NICE CLEAVAGE:

Marriage scholars do emphasize the economic and educational gains married men enjoy. At a press luncheon last Tuesday, Robert I. Lerman and W. Bradford Wilcox discussed the findings from their new report, "For Richer, For Poorer: How Family Structures Economic Success in America." They found that married men earn at least $15,900 more per year in individual income compared their single peers, while black married men earn $12,000 more and married men with a high school degree or less earn $17,000 more.

 

The gap between married and single men drives rather than reflects economic inequality, they said. "One of the most important elements in increasing inequality in the United States is family structure, not only in employment but the slow increase in median incomes," Lerman told a half dozen reporters seated around a white table cloth at the American Enterprise Institute. Lerman said 25 percent to 30 percent of the inequality in the United States is the result of the "retreat from marriage."

 

"Stable, two-parent families limit poverty, increase mobility, and are associated with a variety of positive social and health outcomes for adults and children alike. Two barriers to the formation of stable, two-parent families are having children outside marriage and becoming a noncustodial father," they wrote in the 55-page report.

 

Yet the two scholars' research showed not only that adults and children benefit from marriage in general but women and girls specifically. For example, they found that coming from an intact, two-parent family "was almost as important as race and educational attainment" in succeeding in school. Among their findings:

 

Girls raised in homes with their biological mother and father are nine percent less likely to flunk out of high school. Girls raised in step-parent families fare only slightly better than girls raised in single-parent homes, they found.

 

Girls raised in two-parent homes were 12 percent less likely to be single parents. 

 

Girls raised in two-parents homes work 179 more hours a year compared to their counterparts who grew up in single-parent homes, according to a study of 1997 data. 

 

Women from intact families have more than $4,375 in personal and $12,198 in family income than their counterparts raised in single-parent or step-parent situations. 

 

Married women have more family income: Young mothers have $33,000 more and middle-aged mothers have $52,000 more.

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