Although more than half of the residents in dermatology are now women, women were a minority in medicine in the 1960s and 1970s, even in dermatology. We have decided to honor those among us who have accomplished so much when it was truly a struggle for a woman to do so. We also wanted to use the example of these women’s lives to demonstrate that, with the proper motivation and time management, ...

Research has found that in the United States women have greater economic returns to a college degree than men, because of more stable marriages and other family income. Using cross-sectional data of women aged 19-40 years in Malawi from the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (n = 898), we test whether higher education is associated with these same benefits in a context with lower ...

Following the era of the ‘golden age of marriage’ and the baby boom in the 1950s and 1960s, marriage has declined in importance, and its role as the main institution on which family relations are built has been eroded across Europe. Union formation most often takes place without a marriage. Family and living arrangements are currently heterogeneous across Europe, but all countries seem to be ma...

This paper examines the marriage tax paid by couples in 2000 using the U.S. Census data from that year. The U.S. Census data allows the study to focus on cohabiting and married couples, and ignore individuals, to overcome the inaccuracies that can result when the income of a potential spouse for an individual must be estimated. The marriage tax for couples is calculated and examined. Then, the ...

Kathryn Edin and Joanna Reed review recent research on social and economic barriers to marriage among the poor and discuss the efficacy of efforts by federal and state policymakers to promote marriage among poor unmarried couples, especially those with children, in light of these findings. Social barriers include marital aspirations and expectations, norms about childbearing, financial standard...

In many traditional societies, women's age at marriage acts simultaneously as a gateway to new family roles and the likelihood of producing offspring. However, inadequate attention has previously been given to the broader health and social implications of variability in women's marriage age for public health. Biomedical scientists have primarily been concerned with whether the onset of reproduc...

This is a cross-sectional study conducted with 222 15 to 19 year-old female adolescents who lived in the area of a family health unit in the East part of the city of São Paulo. The aim was to describe their motivation for starting sexual life or remaining virgin, as well as the associated factors to the onset of sexual life. The girls that had already initiated their sexual life were older, did...

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling, but more strikingly, the importance of marriage at different points in the life cycle has changed, re...

In this paper we show how relatively small changes in the age at marriage can equilibrate the marriage market despite relatively large differences in the supply of men and women of marriageable age. In particular, a simple demographic model is developed that provides a prediction about the relationship between relative cohort size and age at marriage that differs markedly from that of the stati...