Inter-ethnic marriage in Britain

In a recent post on educational performance by ethnic groups in the UK I mentioned some research on inter-ethnic marriage by Raya Muttarak of Oxford. She has made at least two studies on the subject: (1) Who Intermarries in Britain? and (2) Marital Assimilation: Ethnic Intermarriage in Britain.

The second study has more recent data and is more useful for comparisons over time, but the first paper has fuller theoretical discussion….

Sources

The data sources are mainly government surveys. An official guide to the ethnic classifications used, and the data sources, is available here.

One point to note is that ’Asian’ usually means ’South Asian’. Chinese people are classified separately, and the term ’Asian’ often excludes Chinese.

The 2001 Census for the first time introduced some ’Mixed’ ethnicity categories: White and Black Caribbean, White and Black African, White and Asian, and Other Mixed. There is no separate category for ‘White and Chinese’. It appears to be the intention that they should be included under ’Other Mixed’, and notes on education statistics make this explicit. However, the 2001 Census form gives no guidance on this point, and faced with a choice between ’White-Asian’ and ’Other Mixed’, White-Chinese people might well put themselves under ’White-Asian’.

Numbers

The propensity of different groups to intermarry is affected by their numbers in the population. Here are population figures (both sexes, all ages) for England and Wales from the 2001 Census:

______________Millions______%
White__________47.52______91.3
Black
_Caribbean______0.56_______1.1
_African_________0.48_______0.9
_Other Black_____0.10_______0.2
Asian
_Indian_________1.04_______2.0
_Pakistani_______0.71_______1.4
_Bangladeshi____0.28________0.5
_Other Asian_____0.24_______0.5
Chinese_________0.23_______0.5
Mixed
_White-BCarib____0.24_______0.5
_White-BAfric_____0.08_______0.2
_White-Asian_____0.19_______0.4
_Other Mixed_____0.16_______0.3
Other*__________0.22_______0.5
*includes Latin American, etc.

The Census includes questions about the relationship between members of the household. It is therefore possible to extract, e.g., the number of White-Asian marriages. Since the Census covers only those present in the household on Census Day, the information is not complete, but it is unlikely to be seriously biased with respect to the proportion of inter-ethnic marriages. The Office for National Statistics has just released some data on inter-ethnic marriage from the 2001 Census. The following are the proportions, in rank order, of each ethnic group who are married to someone of another ethnic group (nearly always White):

___________%
Mixed______ 78
Other_______45
Other Black__38
Black Carib__24
Chinese_____20
Black Afric___15
Indian_______6
Pakistani____4
Bangladeshi__3
White_______2

This might suggest that Whites have a low propensity to marry other ethnic groups, but after taking account of relative population sizes, 2% is actually a high proportion (about 20%) of the maximum possible intermarriage rate for Whites.

These figures may be compared with those of Muttarak (2) taken from different sources (the Labour Force Survey, which is mainly concerned with employment and training issues, but also contains a lot of demographic data). The figures are not directly comparable with the Census data, since they include cohabiting as well as married couples. I have averaged the figures for both sexes.

___________1981_____2002-3
____________%_________%
Black Carib__16_________29
Chinese_____18_________26
Black Afric___18_________11
Indian_______6__________7
Pakistani____4.2_________3.4
Bangladeshi__7_________1.7
White_______0.9________1.1

In most of the non-White groups the proportion of men intermarrying is higher than that of women, the exceptions being the Chinese, where twice as many women as men intermarry, and Indians, where in 2002-3 there was a slightly higher rate for women than for men.

Trends

It will be seen that for Black Caribbeans and Chinese the proportion intermarrying has increased since 1981. For Indians it has increased very slightly, with a fall in the rate for men offset by a larger rise in the rate for women. Among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis there has also been a fall among men and a rise among women, with the net effect a fall. Among Black Africans the rate among both men and women has fallen.

Muttarak’s research shows that in all groups those born in the UK have a higher intermarriage rate than first-generation immigrants, so it may seem paradoxical that in some groups the intermarriage rate has fallen between 1981 and 2002-3. The explanation is that in some groups continuing immigration has offset the rise among the second (or later) generation. As I have mentioned in other posts, there has been a large recent increase in immigration of Black Africans, including many Muslim Somalis. Muttarak (page 21 of (2)) discusses this.

The reasons for the fall among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are less obvious, and Muttarak’s discussion is rather weak. I suspect that it has become easier for spouses from arranged marriages to be ’imported’ in the last 20 years, due both to better transport and communications and to changes in the immigration rules. There may also be increased religious and family pressures on Muslims to marry within the group. I note that among Pakistanis second generation women are even less likely to intermarry than in the first generation, contrasting with all other groups in this respect. I suspect also that the earliest immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh were mainly men, and had a higher intermarriage rate for lack of alternatives. This early cohort may now be dying off (or their marriages may have broken up.)

For the long term, it seems likely that the Chinese and Caribbean groups will become entirely assimilated into the mainstream population. For second-generation Chinese the intermarriage rates are especially high, at around 70%.

It is impossible to predict the future of the Black African group, as it is so diverse and for the most part so recently arrived.

The future of the South Asian groups is unclear. For second generation Indians the intermarriage rate is around 14%, which is not high enough to presage total assimilation in the foreseeable future. But the rate may accelerate in the third generation, when family pressures to marry within the group will probably be weaker.

There is little sign of the Pakistani group disappearing by assimilation. Surprisingly, there may be a greater prospect of assimilation in the Bangladeshi group. Despite their very low overall intermarriage rate, the rate for second generationers is quite high, at over 10% for both men and women. Indeed it is higher for women than for men, and almost as high as for Indian second generation women. I have commented elsewhere on the marked improvement in educational performance among Bangladeshis in the UK, which is another factor promoting assimilation.

Characteristics of intermarrying partners

The main aim of Muttarak’s two papers is to analyse the characteristics of individuals who marry people of another ethnic group. Anyone who is interested in the subject should read the papers, but to summarise:

For ethnic minorities characteristics associated with a high rate of intermarriage include:

a) being born in Britain rather than abroad, i.e. being second or later gener
ation immigrants

b) fluency in English

c) being well-educated, in particular having a university degree or equivalent qualification

d) absence of religious affiliation

e) living in an area with a low density of ethnic minorities.

These apply to both sexes and most ethnic groups. However, Muttarak (2) notes that for Black Caribbeans having a higher education qualification makes little or no difference to the propensity to intermarry, or is even a negative factor. She suggests (p.26) that this is because Black Caribbeans are integrated into the white working-class community. The same appears to be true for second-generation Black Africans.

So far as Whites are concerned, the factors favouring intermarriage are much the same, except that in this case being born outside Britain is positively associated with intermarriage.

Muttarak’s analysis does not cover the effect of belonging to particular religions, as distinct from the effect of absence of religion. However, she notes (page 11, paper (2)) that the recent LFS surveys have included questions on religious affiliation, and she intends to include this variable in the analysis once data become publicly available. It may be difficult to distinguish the effects of religion from ethnicity as such, since most ethnic groups are nearly mono-religious. However, the Indian group may provide sufficient diversity (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh) for a meaningful analysis.

There is nothing very surprising in these results, though the second-generation intermarriage rates for Asians are rather higher than I had expected. It will be interesting to see whether the widely-reported rise of religious devotion among young Muslims has any effect on the trend.

Posted by David B at 04:01 AM

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Meet the Neets

In a recent post on Education and Poverty I commented on the dismal educational performance of the White ‘underclass’ in Britain.

Coincidentally, today’s Sunday Times has a feature article on the new underclass, known in Government circles by the acronym ‘Neet’: Not in Education, Employment or Training. Here’s the article

Depressing stuff!

Addendum

In comments several people asked about ‘race’.

The Sunday Times article doesn’t mention race or ethnicity, but the photos, etc, all involve young Whites. No doubt some people covered by the official definition of ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ must be from ethnic minorities, but simply on numerical grounds it must be a predominantly White group. According to the ST, there are 1.1 million Neets aged 16-24. In the 2001 Census data there are only in total about 120,000 ‘Blacks’ in this age group. (Of course there are also South Asians, Chinese, etc, but no-one will imagine that they are significant in the Neet phenomenon.) As to young ‘Blacks’, they have a slightly higher unemployment rate than Whites, but they also have a higher rate of continuing in full-time education or training. The only significance of Blacks that I see in the Neet phenomenon is that young White uneducated kids have a tendency to ape the worst aspects of Black urban culture: gangsta rap, crack, petty crime, and general insolence. In London, especially, white yobbos often speak with a touch of Jamaican patois, which sounds comical coming from some skinny pale-faced runt.

Addendum 2

I should have learned by now to be cautious of any statistics I read in the Sunday Times. The ST claims that ‘According to official figures, there are 1.1m Neets aged 16-24 in Britain today’.

There are about 5.6m people aged 16-24 (both sexes) in England and Wales (2001 Census). Let’s bump it up to 6m to allow for Scotland. 1.1m would therefore be about 18% of the age group. This is suspiciously high. The Youth Cohort Study gives only 12% Neets at age 18. It is possible that the proportion increases substantially in the years 19-24, sufficiently to raise the average over the years 16-24 to 18%, despite the fact that the proportion of people actually in jobs also increases after age 18, but if so this is probably for the boring reason that in Britain, as elsewhere, women in their early 20s are often having babies. By no means all of them will be ‘Neets’ in the derogatory sense used by the ST. A better test of the size of the problem would be the proportion of males in this age group who are Neets.

This is not to deny that it is a serious problem, but maybe not quite as bad as the ST’s figures suggest.

Posted by David B at 04:57 AM

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Organizing the Debate

There is a tremendous amount of impressive information in the Gene Expression archives. And because it’s only organized by date, it’s underutilized.

How to organize it?

The Gene Expression Textbook Project, maybe? Organize it around giving people an introduction into human biodiversity?

Maybe some sort of greatest hits list?

If we get serious about something like this, the best place on the net to look for guidance is Talk Origins. Gene Expression is similar in that it partakes in a similar sort of debate, and could probably benefit from copying some parts of the Talk Origins organizational style.

Posted by Thrasymachus at 01:26 PM

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Cry baby….

Carl posts about differences between the babies of foragers and farmers/moderns. These sort of shifts of infant behavior dependent on the input that parents (and the ability of the babies to manipulate said parents) provide contingent upon social-environmental constraints make me cautious about assuming an overpowering EEA across a host of variables. Additionally, babies also likely differ in intrinsic temperament, as do the sexes, and according to Jerome Kagan infants of different populations also exhibit variant modal personalities. All this suggests a dynamism on a variety of levels, from the proximate behavorial context all the way to the microevolutionary scale, which is underemphasized by fixating on monomorphic universal traits.

Related: John Hawks also comments.

Posted by razib at 03:05 AM

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I wonder…

…how Terry Schiavo’s parents feel about stem cell research and how well that jibes with the positions of their political patrons?

Posted by jeet at 08:08 AM

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Clades or Clines?

I don’t recall where I found this recent paper by David Serre and Svante Pääbo, so my apologies if it has already been linked to.

Here’s the abstract:

Evidence for Gradients of Human Genetic Diversity Within and Among ContinentsGenetic variation in humans is sometimes described as being discontinuous among continents or among groups of individuals, and by some this has been interpreted as genetic support for “races.” A recent study in which >350 microsatellites were studied in a global sample of humans showed that they could be grouped according to their continental origin, and this was widely interpreted as evidence for a discrete distribution of human genetic diversity. Here, we investigate how study design can influence such conclusions. Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or “races.”

The full paper is published in Genome Research, 14:1679-1685, 2004. A pdf may be available here.

Apart from the findings of substance, the paper raises important issues of methodology: in particular, the choice of sampling frame and statistical inference procedures.

I’m not qualified to judge the technical issues, but presumably the authors’ approach is not obviously wrong, or the paper would not have passed peer review. My only thought is that if the aim is to infer patterns of human genetic history before, say, the last 3,000 years, then the choice of samples should not be influenced by present-day patterns of population density, since these are the result of post-Neolithic population changes.

Posted by David B at 04:01 AM

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Women Bloggers at Political Animal

Kevin Drum, after taking a shellacking for having the temerity to ask about the lack of influential women bloggers, has invited some female journalists to post on topics relevant to women bloggers. Talk about navel gazing. I’m not sure if Kevin’s offering of penance is a solitary burden that he’s bearing or if he’s shifted the burden on to his readership. I favor the latter viewpoint, for I’m definitely feeling that it’s my eyes that are glazing over while Kevin thinks he’s achieved redemption. The first two posts by his guests had a normal amount of comments but as they beat this horse to death the readership seems to be showing a lack of interest.

Rather than playing into the stereotype that women bloggers only write about women’s issues and that this narrow focus is a snore to most people, hence the lack of female influence in the blogosphere, Kevin should have followed the practice we have at this blog, which is not to stereotype our female colleagues in such a fashion. Far better for Kevin’s guests to have a free hand in the choice of topics so that Kevin’s readership could be exposed to the true interests and voices of these women. If they wanted to write about being women in the blogosphere, well then, Kevin would be free of the charge of abetting the crime of gender stereotyping for the women would have been hoisted by their own petard. As it is now, Kevin’s just dug himself deeper into the hole by reinforcing the stereotype that women simply write about women’s issues.

For your analytic pleasure, I’ve gathered the data on this experiment. All of the women’s posts since this adventure began are listed below the fold, with the comments highlighted. To establish a yardstick I’ve used all of Kevin’s posts that were on his front page.

Data Below the Fold.

Amy Sullivan

AND NOW THE MOMENT YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR–GIRLS AND BLOGS Comments: 14 NOW, IN SPECIAL FEMALE-FREE VARIETIES Comments: 28 ATTN: WOMEN–PLEASE WRITE FOR US Comments: 39 A RESPONSE TO KATHA POLLITT Comments: 71

Garance Franke-Ruta

AMITY IN THE U.K Comments: 8WOMEN IN THE BLOGOSPHERE: THE DATA Comments: 44THE BROADER PROBLEM Comments: 17

Katha Pollitt

PRIDE, PREJUDICE, BLOGS Comments: 25TOO FEMINIST FOR THE TIMES? Comments: 44TERRIFIC WOMEN ALREADY EXIST Comments: 106

Kevin Drum

BUNNING WATCH Comments: 32 THE VIEW FROM BAGHDAD Comments:96EDUCATION SPENDING Comments: 51SOCIAL SECURITY vs. MEDICARE Comments: 69RANDOM, FREE-FLOATING, NON-POLITICAL WHINING THREAD Comments: 88ON THE USES AND ABUSES OF TERRI SCHIAVO Comments: 113SOCIAL SECURITY LINGUISTICS Comments: 48TERRI SCHIAVO AND THE LIMITS OF CYNICISM, PART 2 Comments: 113GLOBALIZATION Comments: 61VALERIE PLAME UPDATE Comments: 50

Posted by TangoMan at 12:19 AM

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Male brain ~ more sons vs. female brain ~ more daughters?

Doing some reading on the Trivers-Willard hypothesis I found this: Engineers have more sons, nurses have more daughters: an evolutionary psychological extension of Baron–Cohen’s extreme male brain theory of autism:

In his extreme male brain theory of autism, Baron-Cohen postulates that having a typically male brain was adaptive for ancestral men and having a typically female brain was adaptive for ancestral women. He also suggests that brain types are substantially heritable. These postulates, combined with the insight from the Trivers–Willard hypothesis regarding parental ability to vary offspring sex ratio, lead to the prediction that people who have strong male brains should have more sons than daughters, and people who have strong female brains should have more daughters than sons. The analysis of the 1994 US General Social Survey data provides support for this prediction. Our results suggest potentially fruitful extensions of both Baron-Cohen’s theory and the Trivers–Willard hypothesis.

I don’t have access to the whole article, so be forewarned (I don’t know if the authors are simply observing a correlation between “male brain” professions with high SES, which would tend correlate with a male-skewed sex ratio according to the Trivers-Willard hypothesis).

Support for the Trivers-Willard hypothesis seems stronger in animals, especially in those that are highly polygynous (greater male reproductive variance, so a bigger payoff for mothers who can “invest” well in sons so they exhibit more attractive phenotypes).

Update Well…since someone asked, I did remember this paper: Offspring sex ratio in women with android body fat distribution:

…After statistically controlling for subject’s age, socioeconomic status, and total number of offspring, we found that women with a higher WHR tended to have more sons than daughters. In addition, women who reported greater ease of having multiple orgasms also tended to have more sons than daughters. The results thus support both a hormonal and a behavioral influence on offspring sex ratio.

Baron-Cohen says that the “male brain” is correlated with lower-than-median levels of testosterone in males and higher-than-median levels of testosterone in females. High Waist-Hip-Ratio (WHR) tends to be found in women with higher relative rates of testosterone. The research above (which has been disputed!) suggests that there is a male bias in sex ratio at birth for women who have higher WHR, ergo, higher testosterone levels. Of course this leaves the males out of the equation, but the Trivers-Willard hypothesis is generally concerned with female parental strategies in any case. And don’t discount sex-selective abortions….

Addendum: Testosterone probably plays a role in sex drive as well, so don’t discount the orgasm result being connected to the WHR.

Related: The essential difference.

Posted by razib at 01:34 PM

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