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Project

Educational assortative mating in Europe and the reversal of the gender imbalance in tertiary education

The reversal of the gender balance in higher education

A major social development in the second half of the twentieth century has been the dramatic increase of participation in higher education, in particular among women. One important consequence of this development is that differences in the relative educational attainment of men and women have changed: in the past, men were typically more highly educated than women, while today women excel men in terms of participation and success in higher education. The reversal of gender inequality in higher education holds for almost all European countries (Vincent-Lancrin, 2008), but also for North America (Diprete & Buchmann, 2006) and many other parts of the world (Esteve, García-Román, and Permanyer 2012; Schofer and Meyer 2005). This implies that today, for the first time in history, there are more highly educated women than men reaching the reproductive ages and entering the mating market. We want to examine how this will affect union formation in Europe.

Educational assortative mating

In twentieth century Europe, the dominant pattern of assortative mating has been a combination of educational homogamy combined with female hypergamy and male hypogamy: women have tended to marry men who are at least as highly educated as themselves; conversely, men have tended to marry women who are at most as highly educated as themselves. This pattern reflects a combination of male and female preferences on the one hand, and what is possible given the educational distribution on the other hand. If there are more highly educated women than men entering the dating and mating market, the traditional pattern of with female hypergamy (women partnering upwards) and male hypogamy (men partnering downwards), can clearly not persist. So how will European marriage markets react? We will explore this along two lines.

Research questions

First, we want to provide empirical evidence that, among other factors, marriage market opportunities influence if we are in a union and with whom we are in a union. Our goal is to verify that patterns of educational assortative mating are for an important part driven by the gender balance in education. The focus is on the gender gap reversal in tertiary education because in the European context, the important changes in the relative educational attainment of men and women occurred in the distinction between the college level educated and those with less education. In addition, we will take into consideration that not only patterns of assortative mating but also patterns of union formation (the timing and likelihood of union formation) might be affected by the shifting gender balance in higher education.

Second, we will zoom in on patterns of educational assortative mating among recent cohorts who experienced the turnaround of the gender balance in higher education during their student days. Especially, we want to provide a more detailed view on the couples where she is more highly educated than he. We will do so in three ways. First, we will use a more refined education variable to examine pattern of educational assortative mating. Important is the distinction between highly educated respondents who obtained a bachelor degree and highly educated respondents who obtained a master degree. We know that the number of highly educated women who partner downwards increased with the reversal of the gender balance in higher education (Esteve et al. 2012). We want to test if hypogamy is more common among women with a bachelor degree than among women with a master degree. Second, we will extend the analyses of educational assortative mating by considering parental educational attainment as a valuable secondary characteristic that individuals trade on the marriage market. The expansion of tertiary education has increased the number of children from ‘disadvantageous backgrounds’ who obtained a higher level of education. We expect that highly educated individuals who possess less parental education partner downwards more often. Vice versa, lower educated individuals who possess additional inputs of inherited parental education may partner upwards more often (Blackwell 1998). Third, we will examine how the field of education shapes patterns of educational assortative mating. In short, we want to examine to what extent traditional patterns of assortative mating persist through the gender-based choice of study subject.

Date:25 Feb 2013 →  29 Jan 2018
Keywords:Union formation, Education, Gender, Assortative mating
Disciplines:Applied sociology, Policy and administration, Social psychology, Social stratification, Social theory and sociological methods, Sociology of life course, family and health, Other sociology and anthropology
Project type:PhD project