Gender, age and the marriage market: Evidence on marriage in late adulthood in Russia

In this paper I explore one specific type of informal support, marital unions, and the ways in which patterns suggest differential access to this support mechanism based on age and sex. Through an examination of marriage patterns in the Russian Federation I show that women may be disadvantaged by low levels of access to marital unions past the age of 50 due to high differential mortality and age differentials at marriage. For both sexes, the probability of marital entrance is negatively related to age, but the negative influence of age follows different paths for men and women. In spite of high sex differentials in mortality, findings indicate that men, over 50 and outside of marital unions, are far more likely to marry than their female counterparts regardless of residence or age.