Mate availability, women's marriage prevalence, and husbands' education.

"We predict that marriage prevalence and husbands' education for Black women [in the United States] vary directly with mate availability. We also predict that marriage prevalence and husbands' education will be lower for Black women with less than a high school education than for other Black women. We test these predictions using data on marriage and husbands' education for a national sample of individuals and data on aggregate-level marriage prevalence and husbands' education for a sample of large metropolitan areas. The results support our predictions, and they help to explain how low mate availability for Black women helps to create and maintain an underclass that is disproportionately composed of less-educated Black women and their children."

City differences in racial occupational differentiation: a note on the use of odds ratios.

This note considers whether city differences in racial occupational distribution are best investigated using measures of nominal differentiation or measures of inequality, and argues that measures of inequality are better suited for testing the prevailing theories of race differences in occupation distribution. It also defends the Index of Net Difference and the Index of Dissimilarity (and other measures of inequality used in previous research) from the criticism that they are flawed because they are sensitive to city differences in occupational structure. Additionally, it explores a new approach for investigating city differences in occupational inequality within the log-linear framework. The logical and empirical arguments offered support the conclusions that racial occupation differences reflect racial stratification, and that variation in racial occupation differences across cities is best understood as the product of city differences in the severity of racial stratification. Thus, future research in this area should continue to focus on measures of inequality rather than measures of nominal differentiation until there are sound theoretical and empirical reasons for conceptualizing race differences in occupational distribution in terms of nominal differentiation.