Gender Asymmetry in the Fertility of Racially and Ethnically Exogamous U.S. Couples.

Abstract

Hypotheses explaining fertility levels in unions of women and men with different racial and ethnic origins (exogamous union fertility)-including stigma, in-between, pronatal, and assimilative fertility-apply equally when the minority group partner is the woman or the man. As an alternative, we propose a gendered theorizing of exogamous union fertility in which the fertility preferences of either the woman's or the man's racial and ethnic group might dominate. Our analyses reveal strong support for male-predominant patterns: the couple's fertility is nearer to that in an endogamous union of the man's racial and ethnic group than to that of an endogamous union of the woman's racial and ethnic group. We conjecture that women selecting into exogamous unions to realize their own individual fertility preferences might partially explain this finding. We find no cases of female predominance, in which the couple's fertility is nearer to that in an endogamous union of the woman's racial and ethnic group than that of an endogamous union of the man's racial and ethnic group. In addition, using a simple fertility model in which both the woman's and the man's racial and ethnic groups are included as predictors, we find that only the man's coefficients are statistically and substantively significant. A critical implication of our findings is that the standard demographic practice of using the woman's racial and ethnic group will increasingly downwardly bias estimates of fertility differences by race and ethnicity in the United States as exogamy becomes increasingly common.