Intramarital Status Differences Across Africa's Educational Expansion

Abstract

Objective: This article documents how intramarital differences in educational status vary across Africa's heterogeneous educational expansion, which has encompassed an enormous breadth of educational opportunities during the past 50 years. Background: Educational expansion influences intramarital status differences both by altering the educational composition of men and women and by reconfiguring the social conventions associated with a given educational context. Status differentials between marital partners can influence spousal well‐being and, in the aggregate, determine the extent to which marriage provides a pathway to upward social mobility. Method: Using Demographic and Health Survey data representing 32 sub‐Saharan African countries and 5 decades of birth cohorts, the article examines the prevalence and propensity of educational pairings as a function of educational access (the percentage of a cohort who ever attended school) and wife's education level. Results: Educational expansion created gendered changes in educational compositions of married individuals, which led to increased prevalence of hypergamy (wives who married “up”) in most countries. Educational expansion has also led hypogamous marriages to become less of a social aberration: in lower education contexts (but less so in higher education contexts), conventions lead women to “marry down” at far lower rates than would be expected based on the sex‐specific compositions of husbands and wives. Conclusion: Educational attainment remains a central determinant of social positioning in African society. However, as schooling expands across the continent, social conventions regarding educational status are playing a weakening role in determining who marries whom.

Attitudes Toward Intimate Partner Violence in Dyadic Perspective: Evidence From Sub-Saharan Africa

“…An alter na tive pos si bil ity is that joint expo sures to school ing, work, and media pre dict a greater prob a bil ity of joint rejec tion because joint expo sure to global cul tural scripts is mutu ally reinforcing, which is con sis tent with the global cul tural dif fu sion lit er a ture (Baker and LaTendre 2005;Swindle 2018). At the same time, sim i lar i ties in atti tudes may be related to mar riage mar ket selec tion pro cesses, whereby peo ple pre fer to match with oth ers who hold sim i lar opin ions (Lopus and Frye 2020). Another pos si bil ity is that cou ples with dif fer ent back ground char ac ter is tics-such as edu ca tion or media expo sure-do not share infor ma tion with their part ners as actively.…”

“…Joint expo sure to anti-IPV mes sag ing (through, for exam ple, schools and media) might have a stron ger effect on atti tudes than if only the wife or only the hus band were exposed because the cou ple may be more likely to jointly inter nal ize antiIPV mes sages and dis cuss them with each other. At the same time, given that those with sim i lar char ac ter is tics (i.e., edu ca tion, work, age, and so on) are more likely to select into mar riage with each other (Lopus and Frye 2020), mar ried cou ples may also hold sim i lar views on IPV. However, cou ples' sim i lar i ties in char ac ter is tics such as edu cation and employ ment may cor re spond with the back lash that might be asso ci ated with increases in IPV accep tance among one or both mem bers of the cou ple (Behrman 2019).…”

Explaining inter‐ethnic marriage in Sub‐Saharan Africa

“…However, if the offspring of inter-ethnic marriages identify as a separate group instead of with either of their parents' groups-as historically happened in the ethnogenesis of the Coloured, Creole and Shirazi groups, as noted above-then these processes could again be mitigated. Third and finally, although educational homogamy is currently on the decline in Africa, this trend is likely to reverse in coming decades as the educational gap between men and women closes and norms about educational hypergamy change (Lopus & Frye, 2020); thus, if the negative relationship between educational homogamy and inter-ethnic marriage continues to hold, rising levels of educational homogamy could contribute to lower levels of inter-ethnic marriage in the future.…”

“…This finding suggests that greater similarity between spouses in their levels of education is actually correlated with lower, not higher, levels of inter-ethnic marriage, which could be due to declining educational homogamy that itself is a result of rising levels of education across the continent (Lopus & Frye, 2020).…”

“…This trend has been documented for Protestants and Catholics in the 20th‐century United States (Kalmijn, 1991), although more recent evidence has questioned the degree to which educational homogamy increases over time in the United States (Rosenfeld, 2008). In Africa, there is recent evidence for the opposite trend, such that the expansion of education across the continent has led to declining educational homogamy as both educational hypergamy (marrying someone with a higher level of education) and hypogamy (marrying someone with a lower level of education) are on the rise (Lopus & Frye, 2020). In our analysis below, we examine evidence for educational homogamy as well as its relationship with inter‐ethnic marriage in Africa.…”