[HN Gopher] Which jobs most often pair together among married co...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
        
       Author : thrower123
       Score  : 137 points
       Date   : 2021-10-26 18:11 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (flowingdata.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (flowingdata.com)
        
       | Kkoala wrote:
       | There was some really similar research done in Finland, and they
       | concluded that many of the correlations were because students of
       | certain fields used to go to the same parties / events.
       | 
       | E.g. Computer Science students had a lot of parties with nurses,
       | and this then caused a correlation in marriages between those
       | groups as well
        
       | robocat wrote:
       | Some jobs have very skewed gender ratios: so Early childhood
       | teachers don't marry other Early childhood teachers, and
       | relatively few Police officers marry other Police officers.
       | 
       | I would expect people with working class jobs as far more likely
       | to marry other working class people, and respectively for
       | professional jobs. Hard to see from this - needs some sort of
       | cluster analysis.
        
       | llimos wrote:
       | When I was at university, Engineering and Psychology used to have
       | parties together. But that might also have been because
       | Engineering was 80% men and Psychology 80% women.
        
         | TMWNN wrote:
         | I'm told that Milwaukee School of Engineering began a nursing
         | program to even out the male-female ratio. <https://np.reddit.c
         | om/r/todayilearned/comments/6onyh6/til_th...>
        
           | toast0 wrote:
           | I gradumated from there... This is like the first time seeing
           | its name here.
           | 
           | I'm not sure I saw any nursing students while there. All of
           | the students I knew were in the engineering program, or had
           | started there and moved to the business program (often as an
           | intermediate step before dropping out)
           | 
           | Biomedical engineering seemed to have the least skewed ratio
           | when I attended... But it's also really fing hard.
        
       | coder-3 wrote:
       | One thing to remember when interpreting those stats is the
       | popularity of a profession in general. Elementary and middle
       | school teachers come up a lot because either there's a huge
       | number of them or they disproportionately responded to the
       | survey.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | krysp wrote:
       | A few interesting ones in there, such as Dentists, who other than
       | other dentists, most often marry secretaries and assistants.
        
       | sdenton4 wrote:
       | Software developers often marry other software developers, and
       | computer programmers often marry computer programmers, but it is
       | apparently rare for a software developer to marry a computer
       | programmer.
       | 
       | (Also, apparently mathematician isn't a real job.)
        
       | mensetmanusman wrote:
       | This will be kind of skewed towards the wealthy, as marriages are
       | becoming less obtainable by the lower classes.
        
         | jlawson wrote:
         | Did the price of marriage paperwork go up or something?
         | 
         | How can a marriage be "less obtainable"?
        
           | wanderingmind wrote:
           | There is a difference between wedding and marriage. A wedding
           | paperwork is not too expensive, but a marriage has truly
           | become unaffordable.
        
             | micromacrofoot wrote:
             | I have no idea what this means. Are you talking about the
             | societal standards of what marriage is? something else?
             | 
             | There were 4 people at my wedding. It was only marginally
             | more expensive than the paperwork.
        
               | barry-cotter wrote:
               | You know the big fancy wedding for 50-300 people in a
               | hotel? That's expensive. I forget the sociological
               | terminology but getting married has gone from a "We're
               | getting started" to a "We have arrived" statement and the
               | wedding is meant to show that, which is expensive.
        
               | micromacrofoot wrote:
               | Well sure, but that's just one example of how corporate
               | interests tend to push tradition into being as expensive
               | as possible (holidays face a similar fate). They're
               | creating social pressure to solidify their revenue.
               | 
               | A wedding can be whatever you want. It's not
               | "unobtainable" unless you're treating it like a class-
               | based measuring stick.
        
             | lowkey_ wrote:
             | Marriage licenses are like $100 -- are you confusing
             | wedding and marriage in this? (i.e. it should be that
             | marriage paperwork is not too expensive, but a wedding is
             | unaffordable)
        
             | foxbarrington wrote:
             | What is expensive about marriage? I'm trying to think of
             | reasons. Taxes? It can be advantageous to stay single, but
             | I wouldn't say this is that big. Kids? Another mouth to
             | feed and educate is wildly expensive, but I doubt this is
             | what we're talking about. Rent/buying a home? Cheaper to
             | share a space I'd think. I think I'm missing something.
        
               | monocasa wrote:
               | At least on the income tax side too, you're allowed to
               | file seperately even if you're married.
        
             | sparrish wrote:
             | How has marriage become unaffordable? In what way? I'm
             | really asking.
             | 
             | Seems to me two people with two incomes living in a 1
             | bedroom apartment is cheaper than one.
             | 
             | Nearly everything is cheaper when you're married:
             | Insurance, taxes, meals, utilities.
             | 
             | What's less expensive as a single?
        
               | mensetmanusman wrote:
               | Well, consider, about 50 years ago almost every child was
               | raised by married parents, today about half are.
               | 
               | Having so many people with no lived experience means
               | lower cultural forces behind asking them to participate
               | in an expensive party, even though marriage is so good
               | for raising children (which used to be the purpose of
               | marriage).
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | I don't understand what you are trying to say.
               | 
               | Lived experience? Explain.
        
               | mensetmanusman wrote:
               | If most couples you know are just cohabitating, the
               | cultural forces to have a public ceremony decrease.
        
               | emidln wrote:
               | Why is an expensive party important? You can certainly
               | get married at a Church or at a courthouse for pretty
               | cheap and a party isn't required, but even if it is, you
               | can throw a decent party without thousands of dollars
               | spent. I've been to many of them in small towns across
               | the Midwest.
        
               | mensetmanusman wrote:
               | If you are already cohabitating, marriage is an expense
               | you can indefinitely procrastinate.
               | 
               | Especially if you see what others are doing on social
               | media, your mental model of the expense continues to
               | inflate and the pressure to procrastinate grows.
        
         | peanut_worm wrote:
         | How so? There isn't much paperwork and you will save on taxes.
        
           | neogodless wrote:
           | > you will save on taxes
           | 
           | ... if you pair a high earner with a low/no earner
        
             | monocasa wrote:
             | You'll never do worse than when you were single since you
             | can always file seperately.
        
               | downut wrote:
               | I have not looked at filing separately for many years,
               | but I ran the numbers back then and the result was the
               | same.
        
             | downut wrote:
             | This is correct. When I was still in grad school and the
             | better half was working as an engineer I pretty much got
             | the ultimatum that we needed to get married for the tax
             | break. We had been living together for 7 years.
             | 
             | But then we were both working and living in SF as engineers
             | and I did my taxes on my own for the first time about 3
             | years in from graduate school. I was shocked that the
             | penalty for being married vs. not was $3000. I immediately
             | turned to my wife, and said, "split, and split the
             | difference?". (She understood that I was joking.) And
             | _then_ I discovered that you can 't fix it that way, you
             | still get taxed at the same rate. Or did. That was 30 years
             | ago. (We're still married, humor is important.)
             | 
             | But after that while working at Sandia I had a PhD friend
             | getting married to another fresh PhD, and I did tell him,
             | do take a look at the tax hit.
        
               | monocasa wrote:
               | They changed the bracket differences for single, married
               | filing jointly, and married filing seperately back in
               | 2018. Married filing seperately is basically the same as
               | being single these days.
        
         | lowkey_ wrote:
         | Marriage is actually a great financial choice for most people.
         | If marriage rates are dropping, I'd blame our culture -- the
         | financial incentives are clearly there.
        
           | munk-a wrote:
           | Young people get pretty bombarded by divorce horror stories -
           | especially from pop culture. Most divorces don't go to a
           | court and a large number are resolved entirely internally and
           | only seek professional help for the finalization of the
           | agreement... but there are the attention grabbing headlines
           | of someone being left with only the shirt on his back (and
           | like 20 mil in options) on the far side of a really bad
           | divorce.
           | 
           | I also think that culture does play a fair role. I was
           | initially hesitant to marry (as a millennial) because a lot
           | of my friends were being denied the ability to marry who they
           | chose, so I wanted to stand with them and reject the
           | institution. That, thankfully, has been resolved - but I can
           | totally understand people who have mixed feelings on
           | marriage.
        
           | lazide wrote:
           | Only if you manage to avoid the often catastrophic downside
           | risks, which are very apparent and very frequent in many
           | industries. It's quite straightforward and convenient (in
           | that there is an entire industry in family law serving it) to
           | completely destroy decades of earnings and often times
           | decades of future earnings for one or both parties.
           | 
           | Have seen it happen, and literally half of the couples in the
           | 'good part of town' where I used to live which was populated
           | almost exclusively by well educated white collar
           | professionals were either going through it/at some stage of
           | it, or were in a clearly abusive situation that might even
           | have benefited from doing it - as long as they didn't wait
           | for the other party to really screw them over by pulling the
           | trigger first and alleging abuse or whatever.
           | 
           | A friends neighbor had been on the receiving end (along with
           | their daughter) of literally years of verbal and emotional
           | abuse from the wife for no apparent reason. She would go
           | after neighbors too, if they dared to exist in her presence.
           | 
           | Both of them were lawyers. Last time I was over there a month
           | ago, after an hour of it, he just begged her to stop
           | screaming in the most pitiful voice I've heard a man ever
           | use. So she yelled at him more for being so pitiful.
           | 
           | It's hard to really understand how terrible a prior trusted
           | loved one can be until you've been on the other end of it.
           | It's easy to assume it's because the other party did
           | something wrong to deserve it too - but that is not usually
           | the case in my experience. It's often lack of emotional
           | regulation/healthy outlets for stress or life problems,
           | usually reinforced by denial from the abuser.
           | 
           | The abusee often can't figure out how to escape or feels held
           | hostage, sometimes also by denial at their own problems or
           | inability to cope that lead them to that state of insecurity.
           | 
           | While marriage (the legal process) can magnify the upside, it
           | can also dramatically magnify the downsides too, and make it
           | MUCH MUCH harder to escape a bad situation for everyone.
           | 
           | It's quite a shit sandwich. Always has been near as I can
           | tell.
        
           | tiborsaas wrote:
           | It's a shame to marry because of financial incentives.
        
         | 988747 wrote:
         | A theory I once read goes like this: in the past it was quite
         | common for lawyers, directors, managers to marry their
         | secretaries, which was the way for them to jump to higher
         | social class. Now, a director making advances towards their
         | secretary faces immediate sexual harassment lawsuit, so they
         | choose to marry other managers/directors instead.
        
           | bduerst wrote:
           | Is that really a bad thing though?
           | 
           | For the 1/10 times at work where the person in power ends up
           | having a meaningful relationship with an underling that you
           | lose, you also have the 9/10 cases of sexual harassment that
           | you lose too.
        
           | TMWNN wrote:
           | 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
           | vice versa).
           | 
           | I don't have a good answer for how to get the one without the
           | other, but both are consequences of modern sensibilities.
        
             | rsj_hn wrote:
             | 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
             | dominated by large patriarchal societies other than some
             | sort of accident of history.
             | 
             | If that's true, then a society with lots of gig jobs or
             | work at home jobs might help alleviate the problem. There
             | could be other creative solutions, like reimagining higher
             | education to give people time to marry and have kids before
             | college. Other approaches are also possible. Whatever the
             | reason, the secular societies will need to scramble if they
             | don't want the world of the future to be dominated by
             | orthodox religious populations.
        
               | monocasa wrote:
               | Eh, Rome had widespread use of abortifacients, only
               | falling after they had harvested those plants into
               | extinction.
        
               | rsj_hn wrote:
               | Do you have some data on how widespread and effective it
               | was? Perhaps this also contributed to Rome's population
               | problems - it needed to rely on the provinces to supply
               | labor and manpower for a substantial portion of the
               | Empire, and eventually the capital was moved away from
               | Rome entirely. Constantinople was also basically empty by
               | the time it was conquered, having a population of only
               | 50,000 people when the Turks arrived, from a high of one
               | million.
               | 
               | But I think in such ancient societies, the struggle is a
               | little different. E.g. when you are being ravaged by wars
               | and plagues, you need more than replacement level
               | fertility. You need huge fertility that can recover
               | massive population loss in a short period of time. After
               | Hannibal decimated the population of Italy, Rome
               | recovered remarkably quickly. They just made more Romans.
               | Later on, that stopped working and they needed manpower
               | from the provinces.
               | 
               | In modern societies, we've licked most of the other stuff
               | and so can keep going much longer as fertility declines,
               | to the point where we start noticing only when rates hit
               | below replacement. Traditional societies would see
               | population loss long before fertility rates fell below
               | replacement.
        
               | TMWNN wrote:
               | >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...>
        
       | xhevahir wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Rebelgecko wrote:
         | I think the # of female doctors has grown much more quickly
         | than the # of male nurses (IIRC most medical students are women
         | now). It would be interesting to compare stats by gender- does
         | a male software engineer marry differently than a female one?
        
           | sgerenser wrote:
           | Yep, I can say with almost 100% certainty there's a big
           | difference between male and female dating preferences even
           | within the same occupation. For all the talk of feminism and
           | empowerment, women in high status fields like law and
           | medicine are Much less likely to "marry down" to a man in a
           | lower status field than the other way around.
        
         | thrower123 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | genericuser314 wrote:
       | Type in "Other agricultural workers" and then compare the result
       | to other professions.
        
         | Enginerrrd wrote:
         | I'm not sure quite what you're getting at. Can you elaborate?
        
           | jmknoll wrote:
           | Might be a mobile display bug, but the match% between "other
           | ag workers" and themselves is greater than highest value of
           | the bottom axis
        
             | MattGaiser wrote:
             | Can see it on laptop too.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | lostcolony wrote:
             | So it overflows the chart on desktop Firefox for me, but,
             | the buttom axis caps out on the right at 22%. It looks like
             | they hardcoded the graph axis, and so since other
             | agricultural workers are at 23%, it overflows.
        
               | jmknoll wrote:
               | Good catch. I didn't see the bottom axis. Edited my
               | comment accordingly.
        
               | lostcolony wrote:
               | On that note, bottom axis is usually x, not y. Dunno if
               | it displays differently on mobile; on desktop the bars
               | run horizontally; y-axis is profession, x-axis is
               | percentage.
        
         | davio wrote:
         | It's slightly more than Physicians
        
       | clircle wrote:
       | Unfortunately, the statistician or data scientist that put this
       | visualization together neglected to include statisticians and
       | data scientists in the list of searchable jobs.
        
         | lotsofpulp wrote:
         | I would be interested in seeing this data by age so we can see
         | any changes in the past few decades. Perhaps profession on
         | marriage date. I do not expect there to be decent data
         | available for this though.
        
         | alexfrydl wrote:
         | I bet the results were too embarrassing.
        
       | peruvian wrote:
       | Not surprised by lawyer. Only other lawyers can understand the
       | long hours and stress.
        
         | munk-a wrote:
         | There's also some joke in there about the only person able to
         | write a contract to successfully bind a lawyer to a long term
         | commitment being another lawyer.
        
       | screye wrote:
       | 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 don't like intermarrying.
       | However, the truth is that there simply aren't enough of them
       | around, they are simply more likely to run into software
       | engineers, so that's whom they marry most.
       | 
       | IE. 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.
        
         | beerandt wrote:
         | 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 which point they've primarily been around
         | other doctors and lawyers for the previous 3-7 years.
        
           | chiph wrote:
           | We had one woman in my graduating comp-sci class. _One._ And
           | she had been dating someone seriously for a few years.
           | 
           | We guys had better luck dating Early Childhood Education
           | majors, which is supported by their chart.
        
           | bumby wrote:
           | 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
        
             | eCa wrote:
             | It wasn't that long ago (at least over here in Europe) that
             | very few women[1] made it to anything High Income, so such
             | couplings were rarer.
             | 
             | [1] Relatively speaking
        
             | beerandt wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | 908B64B197 wrote:
         | > Doctors and agricultural workers are the obvious standouts
         | 
         | Doctor is one of the few profession that's available in the
         | countryside, where 90% of the jobs will be in the agricultural
         | sector.
         | 
         | > So, it appears as though software analysts don't like
         | intermarrying. However, the truth is that there simply aren't
         | enough of them around, they are simply more likely to run into
         | software engineers, so that's whom they marry most.
         | 
         | They also broke down Software Engineers into a few different
         | professional tittles. Computer Analyst Specialist sounds
         | very... East Coast 90's.
        
           | bumby wrote:
           | The data shows physicians predominantly marry other
           | physicians and ag workers tend to marry other ag workers. Not
           | that physicians and agricultural workers inter-marry
        
         | chrisseaton wrote:
         | > 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.
        
           | kens wrote:
           | On the topic of analysts, I've been wondering for a long time
           | about "systems analyst" which used to be the cool job in
           | computing in the 1980s but then essentially vanished. I was
           | never quite sure what systems analysts did.
           | 
           | Getting back to the data visualization, a lot of it seems to
           | be that male-dominated jobs pair with female-dominated jobs,
           | which isn't particularly surprising.
        
           | asdff wrote:
           | According to FB only 28% of married couples meet in college.
        
             | chrisseaton wrote:
             | So that's still probably a vast majority of people with the
             | predicate of people who went a university at all?
        
           | smnrchrds wrote:
           | You have to be a 'Computer Systems Analyst' to be eligible
           | for TN status.
        
           | ZephyrBlu wrote:
           | > _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.
        
             | chrisseaton wrote:
             | Is that the case? I guess my university experience is 10
             | years out of date but that's how it was back then.
        
         | dmurray wrote:
         | > 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/
        
         | PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
         | > Us programmers stick together. Quite a high rate of marrying
         | within the community.
         | 
         | nobody else would take our schtick ...
        
       | burkaman wrote:
       | Why are chief executives and legislators grouped together as one
       | profession?
        
         | hanniabu wrote:
         | Revolving doors
        
       | cwkoss wrote:
       | Would be nice if you could click the result professions to pivot
       | to that as the focused profession
        
       | Unbeliever69 wrote:
       | It is extremely rare for musicians to marry outside of their
       | field. Particularly professional musicians.
        
         | cromka wrote:
         | I like that Clergy was high on that list, too. Must be church
         | musicians marrying pastors?
        
       | syntaxing wrote:
       | Kinda interesting that almost all type engineers have elementary
       | and middle school teachers and registered nurse in the top 3
       | groups.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | maerF0x0 wrote:
       | So tldr;
       | 
       | Everyone marries Elementary and Middle School teachers, even that
       | group intermarrying.
       | 
       | Now i know who to swipe on in the dating apps :)
        
       | kerng wrote:
       | Looks like elementary teachers are the ones paired with everyone
       | the most, even with themselves. Not sure, looks to me like the
       | data might be off
        
       | bryanrasmussen wrote:
       | I would be interested in seeing which jobs often pair together
       | among divorcing couples.
        
         | andrewclunn wrote:
         | My guess is unemployed will be overrepresented for men on that
         | one. Also military service.
        
       | bedobi wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | blackoil wrote:
         | Plus we have so many additional risks of confrontation. Space
         | vs Tabs, Vim vs Emacs, Deb vs Rpm...
        
         | NikolaNovak wrote:
         | 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 friends don't, to talk about not work
         | after work, or at least _different_ work, etc. Ultimately even
         | somebody to disagree with us.
         | 
         | After a few similar experiences, it's not that I ever actively
         | avoided a software engineer partner, it's just that they never
         | seemed to last long. Love of my life is English major with
         | career in retail and home depot / Canadian tire store manager.
         | She brings softer , more emotionally intelligent, people
         | oriented side to our family. I'm the annoying pedantic literal
         | obsessive nerdy one :-D. Works well!
         | 
         | Edit : All of my close developer friends are similarly married
         | to arts major types. Interestingly, I now realize, great many
         | of my _acquaintance_ developer friends have nerdy or techu
         | partners. Wonder what variables are at place but definitely to
         | each their own!
        
           | InitialLastName wrote:
           | I'm in the same boat; my household is certainly much more
           | resilient and effective with a technically-focused, detail-
           | oriented engineer and an emotionally intelligent human-
           | oriented teacher in it than it would be with two of me (we
           | certainly have better relationships with our neighbors and
           | community this way, at the very least).
        
           | leetcrew wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | dboreham wrote:
           | Could be something to do with a tech-literate person is
           | _more_ valuable to an arts person than to another tech
           | person. E.g. arts person wants their small plumbing jobs
           | done, their offspring taught math properly, and so on, but
           | other tech person doesn't need that because they do those
           | things themselves.
        
         | bad_good_guy wrote:
         | I have just learned I'm the same way. I had actually never
         | thought about it, but I had an unexpected physical negative
         | reaction when I saw the stats on software developers so often
         | pairing with other software developers.
         | 
         | Just something about it turns my stomach. I hope its not some
         | internalised misogyny, as I have no similar response to idea of
         | a partner in any other high skilled job, such as physician, or
         | barrister, or researcher, etc.
        
         | afavour wrote:
         | This was one of the reasons I moved to NYC many years ago over
         | Silicon Valley. No doubt the career opportunities in SV would
         | have been greater but the diversity in company (both friendly
         | and romantic) has a lot going for it.
        
         | maerF0x0 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | robocat wrote:
           | Wow - that is still happening? The initial interest followed
           | by that sudden glazed disinterest as soon as they find out
           | your job. Or is it location based where they have formed a
           | stereotype from previous encounters? I had thought a well
           | paying job would be a good start to a relationship (enough
           | money does prevent a lot of problems). Personally I don't
           | like judgmental people (I'm meta-judgemental) so it usually
           | has been no great issue to be ignored.
        
           | tiborsaas wrote:
           | Are you me? Once I couldn't convince a girl that I'm a nerd.
           | 
           | A colleague of mine dated a really hot girl from Tinder and I
           | asked him if he told her that he's a software engineer.
           | 
           | - Not yet, came the answer :)
        
       | mschuster91 wrote:
       | No surprises that those in exploitative working conditions - not
       | payment, but _time_ - end up intermarrying the most: chefs,
       | doctors, nurses... all of them have one thing in common:
       | extremely long shifts, frequent overtime and double shifts.
       | 
       | When living with a "normal" 9-5 person, that person _will_ build
       | up resentment for not seeing their partner, for differing sleep
       | schedules, frequent travel and whatever else comes with that job.
       | Someone in a similar work environment however knows the struggles
       | themselves and since they also have the same problem as their
       | partners, there is less chance of resentment directed to the
       | partner - hard to get annoyed by your partner working a
       | spontaneous double shift when you have been in the same situation
       | a week earlier!
        
       | spullara wrote:
       | Honestly the manicurists marrying other manicurists makes me
       | think that the data is bad.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | valbaca wrote:
         | TFA: "Oftentimes, people marry someone in the same industry or
         | with the same job."
        
       | daveslash wrote:
       | I clicked random for a while, just waiting to find a job with an
       | usually high correlation with any other job. Pharmacist is
       | unusually highly correlated with Pharmacist. Edit: Same with
       | Lodging managers, high correlation with Lodging managers.
        
       | TehShrike wrote:
       | I was disappointed they didn't include "homemaker" or
       | "unemployed" so you could see which professions supported a
       | family by themselves.
        
         | missedthecue wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | pugworthy wrote:
       | It would be nice if age or duration of marriage was also put into
       | play. Additionally how much people moved. It's not always true,
       | but sometimes one person in a relationship is the "portable" one
       | who can find a job in many areas.
        
       | Pasorrijer wrote:
       | Boy, sure are a lot of professions married to teachers.
        
         | dexwiz wrote:
         | Lots of people are teachers. Also any of the heavily gendered
         | professions appear this way because given a hetero
         | relationship, there is a relatively high chance at least one
         | person is in one of these.
         | 
         | Lastly I know some people who avoiding marrying other teachers
         | because the combined salary is less than many single
         | professions.
        
           | MattGaiser wrote:
           | > Lastly I know some people who avoiding marrying other
           | teachers because the combined salary is less than many single
           | professions.
           | 
           | I know some teacher couples that are busy coming to terms
           | with this problem.
        
         | golemiprague wrote:
         | The missing filter there is by which gender, obviously many man
         | will be married to nurses because there are so many female
         | nurses but no so many women marry male nurses.
        
         | handrous wrote:
         | Teacher's a great pairing for any profession that might involve
         | moving around quite a bit. Teaching jobs are available
         | _everywhere_ and you 're probably not going to miss out on big
         | bucks by being in one place versus another. Higher pay here,
         | lower pay there, sure, but after CoL it mostly evens out.
         | 
         | It's also damn near the only career in the US that provides
         | roughly European levels of time off, and, crucially, pretty
         | good (by US standards) parental leave. Time it right and you
         | can be off for four months or so with your newborn, which is a
         | _very_ rare benefit in the US (yeah, I know, some super-rich
         | tech companies offer such perks, but those are uncommon jobs).
         | 
         | Teacher's schedule also means that parent can usually handle
         | afternoon-but-before-5 kid stuff, if the other parent's
         | schedule's standard and inflexible.
        
         | nathcd wrote:
         | The article touches on this:
         | 
         | > Some pairings are simply volume. There are a lot of nurses
         | and teachers, so they show up on top of the list often.
        
           | mcguire wrote:
           | On the other hand, at UTAustin when I was there, the College
           | of Engineering had a pretty serious lock on the College of
           | Education---they frequently had social events together, for
           | example.
        
       | asimpletune wrote:
       | I was not surprised to see that programmers marry other
       | programmers
        
         | Spivak wrote:
         | The only one that I found that was stronger was Physicians
         | which blows out the chart.
        
           | azundo wrote:
           | FTA "Other agricultural workers" is the highest at 23%.
        
         | monkeybutton wrote:
         | I am! Everywhere I've worked the gender imbalance is so extreme
         | that it'd be impossible unless all the guys are married to each
         | other.
        
           | Aperocky wrote:
           | Well it topped out at ~14%. At least it suggest women in
           | programming quite heavily preferred their counterpart coders.
        
             | bruceb wrote:
             | Preferred, or just ratio is so skewed that they married who
             | they interacted with all the time. Men could not do that as
             | much as the were not enough women.
             | 
             | In this regard women devs get added bonus of working tech.
             | Relatively high salary and likely have higher family
             | incomes as both partners work in high earning field. Where
             | as male devs would often marry partners earning less.
        
           | AmpsterMan wrote:
           | Perhaps a disproportionate number of software devs are
           | unmarried?
           | 
           | My own experience actually reflects this situation. On my
           | team, the only married people are married to other software
           | people or teachers. The unmarried all date teachers.
           | 
           | Obviously anecdotal but interesting.
        
         | peruvian wrote:
         | I am but I am not as well.
         | 
         | I have found male programmers to have a more diverse
         | dating/marriage pool, though most are still "tech"-y office
         | jobs e.g. designer. That's just middle/upper middle class
         | sticking together though.
         | 
         | Female programmers I've met almost exclusively date or are
         | married to other programmers.
        
           | screye wrote:
           | Well, there is an incredibly skewed gender ratio in
           | programming.
           | 
           | So, female programmers pretty much get the pick of the pack
           | among their peer groups. (Not judging, just stating
           | statistics)
           | 
           | The other 80-ish% men in programming still need to find love
           | somewhere, so they cast a wider net.
        
             | peruvian wrote:
             | Makes sense! Just surprised -- obviously love > all, but
             | I'd prefer to date someone in a different field of work
             | myself.
        
               | screye wrote:
               | Makes two of us.
               | 
               | Tech communities are all-encompassing to begin with. Tech
               | cities, tech friends, tech hobbies, tech side-
               | projects..... I need out of this echo chamber from time
               | to time.
        
         | bcrosby95 wrote:
         | Computer programmers and software developers are in separate
         | groups. Developers marry eachother more often than programmers
         | do, whatever that means.
        
           | datameta wrote:
           | I'd wager someone with the title computer programmer nowaday
           | is close to or in their middle age at least, so perhaps it is
           | the larger gender disparity in coding work among that
           | generation.
        
         | withinboredom wrote:
         | I actually married a hairstylist. It turns out, a lot about
         | programming and cutting hair are similar. She has to understand
         | the requirements and implement it exactly right, the first
         | time. I also learned that bartering is alive and well in that
         | world. People would trade all kinds of things for a haircut
         | that they didn't have to tell their spouse how much it cost:
         | vacation rentals, private box concert tickets, sailing
         | charters, etc. My wife worked in a high-end salon.
        
           | MonaroVXR wrote:
           | Stupid question, what is a high-end salon?
        
       | valbaca wrote:
       | Honestly, kind of boring results.
       | 
       | - Volume wins out: there are lots of teachers and nurses
       | 
       | - Like-marries-like: most marry someone in their own profession
       | 
       | Not that boring is bad. Just interesting that the trends
       | overshadow any kind of special results.
        
         | Gunax wrote:
         | Yea, I think a more interesting analysis would have based on
         | frequency of profession. That is, how far away (+% / -%) from a
         | random matching is it?
        
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