The night before the California primaries earlier this month, I received a robocall urging me to support one of the candidates because she is a “fighter for children and families.” I emailed the candidate, telling her that I am a 64-year-old lifelong single woman with no kids, and it sounded like she did not even realize that people like me exist.
Much to my surprise, she responded immediately: “As a single woman with no kids myself, I absolutely realize that people like us exist.” She said she thought the call was from a group that endorsed her.
It was good to hear that her campaign had not come up with the exclusionary language, but interesting that a group endorsing her would think that the “children and families” framing would be the most effective way to muster support.
Or maybe they did not think about it at all. Some ways of talking about the issues are so overlearned that they unfurl with little reflection or awareness.
Candidates for public office in the U.S. are among the people who should be especially attuned to unmarried Americans. Now that there are nearly as many citizens 18 and older who are not married as married, it is especially risky to the success of the candidates to ignore them. And, of course, it is of real consequences to unmarried Americans if their needs are ignored not just in campaigns but in policies.
More kinds of diversity are recognized than ever before, but too often, marital status is still ignored
In progressive publications, matters of diversity are often taken quite seriously. Consider, for example, a recent call for papers on public feminisms from the scholarly journal, “Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.” Scholars were asked to address the concern that “the pool of public intellectuals and punditry continues to be largely dominated by white men.” The journal listed some possible topics that contributors might discuss, including: “How do race, nation, religion, class, sexuality, and caste structure where and which feminisms tend to become public?”
Where’s marital status?
Another example comes from an online magazine that describes itself this way: “We cover politics, reproductive rights, policy, civil rights, race, sex, class, gender, LGBTQ, disability, class, media, law, cultural trends, and more.”
Maybe marital status fits under the miscellaneous category, “and more”?
The survey researchers who came up with a dozen possible reasons for unfair treatment, but forgot about marital status
Earlier this year, the BBC invited people to participate in an unusually detailed and thoughtful study of loneliness. One set of questions asked participants to indicate how often, in their day-to-day life, these kinds of things happened to them:
- You are treated with less courtesy or respect than other people.
- You receive poorer service than other people at restaurants or stores.
- People act as if they think you are not smart.
- People act as if they are afraid of you.
- You are threatened or harassed.
Then they were asked to think about the possible reasons for such experiences and check all the relevant ones from this list:
- Your ancestry or national origins
- Your gender
- Your race
- Your age
- Your religion
- Your height
- Your weight
- Physical attractiveness
- A physical disability
- Mental health
- Your sexual orientation
- Your education or income level
- Other
Once again, marital status is missing. The only option that could possibly include it is the catch-all, “other.”
The omission of marital status as an answer to that question was especially problematic because we already know it is relevant. In a nationally representative survey of Americans between the ages of 25 and 74, men and women were asked about their experiences with those kinds of examples of interpersonal discrimination.
When researchers Anne Byrne and Deborah Carr compared the lifelong single people with the married people, here’s what they found:
The lifelong single men (compared to the married men)
- Were treated with less courtesy
- Were more often threatened or harassed
- Said that people acted as if they were afraid of them
- Said that people acted as if they saw them as dishonest
The lifelong single women (compared to the married women)
- Were treated with less respect
- Received poorer service in restaurants
- Were more often threatened or harassed
- Were more often called names or insulted
The place of marital status in laws and policies
More important than whether survey researchers or editors of publications or candidates for office recognize the significance of marital status is whether marital status is protected under the law.
Here’s the relevant section of Harvard University’s “Statement of Equal Opportunity Laws and Practices”:
“Harvard University provides equal opportunity in employment for all qualified persons and prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy related conditions, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, age, veteran status, disability unrelated to job requirements, genetic information, military service, or other protected status.”
If marital status is covered, it is again under the miscellaneous category of some “other protected status,” as if it is not even worth specifying.
Is marital status a protected status in federal employment law? When Joan DelFattore and I looked into this for an article we wrote about when it is and is not appropriate to ask about marital status, we reported:
“The reason federal regulations discourage questions about marital status in job interviews is that married women might be rejected because of their (presumed) focus on family obligations. The question isn’t illegal, though—and good luck proving that your answer to “Are you married?” was the reason you didn’t get the job.”
Similarly, marital status is specified in the federal Fair Housing Act, but the focus is on the protection of cohabiting couples and single parents with children, rather than people living alone or with groups of friends.
Of course, as Unmarried Equality members are well aware, there are more than 1,000 federal laws that mention marital status, but only to benefit or protect people who are legally married. Marital status is specified in these statutes not to stipulate that unmarried people are to be treated fairly but to indicate that it is legal to discriminate against them.
Our culture is lagging, and it is time to catch up
Byrne and Carr, the researchers who documented the unfair treatment experienced by single men and women, wondered why interpersonal discrimination against single people persists, even as the number of single people continues to grow. They suggested that the answer is “cultural lag”:
“Rapid social change may produce a cultural lag, where one element of a culture or society changes more quickly than another…Singles may be caught in such a ‘lag’ or delay between the point in time when social conditions change, and the time that cultural adjustments are made.”
Ignoring single people is costing candidates votes. Ignoring them is going against the valuing of diversity that is part of the mission of many publications and organizations. Ignoring them stunts our understanding of the psychology of bias. Ignoring them is making second class citizens out of nearly half of all adults.
We need to do better.
[Notes: (1) The opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality. (2) The comment option on the UE website has been invaded by spammers, so I have disabled comments for now. I’ll post all these blog posts at the UE Facebook page; please join our discussions there. (3) For links to previous columns, click here.]
About the Author: Bella DePaulo (PhD, Harvard), a long-time member of Unmarried Equality, is the author of Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After and How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, among other books. She writes the “Living Single” blog for Psychology Today and the “Single at Heart” blog for Psych Central. Visit her website at www.BellaDePaulo.com and take a look at her TEDx talk, “What no one ever told you about people who are single.”
About Bella DePaulo
