Marital Status, Gender, and Race in The U.S.: Perceptions of Middle-Aged Men and Women

Abstract

A handful of studies conducted in the 1980s and 1990s find that undergraduate students perceive unmarried people less favorably than married people. The present research describes two experimental studies that revisit and extend this work by examining the extent to which perceptions of singles depend on marital history, gender, and race, both of which employ a more diverse sample of Americans via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Black Americans are less likely to marry, more likely to divorce, and less likely to remarry than their White counterparts; Black women are less likely to marry than Black men; and Black women contend with nuanced stereotypes that portray them as strong, independent, and self-sufficient. These differences suggest race may shape beliefs about singles, and that racialized differences may be gendered. In Study 1, respondents rated a married or never married man or woman across a range of characteristics. In Study 2, respondents rated a White man, White woman, Black man, or Black woman who was either married, never married, or divorced. Across both studies, regression models indicate singles were evaluated more negatively than married people. Moreover, divorced Black women were perceived more positively on several measures compared to divorced members of other groups. For the most part, however, the magnitude of the singlism effect did not vary by marital history (never married or divorced), gender, or race. We note that null findings regarding gender and race are often relegated to the file drawer, but that this practice distorts the results of systematic reviews and perpetuates the misconception that groups of people (e.g., men and women, Blacks and Whites) are vastly different from one another, a belief that undergirds and justifies inequality.