Rising Share of U.S. Adults Are Living Without a Spouse or Partner
"The growth in unpartnered adults has been sharper among men than women. In 1990, men and women ages 25 to 54 were equally likely to be unpartnered (29% of each group). By 2019, 39% of men were unpartnered, compared with 36% of women."
This point of information from the Pew Research Center piqued my interest.
Despite thinking about it for a while, it still seemed odd to me - intuitively, the proportion of "single" men and women in a population should be almost the same (the study looks at "Unpartnered adults", who are "neither married nor living with an unmarried partner", but the articles on this refer to them as "singles").
I read a few articles on this phenomenon, but none identified this seeming puzzle.
So I dug into the data.
The first explanation might be that the proportion of females in the population has decreased. Assuming one man partners with one woman, fewer women would mean that more and more men would be unable to find partners (as in China, with the one child policy).
Yet the US Census Bureau's July 2022 data shows the percent of females at 50.5% was only slightly lower than in 2005 when it was 51.0%. The female:male sex ratio dropped from 1.04 to 1.02.
However, narrowing the analysis down to the population aged 25-54, in 2005 women were 50.49% of this age group but in 2021, they were 50.32% of it. So the female:male ratio only fell from 1.02 to 1.01.
Let us apply these numbers to a hypothetical population.
A representative group of 10,000 men and women aged 25-54 in 2005 would've had 5049 women and 4951 men. About 32% of each sex would've been unpartnered, so that's 1,616 women and 1,588 men. Meanwhile, a representative group of 10,000 men and women aged 25-54 in 2021 would've had 5032 women and 4968 men. About 1,812 women and 1,938 men would've been unpartnered. 196 more women were single in 2021 than in 2005, but 350 more men were - so 154 more men (almost 10% of the singles) were displaced than we would've expected if they would've, in a counterfactual situation, been dating these 196 women. Clearly something is going on.
One possibility is that now there're relatively more lesbians than gays. The oldest data on the gay and lesbian population in the US I could find was from 2011, where 1.1% of women were lesbian and 2.2% of men were gay, with 2.2% of women being bisexual and 1.4% of men being bi. Meanwhile, in 2020, 1.3% of women were lesbian and 2.5% of men were gay, with 4.3% of women being bisexual and 1.8% of men as bi. So we can see that while the relative gay and lesbian ratios are pretty similar between the years, there're now relatively more bisexual women. So bisexual women who are partnered with other women could be responsible for more men being single.
Another possibility is that more women are going for men older than 54. Using the median age of marriage as a proxy, the median age of marriage for women did rise from 26.3 in 2006-2010 to 28 years in 2015-2019, but the median age at first marriage for men also went up, from 28.1 in 2006-2010 to to 29.9 years in 2015-2019. So I doubt this is a real factor.
Yet another possibility is that more women are going for men younger than 25, but this is even more unlikely, especially since women generally prefer older men.
The last factor I could think of is that there are now more cases of multiple women living with one man. While polygamy is illegal in the US (for now), this doesn't stop polygynists since they could be "living with an unmarried partner". There is some evidence for this, with attitudes to it relaxing, but this does not distinguish between polygyny and polyandry. Plus, more men than women engage in non-monogamy. The young are more likely to do it than the old though (all these studies look at the relationship type, not living arrangements, but those would be correlated).