Three big themes in life-pattern diversity
The information we’re looking at is about Millennial women’s education, alcohol/marijuana usage, sexual activity, cohabitation, marriage, income, body mass index (BMI), church attendance, and childbearing. Each item was measured in surveys that the women took every year or so going back to when they were in their early-to-mid teens.
In this section, we’ll just dive in and try to glimpse the big picture all at once. I used a factor analysis, which is a useful way to try to figure out in broad strokes what variables tend to go with what, suggesting the major themes that help account for related items in datasets with lots of variables.
Looking at items from their 20s and 30s, the factor analysis suggested three major areas in which these women’s life-patterns varied from one another.
First theme: Higher SES vs. Lower SES
The first theme points to a large-scale pattern in which the following items tended strongly to go together for these women: Getting more education, having higher household incomes, and having fewer children (and especially having fewer children in their 20s). In addition, the SES factor tends also to involve having fewer non-marital cohabitations, being more likely to be married in their 30s, being thinner, and having more alcohol/pot usage in their 20s.
And vice versa, of course. At the other end of this factor we tend to see these going together: less education, lower incomes, more children (especially in their 20s), more non-marital cohabitations, less marriage in their 30s, higher weights, and less alcohol/pot usage in their 20s.
The prototype for higher SES Millennial women, then, centers on those who got extended educations in their 20s before having children, partied more on average than other women in their 20s, and mostly avoiding non-marital cohabitations. Later they tended to get married and have children, though their slower start usually meant they ended up with fewer children than lower SES women on average. And, throughout this time, they usually had substantially higher household incomes and were significantly thinner than other women. And vice versa for lower SES women.
The core of this SES-based theme is pretty simple: Not many Millennial women combined, on the one hand, getting the sorts of educations that tend to lead to higher incomes with, on the other hand, starting childbearing in their teens or early 20s. On the flip side, lots of women who didn’t pursue higher education decided to start their childbearing in their teens and early 20s.
Second theme: Secular Freewheelers vs. Religious Ring-Bearers
The second factor that helps statistically organize and summarize the relationships among the variables in this dataset involves, on one side, women who tended to have more frequent partying and less frequent church attendance, were more likely to have had multiple sex partners over a given time period (and were also simply more likely to be sexually active at all), had more non-marital cohabitations, and had fewer children by their late 30s.
On the other side were women who were more likely to have the opposite features: less frequent partying, more frequent church attendance, fewer sex partners (and less likely to be sexually active at all over a given time period), fewer non-marital cohabitations, and more children.
I call the one side “Freewheelers” (more partying, more sex partners, more cohabitation, fewer kids) and the other “Ring-Bearers” (less partying, fewer sex partners, less cohabitation, more kids). You can get these life-patterns without religion being in the mix, but it’s more typically the case that Freewheeler types attend religious services a lot less often than Ring-Bearer types, and indeed, it all loads onto this second core theme describing diversity in Millennial women’s life-patterns.
Third theme: Sidelines vs. Stable Relationships
The third statistical current flowing through the data is pretty simple: Those on the Sidelines were especially likely to have been inactive sexually at various times throughout the study, and they ended up with few children.
Those on the Stable Relationships side tended primarily to have been married more and, secondarily, to have had more non-marital cohabitations, in either case, without also having a larger number of outside partners, and also tended to have had more children in the end.
There is also a discrete middle ground on this Sidelines vs. Stable Relationships factor: Women who were sexually active but who spent less time married or cohabiting, typically having a number of children which was in between the higher number for those with Stable Relationships and the lower number for the Sidelines.
This draws an interesting contrast with the Freewheeler vs. Ring-Bearer theme. There, married people and those on the sidelines were together in the Ring-Bearer camp, as opposed to non-marital cohabitators and those with higher numbers of partners in the Freewheeler camp. There, it’s a contrast that is situated in the context of religious differences.
The Sidelines vs. Stable Relationships theme, in contrast, doesn’t relate to religiosity. It’s also not a socioeconomic contrast. Instead, it’s more of a practical point: When women never really got in the mating game at all, they tended to end up with very few children. At the other end, having been married more in their 20s and 30s is strongly associated with having had more children. Periods of non-marital cohabitation were more weakly associated with having more children, and having multiple partners in their 30s was weakly associated with having fewer children.
