Being Unmarried under Sex Discrimination and Inequality within the Sexes: A Simple Model

This paper explores a micro-macro link: to explain the relationship between women's expanding economic independence and the rate of the unmarried in terms of a model of women's rational decision-making. An expected utility model is developed and combined with the assumption of random matching of men and women. The major propositions derived from the model are as follows. (1) The severer the sex discrimination in the sense that the difference in the means of the logarithm of income between men and women is large, the lower the probability of being unmarried. (2) The severer the sex discrimination as measured by the probability that a married woman, relative to an unmarried woman, can stay in her job, the higher the probability of being unmarried. (3) It is predicted that in most industrial societies, the higher the degree of inequality within the sexes, the higher the probability of being unmarried.