The Rise of Educational Hypogamy, 1970-2015: Trends and Mechanisms

• In Event: 1567 - Mate Selection and Relationship Formation

Abstract

Despite the lingering reluctance to wife’s status advantage in marriage, more and more highly educated women are “marrying down” at least in terms of education. Most of the existing studies attempting to explain this trend have highlighted the role of sex ratio imbalance in the marriage market. According to them, the number of educational hypogamy is greater in countries where women in general have more education than men. In this paper, however, I show that the degree of educational hypogamy in a country is not just determined by the education distribution of the marriage market, but also (and perhaps primarily) determined by the country’s changing economic and cultural foundations that may facilitate (or discourage) the marriage. Using an unbalanced panel dataset for 28 industrialized and newly industrializing countries for the years 1970 through 2015, this study aims to identify what specific mechanism explains the rise of educational hypogamy. The major findings are as follows. First, as the number of highly-educated women increases, the degree of educational hypogamy increases. Second, however, I found that the degree of educational hypogamy is also affected by changing economic conditions for both women and men. Specifically, the expansion of labor market opportunities for women increased the degree of educational hypogamy. In a similar vein, diminishing labor market opportunities for men increased the degree of hypogamy. These results suggest that the new reality of more and more women marrying down is not just about the educational progress of women, but also about changing gender-roles in marriage and society.

Author

• Sinn Won Han, Harvard University