Schoen R
Demography. 1983 Feb;20(1):61-78.
The "marriage squeeze," or the effect on marriage of an imbalance between the numbers of males and females, has been seen as having a great influence on contemporary marriage behavior. Nonetheless, the literature does not contain a clear definition of exactly what a marriage squeeze is and contains few quantitative estimates of its impact on marriage. The present article provides a precise definition of the marriage squeeze in equation (2), and applies it to measure both artificially produced marriage squeezes in two-sex nuptiality stable populations and the experience of the United States during the period 1950-1990. The marriage squeeze is shown to be capable of producing significant changes in both the level and distribution of marriage, and it appears to be having such an impact in some contemporary Third World societies. For developed countries in general and for the United States in particular, the marriage squeeze exerts little influence on the level of marriage but has a considerable effect on the distribution of marriages. The U.S. age-sex composition of the year 1978, compared to that of the year 1951, is shown to imply a 0.54 year decrease in the male mean age at marriage and a 0.53 year increase in the female mean age at marriage, as well as an 18 percent reduction in the variance of the male ages at marriage and a 33 percent increase in the variance of the female ages. The social and economic implications of such changes have yet to be fully explored.
“婚姻挤压”，即男性与女性数量失衡对婚姻产生的影响，被视为对当代婚姻行为有重大影响。尽管如此，文献中并未对婚姻挤压的确切定义给出明确界定，且对其对婚姻影响的定量估计也很少。本文在公式（2）中给出了婚姻挤压的精确界定，并将其应用于衡量两性婚姻稳定人口中人为制造的婚姻挤压以及美国1950 - 1990年期间的实际情况。研究表明，婚姻挤压能够在婚姻水平和分布上产生显著变化，而且在一些当代第三世界社会似乎正产生这样的影响。总体而言，对于发达国家尤其是美国，婚姻挤压对婚姻水平影响不大，但对婚姻分布有相当大的影响。与1951年相比，1978年美国的年龄性别构成显示，男性平均结婚年龄下降了0.54岁，女性平均结婚年龄上升了0.53岁，同时男性结婚年龄的方差减少了18%，女性结婚年龄的方差增加了33%。这些变化的社会和经济影响还有待充分探讨。
