While in the past men received more education than women, the gender gap in education has turned around: in recent years, more highly educated women than highly educated men are reaching the reproductive ages. Using data from the European Social Survey (rounds 1-6), we investigate the implications of this reversed gender gap for educational assortative mating. We fit multilevel multinomial regression models to predict the proportions of men and women living with a partner of a given level of education, contingent on respondents' own educational attainment and on the cohort-specific sex ratio among the population with tertiary education at the country level. We find that highly educated women tend to partner more often ''downwards'' with less educated men, rather than remaining single more often. Medium educated women are found to partner less often ''upwards'' with highly educated men. For men, there is no evidence that they are more likely to partner with highly educated women. Rather, they are found to be living single more often. In sum, women's advantage in higher education has affected mating patterns in important ways: while women previously tended to form unions with men who were at least as highly educated as themselves, they now tend to live with men who are at most as highly educated. Along the way, advanced education became a bonus on the mating market for women as well as for men.

While men have always received more education than women in the past, this gender imbalance in education has turned around in large parts of the world. In many countries, women now excel men in terms of participation and success in higher education. This implies that, for the first time in history, there are more highly educated women than men reaching the reproductive ages and looking for a partner. We develop an agent-based computational model that explicates the mechanisms that may have linked the reversal of gender inequality in education with observed changes in educational assortative mating. Our model builds on the notion that individuals search for spouses in a marriage market and evaluate potential candidates based on preferences. Based on insights from earlier research, we assume that men and women prefer partners with similar educational attainment and high earnings prospects, that women tend to prefer men who are somewhat older than themselves, and that men prefer women who are in their mid-twenties. We also incorporate the insight that the educational system structures meeting opportunities on the marriage market. We assess the explanatory power of our model with systematic computational experiments, in which we simulate marriage market dynamics in 12 European countries among individuals born between 1921 and 2012. In these experiments, we make use of realistic agent populations in terms of educational attainment and earnings prospects and validate model outcomes with data from the European Social Survey. We demonstrate that the observed changes in educational assortative mating can be explained without any change in male or female preferences. We argue that our model provides a useful computational laboratory to explore and quantify the implications of scenarios for the future.

In the absence of medical treatment and vaccination, the mitigation and containment of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic relies on behavioral changes. Timely data on attitudes and behaviors are thus necessary to develop optimal intervention strategies and to assess the consequences of the pandemic for different demographic groups. We developed a rapid response monitoring system via a continuously run online survey (the "COVID-19 Health Behavior Survey") across eight countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States). The survey was specifically designed to collect key information on people's health status, behaviors, close social contacts, and attitudes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We developed an innovative approach to recruit participants via targeted Facebook advertisement campaigns in order to generate balanced samples for post-stratification. In this paper, we present results for the period from March 13-April 19, 2020. We estimate important differences by sex: women show a substantially higher perception of threat along with a lower level of confidence in the health system. This is paralleled by sex-specific behaviors, with women more likely to adopt a wide range of preventive behaviors. We thus expect behavior to serve as a protective factor for women. Our findings also show a higher level of awareness and concern among older respondents, in line with the evidence that the elderly are at highest risk of severe complications following infection from COVID-19. While across all the samples respondents were less concerned for themselves than for their country or for the world, we also observed substantial temporal and spatial heterogeneity in terms of confidence in institutions and responses to non-pharmaceutical interventions.

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text.

Physical distancing measures are intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. However, the impact these measures have on social contact and disease transmission patterns remains unclear. We ran the first comparative contact survey ( =53,708) across eight countries (Belgium, . Our results show that social contact numbers mainly decreased after governments issued physical distancing guidelines rather than after announcing national lockdown measures. Compared to pre-COVID levels, social contact numbers decreased by 48%-85% across countries. Except in Italy, these reductions were smaller than those observed in Wuhan (China). However, they sufficed to bring the 0 below one in almost every context considered. Finally, in all countries studied, the numbers of contacts decreased more rapidly among older people than among younger people, indicating higher levels of protection for groups at greater risk.