Prognosticators See It as Good-Bad News for Marriage-Minded Women : Windfall of Men Predicted to Follow Baby Boom Drought

Just three years ago, aging female “baby boomers” were wringing wedding-ringless hands over a Newsweek report that said they were less likely ever to marry than be killed by a terrorist (whose marital status was unknown).

The good news today is that the so-called “man shortage” is over.

“With the upswing in available men, you will find that of women who want to get married, fewer will be frustrated in that effort,” said Neil Bennett, the Yale University sociologist whose research unwittingly touched off the man shortage panic of 1986. “There’s going to be an abundance of men.”

The bad news, though, is that it is going to rain men only in the generation now in its 20s and younger. So those fortysomething-and-single women so terrorized by the media several years back will still find slim marriage pickings.

Ratio Is Being Reversed

Population projections show that the male-to-female ratio favoring men has begun to reverse. The reversal hits about the 1960 birth year--those born before generally find more available women in their age group; those born after find an excess of available men, said Bennett, whose research will be published this fall in the American Journal of Sociology.

But Bennett, still smarting a bit from the furor his initial research created, warned that it is impossible to conclude what effect the current trend will have on the future marriage market.

“Our (first) study didn’t necessarily say that there were women out there pining for men and couldn’t find them,” he said. “Much of this non-marriage thing was by choice rather than the dearth of available men. My current research shows that for those born between 1960 and 1975, they will find a relative surplus of men.

“But we can’t say what the net effect of this will be. There are two countervailing effects. One is that fewer and fewer women are marrying. They now have options today that they didn’t have before; the economic need to marry is no longer there for many of them.

“But for women who indeed do want to marry, they will see an upswing in available men.”

Effect of Supply and Demand

What will this mean in practical, what-are-you-doing-Saturday-night terms? Will the supply-and-demand forces of the meet market favor women over men? Will men now be the ones who love too much and complain that all the “good” ones are taken?

“We looked at other times and places when there was a shortage of women, such as in colonial America. Men just went crazy courting women,” said Paul Secord, a social psychologist and co-author of the 1983 book, “Too Many Women?”

“When the news went around that a ship was coming in with women on it, men would go to the docks with signs like, ‘I’m a carpenter, marry me.’ ”

Secord, who recently retired from the University of Houston, believes that the sex-ratio reversal means that men will want to settle down earlier because there will be greater competition for women. One of his colleagues at the university has even predicted that the competition could lead to a boom in the market for flowers and other tools of romance.

“What happens when there’s a shortage of women is that men will commit more readily,” he said. “They go back to the romantic tradition. The songs of the time will even reflect that.”

More Valuable if Supply Short

It will be back to Economics 101 and the supply-and-demand theory of the marketplace: Whatever is in short supply becomes more valuable.

“The person in short supply can demand more,” Secord said, “and the person in oversupply has to give more.”

The short supply of available men since the 1970s has made many of them reluctant to commit to one woman, he said. Ergo, the “Peter Pan syndrome,” the “Cassanova complex” and all those other pop-mythic maladies of recent years.

Take Dave Powers, 34, and one of the founders of the Young Anne Arundel Professionals singles group. He estimated that there are three to four women for every man at the club’s events.

“I don’t mind it,” he admitted with a chuckle. “Why settle down when I’m having so much fun now?”

Powers, who works for an engineering firm in the Annapolis area, was married at 25 and divorced last year. He said he wants to catch up on the bachelorhood he missed by marrying early but knows that he wants a permanent relationship someday. Not now, though.

“I’m not ready for that,” he said. “I’m just being selfish now in that I want to do stuff for me and not get emotionally involved with one person.”

Dating Service Breakdown

The sex ratio shift is already making itself felt in several ways. At the Together Dating Service, a national chain, the age breakdown parallels the shift in the overall population. Owner Brad Megahan said he has more male than female members in the under-25 age bracket, a roughly even split in the 25-to-40 age group, and more women than men in the over-40 crowd.

“The younger women are going to meet more men,” he said. “The older women aren’t going to meet a lot of men. And the older men are going to be inundated.”

But numbers do not tell the whole picture.

Mass population trends do not always filter down and actually change individual behavior, Bennett said. He considers Secord’s assumption that a gender ratio favoring women would lead men to marry early--before all the “good” ones get taken--quite a leap.

“Theoretically, it’s possible, but I would be hard pressed to believe behavior will respond so explicitly to this new trend,” he said. “That implies young men are consciously going to be thinking, ‘I better get married this year,’ which is what people thought women were thinking when my first study came out.”

Who Will, in Fact, Marry?

And not everyone agrees that the shift in gender ratio will make much of a difference about who gets married when, or even if.

Men will always have a larger pool of women available--from their own age groups and those younger, even substantially younger--because society tends to accept that kind of May-December coupling much more readily than its reverse, one demographer said.

“I don’t think the overall impact will be very great with this kind of shift,” said Charles Westoff, director of Princeton University’s Office of Population Research. “My guess is that it will ease somewhat the disadvantages women had in the early ‘80s.”

But, he added: “The fact is, men can still in effect reach down, to women even 20 years younger than them. But that pool is not available to women. There’s no amount of modest changes that’s going to eliminate the greater purview that men have.”