Education and marriage: the shift from female hypergamy to hypogamy in Belgium, a 20th century cohort analysis

Abstract

One of the key social trends of the 20th century has been the expansion of participation in education. Using detailed retrospective information from the 1981 and 2001 censuses, this paper investigates how this expansion is associated with major trends in nuptiality in Belgium. We focus specifically on the changing gender balance in education and how this is related to the likelihood and timing of marriage and to patterns of educational assortative mating. Our empirical analysis shows that marriage was getting more universal, happening at an earlier age and more often heterogamous in term of education over the cohorts born in the first half of the 20th century. In younger cohorts, when women’s levels of education caught up with men’s, the age at marriage as well as the degree of homogamy increased again. Homogamy remained dominant throughout, but while women tended to marry men who were at least as highly educated as themselves until the 1950s cohorts, in more recent cohorts, women have tended to marry men who are at most as highly educated as themselves. Hypogamy is now the second most common pattern, after homogamy. Controlling for changes in the distribution of educational attainment by applying a log-linear model, we find that part of the changes in assortative mating in Belgium may be explained by changes in mate preferences regarding education. Finally, we find that hypogamous marriages tend to be contracted at later ages than homogamous or hypergamous ones.

Marital Fertility and Educational Assortative Mating before, during, and after the Baby Boom in Belgium

“…As more and more people got married during the Baby Boom years (Nomes & Van Bavel, 2015), these marital fertility levels were applicable to a growing share of the population. This already explains a substantial part of the Baby Boom.…”

“…For generations born after 1940, fertility decreased fairly quickly back to belowreplacement levels. Source: Belgian censuses of 1981and 2001, own calculations, see Nomes & Van Bavel (2015 The expansion of participation in education is one of the main social changes of the 20 th century in the Western world, a change in which Belgium, although lagging behind somewhat compared to its neighbouring countries, participated as well (Nomes & Van Bavel, 2015;Ronsijn, 2014). Figure 3 shows the cohort trends in educational attainment for both men and women.…”

“…A crucial element is that the educational expansion did not happen at the same time and with the same speed for men and women (Nomes & Van Bavel, 2015). Men took a head start and women had to catch up, which has important consequences for the balance within couples.…”

“…Among the Baby Bust producing cohorts, homogamy was on the rise again, while hypergamy started to decline. Nomes & Van Bavel (2015) Theoretical framework…”

“…As a result, hypogamous couples are likely to have had lower fertility levels than homogamous and hypergamous couples. This could be reinforced by timing and selection effects: hypogamous couples tend to get married on average at a later age (Nomes & Van Bavel, 2015) and might have been more attractive to people who were less eager to have children. Moreover, if hypergamy became a social norm in the Baby Boom era, it seems likely that people who adhered to this norm, tended to adhere to dominant family norms in general.…”