Is It Only a Numbers Game? A Macro-Level Study of Educational Hypogamy

Abstract

In many countries, the tendency for highly educated women to marry down in education has markedly increased. Research has pointed to an oversupply of highly educated women—that is, a marriage squeeze affecting women—as the core reason for this phenomenon. This study aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the causes of this marriage trend by analyzing over-time data drawn from IPUMS International census microdata samples for 34 countries. Several key findings are notable. First, the degree of educational hypogamy is associated with the magnitude of the deficit in college-educated men in the marriage market, which is consistent with the marriage squeeze hypothesis. Second, the degree of educational hypogamy is related to the economic empowerment of college-educated women, even after accounting for the mating squeeze effect. Third, counterfactual simulations show that while the mating squeeze is the major driver of educational hypogamy in the majority of the sample countries, the economic empowerment of college-educated women plays an equally important role in several countries.

Gender, education expansion and intergenerational educational mobility around the world

“…Alongside education expansion in recent decades, educational hypergamy has declined whereas hypogamy has grown in many societies 27,46,47 . Nevertheless, such macrocompositional changes in educational pairing patterns result from not just education expansion but also changes in institutional and cultural contexts such as opportunities and norms regarding women's education and broader gender empowerment 49,50 . Against this backdrop, we find that mother-child and father-child associations in educational status vary with parents' educational pairing patterns, over and above education expansion.…”

“…When we compare the results from Models 1 and 2 with those from Model 3, both the orange and blue bars largely overlap with the black bars, indicating that education expansion and parents' educational pairing patterns do not mediate each other in predicting intergenerational mobility. This is not entirely surprising as education expansion does not necessarily translate into a rise in homogamy or hypogamy; rather, whether it does depends on gender norms and empowerment in a given context and the extent to which the expanded opportunities are equally accessible to both genders 49 . Below, we focus on the results from Model 3.…”

“…In the past decades, traditional hypergamous heterosexual unions in which women are paired with a better-educated man have declined in many countries, whereas homogamy and hypogamy in which women are paired with a similarly-or less-educated man have increased 27,46,47,48 . Nevertheless, the extent to which education expansion translates into changing educational pairing patterns also hinges on gendered educational opportunity, normative recognition of women's education, and broader gender empowerment in a given context 49,50 . Such contextual constellations embodied in the macro patterns of parents' educational pairing not only shape the influence of the mother vs. the father over their children, but also affect the children's tendency to view and follow the mother vs. the father as potential role models 38 .…”