Career Matches in Real Life
Bloomberg recently released a statistical report which examines marriage patterns by occupation in the United States. Who do female doctors marry? Male doctors? Female and male lawyers? It’s a fun graph to play with, and although I’m not sure there’s enough data for same-sex couples to be statistically significant, those are listed as well. I used the data to check out some popular romance cliches. Do tycoons really marry secretaries? Who do athletes marry?
For several popular romance hero types, I’ve put the three top female matches, plus the male match in parens for m/m readers. (Alas, the U.S. census is lacking in dukes and sheikhs, so I had to omit those categories). And the results are bizarrely consistent. Take a look!
Links go to books I could think of with that pairing, like the CEO/CEO pairing in Judith McNaught’s Remember When and the CEO/secretary pairing in the graphic novel Midnight Secretary. I had to fudge it sometimes (a similar occupation, a historical, a non-US story, etc), but the spirit is there. If you can think of a better example, let me know in the comments!
CEOs (classified on Bloomberg as CEOs and Legislators): elementary and middle school teachers, secretaries and admins, and CEOs. (Male: CEOs).
Doctors: Doctors, nurses, and elementary and middle school teachers. (Male: nurses).
Lawyers: Lawyers, elementary and middle school teachers, secretaries and admins. (Male: lawyers)
Police: Elementary and middle school teachers, secretaries and admins, police officers (Male: elementary and middle school teachers.
Athletes: Elementary and middle school teachers, nurses, and athletes (Male: Secretaries and admins)
Actors: Actresses, secretaries and administrative assistants, lawyers and judges (male: Camera operators and editors).
These numbers suggest that if you want to marry a hero, first, pursue the same job as the man you want to marry. Failing that, should you study nursing, get that teaching credential, or hit the books at secretarial school? Actually, no. There are so many women in nursing, education, and secretarial work that doctor-nurse (for instance) pairings may be common among doctors, but they represent a small fraction of nurse marriages.
I ran the matches in reverse for the common female professions, and you can see this different story unfold. A randomly selected male doctor is likely to be married to a female nurse, but a randomly selected female nurse is more likely to be married to a male truck driver. Truck drivers are huge in the data here, but essentially nonexistent in the romance novel canon. I recommend a female/male truck driver romance, Eve Silver (Eve Kenin)’s Driven, but a post-apocalyptic AR ice road trucking scenario isn’t quite analogous to a US contemporary. With some Googling I turned up exactly one truck driver romance: One Christmas Knight by Kathleen Creighton, featuring a trucker named Jimmy Joe Starr and a heroine of unknown career named Mirabella Waskowitz who is pregnant by a sperm donor. The back copy reads “FA LA LA LA… LABOR!” I really hope someone reads this book and reports back.
What were the match for common female careers?
Female elementary and middle school teachers: elementary and middle school teachers, “miscellaneous managers,” and truck drivers (female/female: elementary and middle school teachers; male/male: educational admin)
Female nurses: “miscellaneous managers,” truck drivers, and nurses (female/female: nurses, male/male nurses)
Female Secretaries and admins: “miscellaneous managers,” truck drivers, and retail supervisors (female/female: flight attendants, male/male office supervisors)
The lack of stories I could find to link to here represents, I think, an overall selection against working-class marriages in romance. Which is another, and equally interesting, idea for a post.
Here are some other intriguing occupation matches I stumbled across while playing with the data.
- The most common same-sex match for male firefighters is male real estate brokers. I guess someone does need a new house…
- The top match for male enlisted military is female hairdressers. However, the third is female elementary and middle school teachers.
- The second most common match for female musicians and singers is male clergy.
- Female librarians are most likely to marry male professors (book 1, book 2)
- The top match for unemployed men is unemployed women (and for gay men, it is “male eligibility interviewers, government programs,” which is a novel ‘cute meet’).
- The second most common match for female writers is male CEOs. (Research?)
If you’re married, do you match the statistics for your profession? Did you find anything else funny or striking while you looked around the data? What books do you know that could fit here, either where I already found a book or where I missed one? Have you read any of the books I linked to?
Caroline Russomanno
I’m a novelist married to a research chemist. We always told our kids they had NO excuse not to do well in school, because they had plenty of help at home: between the pair of us, we covered the core curriculum, me with a B.A. in English and a minor in History, Mike with a B.S. in Chemistry and a double minor in Math and Physics.
I have enjoyed One Christmas Knight (I used to read it every Xmas). It’s been a while since I’ve done that. I’m in a reread pattern right now since I’m waiting for the new Bishop–I may have to dig it out.
‘Over the road’ by Madeline Urban & Abigail Roux features two truckers …
Neat! Thanks for the title!
I’m a college English professor and my significant other is also one as well. He and I met in grad school and have been together ever since, and I think the commonalities of our interests, outlooks and professional duties have made for a good foundation, even though we have some very different hobbies and interests outside of work. The study above seems to have women in lower-status and income professions, and so I’m wondering if upper-income women tend to find partners similarly positioned. Men have traditionally had more comfort and flexibility partnering up with women with lower-status occupations.
The Bloomberg writers found exactly that when looking at the data as a whole – women tend to marry laterally or up, and men tend to marry laterally or down (with those terms obviously being problematic). I think this holds true in romance novels, too.
That’s what I suspected. Traditionally men could afford to marry “”down,”” whereas women could not as easily.
Go truck drivers! LOL. I’m not sure I’ve ever met one. I married my scuba diving instructor who turned into a bus driver, does that count?
I guess we would call that “”recreation and fitness instructor?”” In that case there is no female match!
This sounds like a great story.
Interesting column. I think I have tended to think in personality terms instead of career matches, you know, such as like drawn to like, or opposites attracting? Of course if one reads a lot of English historicals like I do one always comes across the marrying for money or position situation. To answer your question, though, I was an editor and a musician and I married another musician.
Just by coincidence I happened to have read a recent column in the NY Times called “”The Marriages of Power Couples Reinforce Income Inequality.”” The article starts off mentioning Jane Austen and Henry James but it’s more economics based than career type obviously. For anyone interested–in addition to Caroline’s data–here is the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/upshot/marriages-of-power-couples-reinforce-income-inequality.html