The Widening Gap in Black and White Marriage Rates: The Impact of Population Composition and Differential Marriage Propensities

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Data from the North Carolina Division of Health Services the Virginia Department of Health the 1970 Public Use Sample tapes and the 1980 Public Use Microdata tapes from the US Bureau of the Census show that marriage rates in Virginia and North Carolina declined between 1970 and 1980. Analysis of the data by race sex and educational level showed that the rate of black marriages declined substantially more than white marriage rates at all levels of education. This paper attempts to determine whether the decline in the black marriage rate is due to factors in the composition of the black population or to differences in the propensity of blacks to marry. Compositional differences include the following: 1) black women outnumber black men; 2) black women have more education than black men and therefore must marry down or not at all; and 3) fewer black men have the potential for stable remunerative employment which would qualify them as good providers. Differences in the propensity to marry include the following: 1) blacks are more likely to form consensual unions and rely more on kinship ties outside the nuclear family; 2) black women have low expectations of marriage especially as regards male financial support and they therefore fear being exploited; 3) low income black women fear that marriage will reduce their welfare benefits without the compensation of a regular income-earning husband; 4) public assistance enables black women to have children without marriage; 5) black men hold more traditional beliefs about womens role; and 6) educated black women do not want to marry men with less education. When the data are examined the real effect of compositional differences diminishes. There are more black women than men but the difference is exaggerated because black men are undercounted in census data by 1-44% depending on age and the corrected excess of black women is about the same as that for white women. Interracial marriages reduce the pool of eligible black men by only 2.7%. Moreover although black women do tend to marry men with less education than themselves this pattern is consequence of marital propensity rather than limited availability. Black marriage propensities decline substantially at all educational levels and the data clearly show that marriage propensities play a far larger role than compositional factors on the declining rate of black marriages.