Hidden Data Stories — On older brides and younger grooms
As part of our efforts to promote everyday use of open data, we will publish one short data story biweekly based on seemingly inconspicuous datasets to uncover the hidden data stories on Data.gov.sg.
Most married couples do not share the same age. Across cultures and over time, age disparity has been observed in relationships between men and women (with men being the older party in the relationship). But how big is this gap in Singapore? To find out, we can dig into a dataset named Total Marriages by Marriage Order and Age Differential of Grooms To Brides, Annual on Data.gov.sg.
In the chart above, the horizontal axis represents the age differential of grooms to brides. Age differential is calculated by deducting the age of the bride from the age of the groom.
The first thing to be observed is that the distribution is asymmetric, skewing towards the right. Even though the mode of the distribution is 0, the numbers of negative observations tapers off faster than positive observations.
This agrees with our casual observation that it is uncommon to find couples where the groom is the younger party. It is also noteworthy that the distribution for remarriages is much flatter than first marriages.
The changing marriage age gap
Another thing that we can look into is how the distribution has changed over the years. Judging from the charts below, we can observe that the age gap used to be wider in the past. You can see the weight of the distribution has been pushed towards the zero line.
What might have caused marriage age gap to shrink over the years? One clue can be found in the rising age of women getting married and their higher education attainment. Here we show two related charts from Data.gov.sg illustrating these trends.
We can see back in 1985 the biggest group of brides came from the 20–24 age group. It has since been overtaken by the 25–29 and 30–34 age group. Similarly, brides today are mostly university educated even though it hasn’t been the case less than 20 years ago.
Breaking down the shrinking marriage age gap
How do we prove that rising age of brides and shrinking age gap of married couples are related? We do this by looking at another dataset on Data.gov.sg titled Marriages under the Women’s Charter by Age Group of Brides and Grooms, Annual. This dataset breakdowns marriages by groom’s age (Y) and bride’s age (X) rather than their age difference (Y-X) thereby painting a deeper picture.
This seems like a lot of charts to digest so let us go straight to the conclusion and then explain step by step how we arrive there.
What the charts above suggest is that younger women tend to match with older marriage partner while older women are more likely to marry someone around their age.
We start with the first row that breaks down all marriages where brides are aged 20–24 years. Majority of them married someone from a higher age group (grooms aged 25–29 years). Marriages where the groom belong to a lower age group (under 20) were almost non-existent. Proceeding to the second row, we see brides in the 25–29 age group is most likely to marry someone from the same age group. This applies also to the third row but what’s interesting is that a significant number of brides in the 30–34 age group married someone from the younger 25–29 age group. Finally the fact that charts on the left show the exact same pattern as charts on the right indicates that this is an inter-generational trend.
Since brides marrying older groom is a pattern that applies mostly to young women plus the fact that more and more women are marrying later, what we have is a shift from the top left chart to the middle and bottom right charts all of which implies a shrinking marriage age gap which is reflected in our data.
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