Hancock Ruth, Stuchbury Rachel, Tomassini Cecilia
Nuffield Community Care Studies Unit, University of Leicester.
Popul Trends. 2003 Winter(114):19-25.
Assumptions about the 'typical' age gap between spouses underlie much social policy (e.g. the five-year difference in men's and women's state pension ages). In order to test the basis for these assumptions, detailed marriage registration statistics were obtained for 1963 and 1998, for England and Wales. Age differences between spouses were calculated and analysed by year, age at marriage and previous marital status. The median age gap hardly changed between 1963 and 1998 but this concealed considerable increase in the proportion of marriages where the man was younger than the woman or--to a lesser extent--where the man was six or more years older.
许多社会政策都基于对配偶间“典型”年龄差距的假设（例如男女国家养老金领取年龄相差五岁）。为了检验这些假设的依据，获取了1963年和1998年英格兰及威尔士详细的婚姻登记统计数据。计算并分析了配偶间的年龄差，按年份、结婚年龄和先前婚姻状况进行分类。1963年至1998年间，年龄差中位数几乎没有变化，但这掩盖了男方比女方年龄小的婚姻比例大幅上升的情况，或者在较小程度上掩盖了男方比女方大六岁或以上的婚姻比例上升的情况。
