Office Romance by the Numbers: Which Professions Are Pairing Up
If you’ve got the urge to merge, it might be time for a career change. With the romance-obsessed holiday around the corner, the folks at Bloomberg Business delved into the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey to find out which professions are pairing off. To that end, they’ve created a fascinating interactive chart that reveals the most common occupation/relationship marriage matchups for any selected occupation.
Some findings aren’t surprising: “High-earning women tend to pair up with their economic equals, while middle- and lower-tier women often marry up. In other words, female CEOs tend to marry other CEOs; male CEOs are okay marrying their secretaries.”
Click all charts to enlarge
We looked up a few occupations, mostly to see if the things we’d suspected were true. For example, though it’s pointed out that the most common intra-professional matchups are between elementary school teachers, we made a beeline for architecture, a field known for its husband-wife teams. What we found: Female architects tended to marry male architects, while male architects marry…just about anyone, including, of course, their secretaries.
“Miscellaneous managers” are the kings and queens of office romance regardless of which gender they favor. Female real estate brokers are definitely marrying guys in the field (but they’re choosing women who are physicians and surgeons); the male half are catching the eye of managers (of course), teachers and secretaries.
Female designers tend to marry within the field, but also get hitched with miscellaneous managers. Female designers marry female CEOs, and guys get with (male) secretaries, (of course).
It was no shock that lots of female flight attendants marry other female flight attendants, but apparently not so for the boys, whose in-flight mating patterns didn’t show up on the chart; they tended to go for teachers, go figure. It does make sense, however, that male explosives workers (we found this one by accident, no pun intended) marry female registered nurses; for the women/women side of things, for what it’s worth, female blasters tie the knot with a lot of lady librarians.
Check out the data and the methodology behind it (and find out more about who’s staying late at the office) here.
[Via Bloomberg Business]
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