Census: Same-Sex Married Couples Increase Sharply, Still Small Minority
The number of legally married same-sex couples has increased considerably over the span of a year, but they remain a very small minority compared to opposite-sex married couples.
In a report from the U.S. Census, the number of legally married same-sex couple households increased from approximately 182,000 in 2012 to approximately 252,000 in 2013.
Census Bureau figures noted that this figure was still greatly dwarfed by the over 55 million opposite-sex married couple households, as noted by D'Vera Cohn of Pew Research Center.
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"Because there are relatively few same-sex married couples so far, Census Bureau officials and other experts do not expect the change in how they are counted to have a big impact on overall statistics for married couples," reported Cohn.
"But if the number of same-sex married couples continues to rise, that could change."
The new data released by the Census Bureau represents a change, as for the first time the government organization is including information on same-sex couples who have been issued a marriage license by a state.
"In the past, if two people of the same gender said they were married, the Census Bureau reclassified them as cohabiting partners," wrote Cohn.
Calculating the precise number of same-sex married households has been a challenge for the Bureau, with the census recently overestimating their numbers in the United States.
In 2011, Census Director Robert Groves acknowledged that problems within the Bureau's forms prompted a substantial overestimation on the number of couples.
The bureau originally noted 349,377 same-sex married couple households and 552,620 same-sex unmarried-partner households in the United States in 2010. However the number was adjusted to 131,729 same-sex married couple households and 515,735 same-sex unmarried-partner households.
Census inspectors found that certain name and gender combinations appeared off, such as someone being named "Harold" listed as "female."
They adjusted their findings noting that people are more likely to list their name accurately than their gender. Groves was unsure as to how the error first appeared.
"Our analysts identified the names that were 95% or higher male and those 95% or higher female. Then we completely reanalyzed the entire 2010 Census. When we discovered one of the names in the two lists that had a very unlikely sex reported to it, we noted that as a likely error," wrote Groves on the Census blog.
"When we count those apparent mistakes and reclassify them as a consistent name-sex pair, we found that the same-sex couples counts from the Census agree with other estimates."
The Census Bureau numbers also found a continued decline in marriage overall among adults, in large part because the average age for marriage among men and women is increasing.
