The Explorer Winter 2018 Explorer Winter 2018 | Page 15

WANT TO MARRY
A DOCTOR?
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
OCCUPATIONS IN WHICH
PEOPLE ARE MOST LIKELY TO
BE MARRIED
1) DENTIST
2) CHIEF EXECUTIVE
3) SALES ENGINEER
4) PHYSICIAN
5) PODIATRIST
6) OPTOMETRIST
7) FARM PRODUCT BUYER
8) PRECISION GRINDER
9) RELIGIOUS WORKER
10) TOOL AND DIE MAKER
Bloomberg Businessweek has a fun
breakdown of which occupations have
had the highest shares of people who
are married from 1950 to 2010, based
on data from the Census Bureau. There are a few likely explanations for
why people who take the title “Dr.”
occupy so many of the top slots, besides
the fact that every Jewish mother
considers them highly marriageable.
While engineers, mathematicians and
scientists today are (unfairly)
stereotyped as awkward nerds who don’t
know how to interact with the opposite
sex, in 1950 they were among the
occupations most likely to be married.
Today, the most commonly conjugated
occupations are instead more often
medical professionals with doctorates,
starting with dentists (81 percent of
whom are hitched): One is that marriage rates are strongly
correlated with income, and docs tend
to have both high income and stable
earnings. One analysis, for example,
found that nationwide, doctors are more
likely than any other profession to be in
the top 1 percent of earners; about one
in five doctors lands there. Another
might reflect the age composition of
these workers compared with others:
People are getting married later in life
now, and by the time you get to
officially call yourself “Dr.” you’re likely
Los Angeles Dental Society Explorer
to be older because you’ve been in
training for so long. That seems
unlikely to be the whole story, though.
I also wonder whether there’s something
about the personalities or cultural
backgrounds of people most likely to
become doctors that also orients them
toward settling down. Given how early
in life would-be doctors have to start
preparing for their future careers,
perhaps they are more milestone-
focused more generally.
BloombergBusinessweek also crunched
the numbers for divorcées. Turns out
that in 1950, many of the occupations
whose members were most likely to end
up divorced were creative or artistic
ones (artist, writer/director, dancer,
designer, writer), which perhaps reflects
the communities that were most
accepting of divorce at the time. In
2010, the occupations with the highest
divorce rates were predominantly in
manufacturing or other areas that have
been subject to downsizing (drilling
machine operator, knitter textile
operative, force operator, winding
machine operative, postal clerk).
This seems to support the idea that
economic stability is a good predictor
of marital status. (Marital stability and
family structure, in turn, are also
believed to reinforce economic
stability and success.) 䡲