Marital status and fertility among blacks

As a follow-up to the recent post on marital status and fertility, I used 2000-2010 GSS data to calculate the mean number of offspring for black women ages 40-59 by marital status. I looked at the low- and high-educated separately.


Mean number of offspring

Women with less than four-year degree (sample size = 440)
Married 2.65
Separated/Divorced 2.55
Never-Married 2.34

Women with four-year degree or more (sample size = 111)
Married 2.00
Separated/Divorced 1.62
Never-Married .71*

*significantly lower than corresponding married or separated/divorced groups


In the earlier post, we saw that white never-married women have fewer kids than married or separated/divorced women whether they are more or less educated. For black women, this is true only for educated women. Among less educated blacks, never getting married is not associated with significantly fewer kids.

If marriage disappears completely among blacks, its population will not drop dramatically as we see with whites; by contrast, only fertility among educated blacks--a comparatively small group--will shrink. Let's look on the bright side: the disappearance of your smart people is better than the disappearance of your race.