Motivation for Marriage among Women and Men

Abstract

This paper examines sex differences in motivation for marriage and related career/family plans. Never-married women and men indicated their wish to get married as well as the degree of importance they accorded various benefits and drawbacks associated with marriage. Women had significantly stronger motivation for marriage than did men. Both women and men gave similar ratings to the importance of the benefits and drawbacks of marriage. Women, however, accorded greater importance to the benefit “legal security” in marriage and to the drawback “marriage requires a lot of work” than did men. In addition, among correlations for the importance accorded spousal, parental, worker, and self roles and motivation for marriage scores for women, there was a negative correlation between importance of the worker-role and motivation for marriage while for men a positive value was found between these variables. Implications of these results are discussed from a sex-role perspective.