my area of northern NJ there are entire towns where the population is majority Asian - mostly Korean but with a generous amount of Japanese and Chinese. And they're quite ethnocentric. They date and marry each other. White/Asian couples of any sort are rather rare.

I'd speculate that the high intermarriage and intermating occurs where the Asians are a small minority in a sea of white people.

Severn said...

Whites are a lot more masculine (both sexes) than yellows, and only give up a couple points on IQ (less, practically nothing, if you use verbal IQ - how people relate?). Blacks (both sexes) are more masculine than whites or yellows


Of all the weird theories bandied about in HBD-land, this one has always struck me as the oddest and the one with the least respect for the empirical record of world history. Even in the pre-technological age, those supposedly "masculine" blacks were inferior in combat and aggression to the supposedly less masculine whites and Asians.

There's a reason why blacks were picked to be slaves in the New Work instead of the indigenous American population - they were seen to be more docile and less troublesome.

Truth said...

"There's a reason why blacks were picked to be slaves in the New Work instead of the indigenous American population - they were seen to be more docile and less troublesome."

Uh, no. Blacks were "picked" to be slaves because they had a natural resistance to white diseases, Native Americans did not.

torpor said...

"Uh, no. Blacks were "picked" to be slaves because they had a natural resistance to white diseases, Native Americans did not."

Probably because of lot of the "white diseases" came from Africa and Asia. During the middle ages and into the 1500-1700s, quarantine ports around the Mediterranean were famous for holding up ships coming from ports in Africa and Asia.

Truth said...

Well, you're half right. They came from Africa with the Northern migration thousands of years earlier. At least that's the theory. Blacks have the most genetic diversity of all of the races. This is exhibit one as to the out-of-Africa model.

Native Americans were most of the original slaves, and most died.

Robyn King said...

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