Bare Market: Campus Sex Ratios, Romantic Relationships, and Sexual Behavior

Abstract

Using a nationally representative sample of college women, we evaluate the effect of campus sex ratios on women's relationship attitudes and behaviors. Our results suggest that women on campuses where they comprise a higher proportion of the student body give more negative appraisals of campus men and relationships, go on fewer traditional dates, are less likely to have had a college boyfriend, and are more likely to be sexually active. These effects appear to stem both from decreased dyadic power among women on campuses where they are more numerous and from their increased difficulty locating a partner on such campuses.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the family demography reading group at the University of Texas at Austin for their helpful comments on a previous draft of this article, Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt for data access, and NICHD for the center grant (5 R24 HD42849) made to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

NOTES

Notes

¹ We are not the first to suggest campus sex ratios may influence romantic and sexual relationships on campus. This idea is raised by Glenn and Marquardt (2001) and Bogle (2008), as well as in a recent New York Times article (Williams 2010). We are to our knowledge, however, the first to test the idea empirically.

² Because hooking up is an ambiguous concept that can mean anything from kissing to intercourse, we focus our attention not on hookups per se, but on romantic relationships and sexual activity.

³ The distribution of structural power between genders is best conceived of as a continuum, meaning men and women in different societies have more or less structural power. In societies where women's structural power is higher, women are less dependent on relationship commitment. For example, the marriage rate is lower, and the divorce rate and average age at first marriage are higher, in more developed countries (South 1988; South and Trent 1988). Still, it should be uncontroversial to say that men hold more structural power than women in the contemporary United States, the population of interest for our study, and women remain more dependent on relationship commitment than men.

⁴ Men can also use their structural power to establish a sexual double standard wherein women are held to a stricter sexual standard than are men. As England et al. (2007) discuss, such a sexual double standard still exists on college campuses.

⁵ Certainly, there are many women that assert at least as much interest in sex as men (Hamilton and Armstrong 2009). But they are less common than the stereotype they seek to thwart (see Oliver and Hyde 1993; Baumeister, Catanese, and Vohs 2001; Peplau 2003; Byers and Wang 2004). Men consistently score higher on a variety of measures tapping sex drive, including sexual desires, thoughts, and fantasies; desired frequency of intercourse and number of partners; masturbation; and initiating sex (Baumeister et al. 2001; Schmitt et al. 2003). In one well-known study that exemplifies this, fully three-fourths of college men agreed to have sex with a complete stranger, while no college women agreed to such a request (Clark and Hatfield 1989). Similarly, more single young adult men (65 percent) than women (41 percent) agree that there are people with whom they would have sex even though they had no intention of marrying them (Whitehead and Popenoe 2001). In contrast, when asked to rate the benefits of romantic relationships, college women give higher marks than college men to characteristics associated with commitment, such as companionship and affection, exclusivity, feeling loved or loving another person, intimacy, and security; the only relationship benefit men rate higher than women is sexual gratification (Sedikides, Oliver, and Campbell 1994). Women do participate in casual sex, of course, but when they do, they are also more likely than men to cite the increased probability of long-term commitment from their sex partner as a motivation (Regan and Dreyer 1999). Moreover, college women are more likely than college men to desire a relationship with their casual sex partner both before and after their physical encounter (England et al. 2007). Women may also view casual sex as a “normal” part of campus life, and thus alternatives to it may never cross their minds (Bogle 2008).

⁶ Initially, we ran ordered logit regression models on the four-category ordinal variables, but Brant tests revealed that many of the models violated the parallel regressions assumption of ordered logit regression. We also ran multinomial logit models on these outcomes. These models are substantively similar to the logit regression results presented below; however, for the sake of simplicity, parsimony, and interpretability, we display only the logit regression results.

⁷ As with the attitudinal measures, the parallel regressions assumption was violated when ordered logit models were employed.

⁸ We are indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for making this point.

⁹ Although these data are both individual- and campus-level, we do not conduct multilevel analyses for two reasons. First, the women in the study were selected randomly at the national level (not from within colleges). Second, because of this, the data contain a large number of singletons (i.e., only one respondent per campus)—representing 46 (21.7 percent) of the campuses—and a low number of observations per campus in general (μ = 4.65), which makes multilevel modeling problematic (Duncan, Connell, and Klebanov 1997).

¹⁰ It might be that women's attitudes toward sex and commitment change as a result of exposure to the culture on their campus. If this were the case, differences by campus sex ratio may be evident among freshmen but not among older women. Multiplicative interaction terms (i.e., sex ratio times dummy variables for class standing) revealed that the sex ratio was not significant among freshmen for any variable except one, where freshmen women on campuses with more women were more likely to agree that sex without commitment is wrong (the opposite effect of what the selection argument would predict). As further evidence against a selection argument, there is no correlation between the campus sex ratio and women's virginity status among freshmen women (r = .0001)—only among sophomores, juniors, and seniors.

¹¹ Multiplicative interaction terms between the campus percent women and boyfriend history were not significant (results not shown), confirming that the effect of the sex ratio is similar whether or not women have (had) a boyfriend.

¹² One student's remark in Hamilton and Armstrong's (2009:602) ethnographic study typifies this approach to college life: “College [is] the only time in your life when you should be a hundred percent selfish.”