The missing men of the American marriage market
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The missing men of the American marriage market
By Greg Rosalsky
Tuesday, May 19, 2026 • 6:30 AM EDT
It's a bit weird to think of dating or marriage as a market — but this is a newsletter that tries to make sense of the world through economics. And, like any market, shifts in supply and demand can reshape romantic outcomes in pretty profound ways.<br>First, a dating story that illustrates this dynamic. Then we'll get to a fascinating new study that may help explain why getting married has become harder for many American women.<br>But first, the story. If you haven't heard of him, Jack Antonoff is a musician and super-producer. He, for example, produced a slew of blockbuster albums for Taylor Swift and co-produced nearly every song on Kendrick Lamar's most recent album GNX. I assume he gets invited to great parties.<br>But he didn't always. On a recent episode of The Howard Stern Show, Antonoff reminisced about his struggles to fit in at public school in New Jersey around the turn of the millennium. He said he was basically bullied for being an artsy punk with blue-dyed hair "who everyone thought was gay."<br>Then Antonoff transferred to a performing arts high school in New York City, and everything turned around for him. He thrived among like-minded artsy types. And, he suggested, his dating life improved because of the school's demographic imbalance. "I went from being made fun of for being 'gay' — because I had blue hair — to being the only straight kid in the class," Antonoff told Stern.<br>Antonoff had many things going for him. But he suggested, kind of self-deprecatingly, the math at this new school worked in his favor. His high school sweetheart became none other than Scarlett Johansson.<br>"You're a genius," joked Stern. "You picked a high school where everyone was gay — so you get Scarlett Johansson."<br>It may have been a joke, but it actually points to a broader phenomenon that can affect whole societies. Economists and other social scientists have long studied how gender imbalances can dramatically reshape dating and marriage markets, which can help the romantic prospects of some while hurting the prospects of others.<br>A lot of these studies involve bleak, depressing stuff. For example, a large body of research looks at gender imbalances after wars, when societies lose large numbers of young men.<br>One influential study looked at what happened in France after much of the male population was killed during World War I. The authors found that the men who remained in France tended to "marry up," pairing with women from higher social classes "that would have been inaccessible before the war." In a sense, the value of French men in the marriage market seems to have increased because men were in short supply.<br>Modern China presents a kind of mirror image to post-WWI France. For decades, men have substantially outnumbered women in China. That's in large part because in 1979, the Communist government launched the One Child Policy, which limited couples to having one kid. Influenced by traditional preferences for boys, and concerned about the economic prospects of their families, many couples sought to make sure their one kid was a boy rather than a girl. China has since ended the One Child Policy, but it contributed to a large surplus of men relative to women. Research has suggested that women in modern China have leveraged their relative scarcity, becoming more likely to marry up.<br>The United States is not currently witnessing any demographic imbalances so extreme. The ratio of men to women is pretty even. However, the economic and educational trajectories of men and women have increasingly diverged, with a large swath of men falling behind.<br>For example, women are now more likely to graduate from college than men. In recent years, female students have made up almost 60 percent of undergraduate students, and outnumbered men on college campuses by more than two million, according to one government estimate. Meanwhile, many men who didn't get a college education have been struggling economically, and have been much more likely to end up on drugs, in prison, and unemployed.<br>A new working paper by economists Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann, "Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates," looks at how this growing educational and economic gender imbalance is affecting marriage patterns in the United States.<br>The study suggests that the struggles of many American men have created something like a game of musical chairs for women looking to get married. College-educated women have largely maintained high marriage rates, but they've done so by increasingly getting hitched to men without a college education. But they're not ending up with just any men in this demographic pool. They're, on average, partnering up with the higher-earning ones.<br>Meanwhile, this study suggests that women without a...