Economic changes over the past 20 years have conspired to create a growing underclass of single low income males (SLIMs) without the financial resources to marry and support a family. Consequently, this study shows that primarily it is not the DINKS (dual income no-kids) behind the decline in Australia's fertility rate. Rather, the decline in marriage and fertility is largely among the SLIMs.

In 1986 most women were partnered by their late twenties. By 2001 only a bare majority, 53%, were partnered. (Table 2.2). In 1986, 71% of men had partnered by their early thirties, but by 2001 this had shrunk to 59%. (Table 7.3).

After the economic boom of the 1990s and 20 years of "free market", economic rationalist, structural economic change - deregulation of financial markets, cutting tariffs, labour market deregulation, privatisation, deregulation of agriculture, etc. - there have been economic winners and losers.

The structural economic changes have induced social change:

· There is a growing UNDERCLASS, made up of men who have no further education after leaving school, who are losing out in the job market. The losers are essentially defined as being not in full-time work, have no post-school education, and are living on less than $31,200 p.a. (many on less than $15,600 p.a.). Lacking the financial resources and facing higher housing and child rearing costs, they are also losing out in the marriage market. The critical condition for marriage is a full-time job.

Full-time work for men in their late 20s and early 30s fell sharply from 1986 to 1996. It then continued to fall at a slower rate between 1996 and 2001. By 2001, one-third of men aged 25-29 were not in full-time work and 28-29% of those in the 30-34 age groups were also not in full-time work (Table 3.7).

· More than half of all men in their late 20's and early thirties have no post-school qualifications whatsoever (Pg 31).

· As the summary table demonstrates below, the lower the income the lower the marriage and partnering rate and the higher the divorce and separation rate.

· The marriage rate amongst these men is plummeting and the divorce rate is more than double that of men on higher incomes. If this trend continues into the future, the majority of such men could soon be unpartnered.

In contrast for tertiary educated, higher income people:Married women with tertiary degrees aged 35-39 years have a lower fertility rate of 1.94, but have much higher marriage rate and lower divorce rate than women with no post-school qualifications.

· Single women have a lower fertility rate than women who are married or de facto. Without these single mothers, the fertility rate would be even lower.

Full-time male employment is the key to marriage. Marriage is the key to fertility.

The findings of this study contradicts the popular view conveyed by Sex in the City and lifestyle magazines that give the impression that it is the wealthy who divorce and remarry, or live swinging singles lifestyles. On the contrary, professionals have the highest marriage rates and the most stable marriages, if not the highest fertility rate. There is a marriage gap for tertiary educated females, as they significantly outnumber their tertiary educated male counterparts. However, this problem is not the primary cause for falling marriage and fertility rates.

· Married men are increasingly from the ranks of the better off. Amongst the tertiary educated, there is a much higher marriage rate, and much lower divorce rate (Tables 2.4 & 2.6).

· With higher incomes and job stability, people are more able to hold a family together. Higher qualified men have tended to have a higher marriage rate than other men. While this is not new, what is new is the growing marriage gap between high and low income men.

The revolution in marriage is affecting fertility:

· Australia's fertility rate in 2001 was 1.73, down from 2.8 in the late '60s and well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman over a life time (Pg 39).

· Married women without bachelor degrees are still the most fertile, having about 2.28 children per woman (35-39 years). The problem is that the marriage rate for this group has plummeted as the job situation for their potential partners has deteriorated. This is the primary cause of the decline in fertility since 1986 (Table 4.7).

· For women with no post-school education, by the time they are in their mid-thirties, 32% are unpartnered, and 45% of these are lone parents, compared to just 10% of unpartnered degree qualified women who are lone parents (Table 3.5).

Validity of the Study: Men and Women Apart is based, not on sample survey data, as are many other social reports, but on whole population data from the 1986, 1996 and 2001 censuses. It also draws on data from the Household, Income and Labour Market Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) and from the Commonwealth Department of Family and Community Services.

Comment: Governments have not calculated the true cost of men not being in full-time work. The true cost is much more than their welfare. There are the added costs of welfare for the women they cannot afford to marry and the children these women are having alone. Then there is the cost of having these children at risk ­ social costs in education, drugs and crime. There are also higher health costs for people on welfare.

The solutions can only partly be found in more education and skills training. Fundamentally, it calls for policies to boost infrastructure and grow industries, thus providing full-time work, for those without post-school education. This is because over the decade of the '90s, 87% of all new jobs created paid less than $26,000 p.a. and nearly half paid less than $15,600 p.a. according to the Australian Centre for Industrial Research and Training. ABS figures show that at any one time, for any one job available, there are 7-10 people looking for work. Also needed are tax, welfare and family payments geared to boost male incomes to put them in reach of marriage.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Politicians argue that economic policy and the state of the economy do not impact fundamentally on peoples' ability to marry and have children, or on the fertility rate. Is this true?

"Since the early 1980s, successive Australian governments have embraced economic policies which have shaken up the lives of most residents If, in order to achieve this outcome, it has required a more flexible workforce, including increased casual employment as well as a decline in the number of traditional blue collar jobs in manafacturing, then, according to our political leaders, this is the price the country has to pay. Their assumption seems to be that families are insulated from what is going on in the wider economy.

"The unwritten assumption is that a vigorous free enterprise system and strong families go together. The evidence assembled above suggests that Australia's recent dynamic economic performance is not providing circumstances conducive to the flourishing of family life, at least for a growing minority of Australian men and women.

"Again, as was the case a century ago, there is a close link between income and partnering, particularly married partnering. The main causal link is straightforward. It has to do with the resources a male can bring to a potential relationship. Figure 5.1 examines this link for men aged 35-39. It shows that only 40 per cent of men in the lowest income group listed (less than $15,600 per year) are living in a married partnership, compared with 72 per cent of those in the highest income group listed (on $78,000 or more per year).

"Males with limited economic resources are being hit twice. They do not have much to offer financially as partners and the resources they do possess do not go as far as in previous decades in meeting the costs of establishing and maintaining a married partnership." (Pg 47-49)

What is the relationship between the education level of men, their incomes and their ability to marry?

"Given all the attention to the promotion of higher education, it may come as a surprise that more than half of all men in their late twenties and early thirties have no post-school qualifications whatsoever.

"Why do men without post-school qualifications show such a weak attachment to partnering? Is it because those without any qualifications are attracted to an alternative lifestyle of experimentation, or travel to cosmopolitan centres or, more prosaically, to the life of the pub? The question answers itself men without post-school qualifications are the least likely to be engaging in such activities because of their limited income and education. Nor are they likely to be concentrating on building a career. It is likely that the attractions of the single-male lifestyle would diminish fairly quickly a few years after leaving school. Men who are engaged in the pub culture by the time they reach their thirties are more likely to be casualties of failed partnering than participating because of its inherent appeal." (Pg 31).

What happens to the women low income men don't partner?

"Take the case of men with no post-school qualifications aged 30-34. Superficially, they have a reasonable number of women who are not partnered with the same lack of educational attainments to choose from but, as Table 3.5 showed earlier, 45 per cent of the women in question [30-34 years] are lone parents. Even if an unpartnered male in this context were prepared to enter a partnership with a female lone parent, given that she is likely to be in receipt of the Single Parenting Payment, there would be little financial gain for her in partnering a low income male, since the income he brings to the relationship may not substitute for the loss of government payment." (Pg 33)

While higher income males have a higher marriage rate, could it be that they divorce and remarry more than low income males?

No. "In the case of men, Table 2.7 shows only seven per cent of the 35-44 year old men with bachelor degree or above qualifications who were married had been married more than once, compared with 16 per cent of those with no post-school qualifications. There is a similar, though less marked, pattern for married women in the 35-44 age group. As with men, degree-qualified married women were less likely to have remarried than other women." (Pg 20)

Now that there are more women than men with degrees, is there a marriage gap for these women?

Yes. For those in the 25-29 age group, in 1986 there were 17% fewer women with degrees than men. This had changed by 1996 when there were 25% more women than men with degrees, and by 2001 this had increased to an astonishing 40%. However, this is not the main cause of the decline in marriage and fertility. (Table 3.4)

Isn't the big rise in unmarried men the result of lifestyle choice? Aren't they roving bachelors enjoying the fruits of modern relationships?

"Around a third of all men aged in their thirties do not live in families where they play the partner or father role As such, they face not only the day-to-day difficulties associated with surviving on a low income but also the psychological and emotional stresses their single status implies for their sense of identity and role in society

"Most unpartnered men in their thirties live in the distinctly less glamorous context of their original family (that is with their parents) or in group households. In the case of unpartnered men in their early thirties, almost a third of those with incomes of less than $31,200 live at home with parents." (Pg 54-55)

Isn't the decline in marriage and fertility due to the big increase in the number of women completing tertiary education and taking on independent, feminist values that sees them prefer their careers to marriage and children?

"Much of the literature focuses on the ways increased education and increased participation in careers has prompted women to put off partnering in order to take advantage of their educational investment in the labour market. At the same time they have experimented with a variety of more short term relationships. Yet, the most severe decline in partnering since the mid-1980s has occurred amongst men and women without post-school qualifications. It is amongst these people, who include many of the losers from structural change, that the formation and maintenance of couple relationships appears to be most under threat. For such people, life without a partner or a family is becoming increasingly common, as is the incidence of lone parenthood." (Pg 48)

For degree qualified women, the marriage rate has stabilised at a much higher level, and the divorce level at a much lower rate, than for non-degree qualified women.

Are more married women choosing not to have children?

No. "There has been no drop in the proportion of women aged 35-39 in married partnerships who had at least one child aged 0-14 living in the family in 2001. Moreover, the vast majority of women in married partnerships in the years shown had at least one child (86 per cent in 1986 and 87 per cent in the 1996 and in the 2001 censuses). These are remarkably high rates, given that many of those without children would have been in this situation because of infertility problems

"There has been a drop-off in the share of married women aged 30-34 who have at least one child this decline is probably attributable to delay in age of marriage and thus in the timing of the first birth. This is not to deny the possibility that married women who are now in their late thirties will have a lower number of births on average than their counterparts in 1986." (Pg 36)