The author addresses this in the comments. He states that there are likely more divorces for one gender than the other in his data set. Which implies to me that individuals, rather than couples, are surveyed about their marriages/divorces.

So if he surveyed 10 women and 10 men, those 10 women weren't married to those 10 men.

If that isn't the case, then I'm also not sure how that could be the case given that he states all marriages examined were heterosexual in nature.

I believe this is it. From the source paper:

"We excluded respondents who had a non-US IP address, reported having a same-sex marriage, reported an age at marriage of less than 13 years old, or were above age 60."

The paper used mTurk to get ~3000 responses to their survey. So it's basically saying "the men who answered these questions ended up having this score, the women who answered these questions ended up having a slightly different score"

EDIT: Link to paper, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480

Apart from the small sample size, if they collected data by mechnical turk then I wonder what sort of biases that introduces? In the paper you linked, Frances and Mialon state:

"Samples of mTurk workers have been found to be more representative of the US population than in-person convenience samples, standard internet samples, and typical college samples"

I am somewhat sceptical of this, and there seems to be some evidence to back-up my scepticism [1][2][3]. In particular, [2] states:

"In sum, the MTurk sample is younger, more male, poorer, and more highly educated than Americans generally. This matches the image of who you might think would be online doing computer tasks for a small amount of money."

Which are some of the factors that the marriage study itself seeks to examine. This looks like lazy data collection methodology to me.

[1] http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/7/10/fooled-twice...

[2] http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/19/how-representative-are-a...

[3] http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographi...

It merely says that it's more representative than the other groups, not that it's particularly representative. For instance college samples are massively unrepresentative (younger, smarter, probably wealthier than average).

Essentially it's just a more representative sample than these other horribly unrepresentative samples he's listing.

Thank you, that makes sense. I assumed that he was surveying relationships rather than individuals (ie divorces rather than divorcees), which was a poor assumption on my part.

Nevertheless, it would have useful if the nature of the data was better described in the article itself. I run a comment blocker in Chrome so I didn't see the comments until you mentioned them.

Perhaps (at least in this data), the women were more likely to have been married multiple times?

Divorced individuals of either gender may married people who have never been previously married.