Tag Archives: marriage squeeze

Further Adventures in Publishing

I finally received the pdf version of my recently published paper with a 2006 publication date.  My grad student, Brodie Ferguson, and I used demographic data from the Colombia censuses of 1973, 1985, 1993, and 2002 to calculate the magnitude of the marriage squeeze felt by women in Colombia.  The protracted civil conflict in Colombia means that there has been a burden of excess young male mortality in that country for at least 30 years (the measurement of which is the subject of a paper soon to be submitted).  This excess male mortality means that there are far more women entering the marriage market than there are men, putting the squeeze on women (i.e., making it more difficult for them to marry).  Our results show that in the most violent Colombian departments at the height of the violence (1993), the marital sex ratio was as low at 0.67.  This means for every 100 men entering the marriage market, there were 150 women.  This is a truly stunning number.  We discuss some of the potential societal consequences of these incredibly unbalanced sex ratios.  Two very important phenomena that we think are linked to these extraordinary sex ratios are: (1) the high rates of consensual unions (i.e., non-married couples "living together") in Colombia and (2) the pattern of female-biased rural-urban migration.

The citation to the paper (even though it came out in 2008) is:

Jones, J. H., and B. D. Ferguson. 2006. The Marriage Squeeze in Colombia, 1973-2005: The Role of Excess Male Death. Social Biology. 53 (3-4):140-151.