Assortative Mating and the Reversal of Gender Inequality in Education in Europe: An Agent-Based Model

Abstract

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.

Pathways to marital and non-marital first birth: the role of his and her education

“…As we can see in Table 2, in the majority of countries, couples in which the woman is more educated than the man are more common than couples in which the man is more educated than his partner. This result is in line with recent trends in educational assortative mating that have been found across European and non-European countries (Esteve et al 2012;Grow and Van Bavel 2015).…”

“…While educational homogamy remains the most common mating pattern in Europe (Blossfeld and Timm 2003;Hamplova 2009;De Hauw et al 2017), marked changes in heterogamous couples have occurred. Recent studies have shown that unions in which the man is more educated than the woman (hypergamy) are now less common than unions in which the woman is more educated than the man (hypogamy) (Esteve et al 2012;Grow and Van Bavel 2015;De Hauw et al 2017).…”

The New Roles of Men and Women and Implications for Families and Societies

“…Indeed, the expansion of higher education among women and resulting patterns of assortative mating affect family formation, fertility, and divorce (Schwartz and Han 2014;Grow and Van Bavel 2015). Contrary to expectations, highly educated women are not more likely to remain single.…”

Differences in partnership and marital status at first birth by women’s and their partners’ education: evidence from Britain 1991–2012

“…Alternatively, it has been suggested that an increase in gender symmetry in education and earning capacity would raise the desirability of highly educated women as marriage partners, since their contribution to the household income may be expected to be greater than in the past (Blossfeld and Müller 2002). Indeed, recent studies from Europe and other developed countries have suggested that there has been a decline in traditional marriage unions in which the man is better educated than the woman, and an increase in married couples in which the woman is better educated than the man (Esteve et al 2012;Grow and Van Bavel 2015).…”