The Reversed Gender Gap in Education and Assortative Mating in Europe

Social mobility and partnering. The salience of mobility homogamy

Does intergenerational social mobility influence individuals' partner choices? If so, are the socially mobile more likely to partner with someone from their origin or destination class? Or do they, if torn between the socio-cultural milieu of their well-known origins and less familiar destination, engage in 'mobility homogamy', opting for similarly mobile partners? The impact of social mobility on partner choice has received scant scholarly attention and, yet, it is an issue that is likely to enhance our understanding of partnering dynamics. Exploiting the German SOEP panel data, our principal finding is that the socially mobile are more likely to match with someone from their destination-rather than origin class. This suggests that the influence of destination-class resources and networks outweighs that of social origins. However, once we take into account also the partner's mobility history, it turns out that the upwardly mobile partner disproportionally with someone who is similarly upwardly mobile. Our analyses provide scant support for the social exchange thesis that individuals might seek to complement a high social destination class with a partner from high social origins; instead, the dynamics that we identify point to the saliency of social networks, individuals' resources, and a general preference for homogamy.

All-cause mortality risk for men and women in the United States: the role of partner's education relative to own education

This study examines the association between educational attainment, relative to that of an intimate partner, and all-cause mortality for men and women in different-sex relationships. Research suggests some health benefits for partnered adults that arise from economic benefits and improved access to health-promoting tools. One way these benefits could be gained is through the pairing of the highly educated. While high individual educational attainment lowers mortality risk, less is known about the risks of mortality associated with one's education, relative to their partner's education. Using National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality Files (NHIS-LMF) for the years 1999-2014 with prospective mortality follow-up through December 2015 (N = 347,994), we document the association between relative educational attainment and mortality for men and women with different-sex partners in the United States. Fully adjusted Cox proportional hazard models revealed a higher risk of all-cause mortality for men and women who have more education than their partner, relative to those having the same education as their partner. For women only, having less education than their male partner was associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality. A better understanding of relative status within different-sex partnerships provides insights into partnered adult's mortality risks.

Industrial Robots and Regional Fertility in European Countries

In this study, we examine whether the long-term structural changes in the labour market, driven by automation, affect fertility. The adoption of industrial robots is used as a proxy for these changes. It has tripled since the mid-1990s in the EU, tremendously changing the conditions of participating in the labour market. On the one hand, new jobs are created, benefitting largely the highly skilled workers. On the other hand, the growing turnover in the labour market and changing content of jobs induce fears of job displacement and make workers continuously adjust to new requirements (reskill, upskill, increase work efforts). The consequences of these changes are particularly strong for the employment and earning prospects of low and middle-educated workers. Our focus is on six European countries: Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK. We link regional data on fertility and employment structures by industry from Eurostat (NUTS-2) with data on robot adoption from the International Federation of Robotics. We estimate fixed effects linear models with instrumental variables in order to account for the external shocks which may affect fertility and robot adoption in parallel. Our findings suggest robots tend to exert a negative impact on fertility in highly industrialised regions, regions with relatively low educated populations and those which are technologically less advanced. At the same time, better educated and prospering regions may even experience fertility improvements as a result of technological change. The family and labour market institutions of the country may further moderate these effects.

Decomposing trends in educational homogamy and heterogamy - The case of Ireland

Employing Irish Census microdata, we analyze trends in educational homogamy and heterogamy between 1991 and 2016 and examine how they can be explained by concurrent trends in three theoretically relevant socio-demographic components - (a) educational attainment, (b) the educational gradient in marriage, and (c) educational assortative mating (i.e., non-random matching). Our study proposes a novel counterfactual decomposition method to estimate the contribution of each component to changing sorting outcomes in marriages. Findings indicate rising educational homogamy, an increase in non-traditional unions in which women partner 'down' in education, and a decline in traditional unions. Decomposition results suggest that these trends are predominantly attributable to changes in women's and men's educational attainment. Furthermore, changes in the educational gradient in marrying contributed to rising homogamy and the decline in traditional unions, a fact largely overlooked in previous research. Although assortative mating has also undergone changes, they barely contribute to trends in sorting outcomes.

Will narrowing the educational gap between husband and wife alleviate housework inequality: Evidence from China

In the past 20 years, China's educational advantage has undergone a gender reversal. The average educational level of women is higher than that of men. However, the gender difference in housework is gradually expanding, and women are still the main undertakers of housework. Based on the China Family Panel Studies, this study explores the impact of the educational gap between husband and wife on the inequality of housework division and its mechanism. OLS regression model was used to estimate the impact of marital education gap on household inequality. It is concluded that the higher the education level of the husband is than that of the wife, the greater the gender inequality in housework. This conclusion is significant at the level of 0.01. On this basis, the instrumental variable method was used to overcome the endogenous problems and a more accurate conclusion was reached. Every unit of increase in the education gap between husband and wife would increase the degree of household inequality by 0.281 percentage points. Quantile regression provides strong evidence for the results. When the gender time ratio of housework is in the range of 0.8-0.95, the education gap will have an impact on the gender division of housework. After the robustness test and heterogeneity analysis of the model, an intermediary variable was established to discuss the mechanism of the model. The income disparity and the working time gap were proved to be intermediary variables. This study believes that in modern society, the education gap between husband and wife will affect the inequality of housework division by changing the relative income and relative working time of husband and wife. Although the educational advantages of women in the whole society have not changed their role in the division of housework. However, with the narrowing of the educational gap between husband and wife, the degree of inequality in the division of housework has been alleviated, indicating that the improvement of women's education level has alleviated the inequality in the division of housework to a certain extent.

Intra-Couple Wealth Inequality: What’s Socio-Demographics Got to Do with it?

Existing literature shows that on average and across countries, men have higher levels of wealth than women. However, very little is known about the gender-specific wealth gap within couples. This paper studies this phenomenon for the first time in Austria. The particular focus of the paper is on the relationship between the socio-demographic characteristics of the couple and the couple’s gender wealth gap. We focus on how age, education, marital status, fertility, migratory background, and the gender of the respondent are related to the wealth gap within a couple. In both bivariate and multivariate analyses, we find evidence in support of the hypothesis that bargaining power plays an important role in the intra-couple gender wealth gap in Austria. Immigrant women living in a couple with native men, and, among natives, couples in which the man is much older on average, have larger gender wealth gaps. Furthermore, couples in which the woman is the “financially most knowledgeable person” in the household have consistently lower gender wealth gaps.

Gender-Egalitarian Attitudes and Assortative Mating by Age and Education

In the last decades, conventional patterns of assortative mating have been challenged by changes in the gender-gap in education. In many countries, educationally hypogamous unions (i.e. the woman is more educated than the man) now outnumber hypergamous unions (i.e. the man is more educated than the woman). The extent to which such structural changes have also been accompanied by gender egalitarian attitudes has not yet been investigated. This paper fills the gap by focusing on both age and educational assortative mating, using data from wave 1 and 2 of the Generations and Gender Surveys for 6 European countries. I investigate the role of gender-role attitudes of single men and women, measured in the first wave, on their age and educational assortative mating outcomes observed in the second wave. To this aim, I applied multinomial logistic regressions, and used as reference outcome category remaining single in the second wave. Compared to non-egalitarian men, I found that men holding gender-egalitarian views are more likely to form hypogamous unions instead of remaining single, in terms of both age and educational assortative mating. Egalitarian women are more likely than non-egalitarian women to form age-hypogamous unions instead of remaining single, but they are less likely to form educationally hypogamous unions. I discuss the implications of these results in relation to the convergence of mating preferences between men and women.

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

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.

The Road Not Taken: What Developmental Psychology Might Learn From Darwin's Insights Concerning Sexual Selection

Developmental Psychology is the branch of psychology that studies, not only human behavior, but how and why human behavior changes over time. This essay seeks to review to what extent Developmental Psychology has failed to perceive human behavior through the lens of evolutionary theory in general, and in particular sexual selection as first described by Darwin and later elaborated on by many, including Robert Trivers and Geoffrey Miller; the essay asserts that this failure has resulted in many wrong turns and missed opportunities. In some cases, major developmental theorists (e.g., Freud, Erikson) were bedeviled by sex-based differences which they saw but could not explain and which compromised the parsimony of their stage theories. In the case of stage theories of moral development, some major theorists (e.g., Piaget, Kohlberg) were able to offer simpler explanations of moral development only by limiting their studies to male subjects. And, while Developmental Psychology textbooks thoroughly describe sex differences in the timing of morphological changes in puberty, writers seldom discuss why the timing is different in the two sexes, universally, and functionally. On the other hand, several domains of developmental focus, including play, mate choice, parenting, and spatial cognition, have seen successful research efforts that utilized sexually selected predispositions as foundational assumptions. The essay concludes with a discussion of how a more evolutionary and functional view of human behavior might move the field of Developmental Psychology to an even more robust and accurate understanding of how humans change over the course of a lifetime.

Choosing a Major and a Partner: Field of Study and Union Formation Among College-Educated Women in Europe

In this paper, we explore the patterns of assortative mating among college-educated women who graduated from typically female, typically male, or mixed disciplines. Using a set of cross-sectional observations of a single cohort of female graduates (2010) from European Union Labour Force Survey data and applying multilevel multinomial logit models, we estimated the relative risk of living with a college-educated partner (homogamy), living with less educated partner (hypogamy), or being single. Focusing on the first five years after graduation, the analysis demonstrated that field of study is a significant predictor of mating behaviour. Women with degrees in male-dominated fields are less likely to partner down with less educated men. The mating advantage of women from male-dominated fields is stronger in countries with a higher female employment rate. Furthermore, more liberal gender roles seem to increase the level of singlehood among women from male-dominated fields. Finally, women from female-dominated and mixed disciplines are more likely to partner down if the man graduated from a male-typical discipline. However, among women from male-dominated disciplines, such a trade-off was not observed.

Is Two Still Best? Change in Parity-Specific Fertility Across Education in Low-Fertility Countries

The dominance of two-child families is considered an intrinsic characteristic of low fertility societies. Their share was continuously increasing among baby boom cohorts but the rise ceased afterwards. While parity- and education-specific fertility trends during the expansion of the two-child families have been studied, corresponding analyses of developments in the post-expansion birth cohorts are scarce. This study investigates the parity-specific fertility trends that ended the expansion of two-child families across educational groups. We use data on completed fertility of female cohorts born between 1936 and 1970 in 16 low-fertility countries. Besides examining trends in education- and parity-specific fertility, we provide evidence on increasing variation in family size and on the contribution of parity-specific fertility to the share of two child families among women with low, medium and high education. Our results show that the expansion of two-child families stopped as the variation in family size increased: transition rates to first and/or second birth declined whereas those to third birth increased. This polarisation process was strongest among women with low education. Apparently, as the number of women progressing to second birth declined, they became more selected and family-oriented, and thus more likely to progress to further births. The fact that the strongest polarisation of fertility was observed among the low educated reflects the group’s increasing selectivity. We demonstrate that rising polarisation of family size is a common development to most high-income low-fertility populations, especially among the low educated, regardless of substantial cross-country differences in fertility levels as well as in institutional, economic and cultural settings.

Does National Context Matter When Women Surpass Their Partner in Status?

There is growing evidence that couples in non-traditional relationships in which the woman attains higher status than her male partner experience more negative relationship outcomes than traditional couples. A possible reason is that non-traditional couples violate persisting gender stereotypes that prescribe men to be breadwinners and women to be caregivers of the family. In the current study (N = 2,748), we investigated whether a country's gender-stereotypical culture predicts non-traditional men and women's relationship and life outcomes. We used the European Sustainable Workforce Survey, which is conducted in nine European countries. Two indicators of countries' gender-stereotypical culture are used: Gender Empowerment Measure and implicit gender stereotypes. We found that women's income and -to a lesser extent- education degree relative to their male partner affected outcomes such as relationship quality, negative emotions, and experienced time pressure. Furthermore, men and women living in countries with a traditional gender-stereotypical culture (e.g., Netherlands, Hungary) reported lower relationship quality when women earned more than their partners. Relative income differences did not affect the relationship quality of participants living in egalitarian countries (e.g., Sweden, Finland). Also, couples in which the woman is more highly educated than the man reported higher relationship quality in egalitarian countries, but not in traditional countries. Our findings suggest that dominant beliefs and ideologies in society can hinder or facilitate couples in non-traditional relationships.

A Four-Country Study on the Relationship Between Parental Educational Homogamy and Children's Health from Infancy to Adolescence

This study explores the relationship between parental educational similarity - educational concordance (homogamy) or discordance (heterogamy) - and children's health outcomes. Its contribution is threefold. First and foremost, I use longitudinal data on children's health outcomes tracking children from age 1 to 15, thus being able to assess whether the relationship changes at key life-course and developmental stages of children. This is an important addition to the relevant literature, where the focus is solely on outcomes at birth. Second, I look at different health outcomes, namely height-for-age (HFA) and BMI-for-age (BFA) z-scores, alongside their dichotomized counterparts, stunting and thinness. Third, I conduct the same set of analyses in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam, thus providing multi-context evidence from countries at different levels of development and with different socio-economic characteristics and gender dynamics. Results reveal important heterogeneity across contexts. In Ethiopia and India, parental educational homogamy is associated with worse health outcomes in infancy and childhood, while associations are positive in Peru and, foremost, Vietnam. Complementary estimates from matching techniques show that these associations tend to fade after age 1, except in Vietnam, where the positive relationship persists through adolescence, thus supporting the homogamy-benefit hypothesis not only at birth, but also across the early life course. Insights from this study contribute to the inequality debate on the intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage and shed additional light on the relationship between early-life conditions and later-life outcomes in critical periods of children's lives.

Revisiting Horizontal Stratification in Higher Education: College Prestige Hierarchy and Educational Assortative Mating in China

Existing research on assortative mating has examined marriage between people with different levels of education, yet heterogeneity in educational assortative mating outcomes of college graduates has been mostly ignored. Using data from the 2010 Chinese Family Panel Study and log-multiplicative models, this study examines the changing structure and association of husbands' and wives' educational attainment between 1980 and 2010, a period in which Chinese higher education experienced rapid expansion and stratification. Results show that the graduates of first-tier institutions are less likely than graduates of lower-ranked colleges to marry someone without a college degree. Moreover, from 1980 to 2010, female first-tier-college graduates were increasingly more likely to marry people who graduated from similarly prestigious colleges, although there is insufficient evidence to draw the same conclusion about their male counterparts. This study thus demonstrates the extent of heterogeneity in educational assortative mating patterns among college graduates and the tendency for elite college graduates to marry within the educational elite.

Long-term trends in intergenerational proximity: Evidence from a grandchild design

Competing claims exist about how the geographic distance between parents and their adult children has changed historically. A classic modernisation hypothesis is that people currently live further away from their parents than in the past. Others have argued for stability and the remaining importance of local family ties, in spite of a long-term decline in co-residence of adult children and parents. The current paper uses a novel design that relies on reports by grandchildren to study long-term changes in intergenerational proximity in the Netherlands. The analyses show that there has been a clear and continuous decline in intergenerational proximity between the 1940s and the 1990s. Mediation analyses show that educational expansion and urbanisation are the main reasons why proximity declined. No evidence is found for the role of secularisation and increasing international migration. Proximity to parents declined somewhat more strongly for women than for men.

Mating Market and Dynamics of Union Formation

The paper investigates the relationship between structural partner market constraints and the timing and educational sorting of unions in Germany (1985–2018). We integrate the literature on the effect of the reversed gender gap in education on educational assortative mating, with a focus on mating dynamics and the measurement of the partner market over the life course. We concentrate on two particular educational groups, low-educated men and highly educated women, those with worsening mating prospects and more subject to experience hypogamous unions. Our results show that the local education-specific mating squeeze influences union formation, its timing, and educational sorting. Indeed, for the two groups, the increasing supply of highly educated women in the partner market increases the likelihood of remaining single or establishing an hypogamous union, where she is higher educated than he. In line with search theory, we find the effects of the mating squeeze to become particularly visible after people turn 30 years of age. This is true for the risk of remaining single and forming an hypogamous union. We underline the necessity to study assortative mating and union formation from a dynamic perspective, taking into account changing structural conditions during the partner search process.

Educational Assortative Mating in Sub-Saharan Africa: Compositional Changes and Implications for Household Wealth Inequality

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is undergoing rapid transformations in the realm of union formation in tandem with significant educational expansion and rising labor force participation rates. Concurrently, the region remains the least developed and most unequal along multiple dimensions of human and social development. In spite of this unique scenario, never has the social stratification literature examined patterns and implications of educational assortative mating for inequality in SSA. Using 126 Demographic and Health Surveys from 39 SSA countries between 1986 and 2016, this study is the first to document changing patterns of educational assortative mating by marriage cohort, subregion, and household location of residence and relate them to prevailing sociological theories on mating and development. Results show that net of shifts in educational distributions, mating has increased over marriage cohorts in all subregions except for Southern Africa, with increases driven mostly by rural areas. Trends in rural areas align with the status attainment hypothesis, whereas trends in urban areas are consistent with the inverted U-curve framework and the increasing applicability of the general openness hypothesis. The inequality analysis conducted through a combination of variance decomposition and counterfactual approaches reveals that mating accounts for a nonnegligible share (3% to 12%) of the cohort-specific inequality in household wealth, yet changes in mating over time hardly move time trends in wealth inequality, which is in line with findings from high-income societies.

Change in prevalence or preference? Trends in educational homogamy in six European countries in a time of educational expansion

This paper analyzes trends in educational homogamy in six European countries (Sweden, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Italy). We use vital statistics on all marriages contracted between 1990 and 2016. Absolute educational homogamy increases in all countries (very moderately in the Czech Republic and Italy), it changes its structure, and the absolute educational hypogamy of women increases. The trends over time and among countries in relative educational homogamy are tested using log-linear and log-multiplicative models. We expand a regression-type layer effect model (the Goodman-Hout model) into a four-way table. The results indicate differing assortative mating by educational categories. Relative homogamy decreases in tertiary education. In lower educational categories, relative homogamy increases. We present the hypothesis that a decrease in relative homogamy in tertiary education is a consequence of the rise of social homogamy. We conceptualize this homogamy balance as a "complementary maintained homogamy." Because changes in relative educational homogamies are the same in all countries, the cross-country differences remain constant over time. We conceptualize this as a "maintained flux." The European countries are not in convergence, even though the relative homogamies delineated by educational categories change.

Fearing Such a Lady: University Expansion, Underemployment, and the Hypergamy Ideal in Kampala, Uganda

In Uganda, the cultural norm of hypergamy, which dictates that husbands should have higher economic and social status than wives, is pervasive and influential. Yet hypergamy has recently been challenged by women's gains in education relative to men and by an unemployment crisis leaving educated young men unable to find steady work. Using interviews with recent university graduates in Kampala, we investigate how highly-educated young adults navigate frictions between the hypergamy ideal and these recent transformations in gendered status. Some women reduce the salience of hypergamy by preventing their relationships from becoming serious, while other women intentionally perform the role of submissive housewife while preserving their autonomy. Men reframe their romantic circumstances to underplay their inability to achieve economic hypergamy, portraying educated women as undesirable and characterizing their partners as non-materialistic. These findings reveal how demographic and economic changes reconfigure relationship norms, gendered power dynamics, and family formation processes.

Partners' Educational Characteristics and Fertility: Disentangling the Effects of Earning Potential and Unemployment Risk on Second Births

This study investigates the link between the educational characteristics of partners in heterosexual relationships and their transition to second births, accounting for the selection into parenthood by fitting multi-level event history models. We compare the fertility of Beckerian unions characterized by gender-role specialization with the fertility of dual-earner couples, characterized by the pooling of incomes. Focusing on the economic aspect of the educational degree, in a first step, we estimate the earning potential and unemployment risks by field and level of education, country and sex using European Labour Force Surveys. Next, we link these results with Generation and Gender Survey data from six countries and model couples' transition to second births. We find evidence in support of both the pooling of resources family model (notably in Belgium) and the Beckerian gender-role specialization model. The effects of the earning potential and unemployment risk attached to his and her field of education tends to vary by country context.

The Emergence of Educational Hypogamy in India

With rising education among women across the world, educational hypergamy (women marrying men with higher education) has decreased over the last few decades in both developed and developing countries. Although a decrease in hypergamy is often accompanied by increasing homogamy (women marrying men with equal levels of education), our analyses for India based on a nationally representative survey of India (the India Human Development Survey), document a considerable rise in hypogamy (women marrying partners with lower education) during the past four decades. Log-linear analyses further reveal that declining hypergamy is largely generated by the rise in education levels, whereas hypogamous marriages continue to increase even after marginal distributions are taken into account. Further multivariate analyses show that highly educated women tend to marry men with lower education but from more privileged families. Moreover, consanguineous marriages, which exemplify strong cultural constraints on spousal selection in certain parts of India, are more likely to be hypogamous than marriages not related by blood. We argue that the rise in hypogamous marriage by education paradoxically reflects deep-rooted gender scripts in India given that other salient social boundaries are much more difficult to cross.

Intramarital Status Differences across Africa's Educational Expansion

OBJECTIVE

This paper documents how intra-marital differences in educational status vary across Africa's heterogeneous educational expansion, which has encompassed an enormous breadth of educational opportunities over the past 50 years.

BACKGROUND

Educational expansion influences intra-marital 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 wellbeing 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 paper 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.

Decomposing patterns of college marital sorting in 118 countries: Structural constraints versus assortative mating

Two broad forces shape the patterns of marital sorting by education: structural constraints and assortative mating. However, we lack specific and comparative quantification of the extent of these two forces. In this paper, we measure the specific contributions of (i) assortative mating, (ii) the level of college education and (iii) the gender gap in education on marital sorting patterns and the corresponding polarization levels between college and non-college educated couples. Unlike previous studies, we adopt a large-cross-national approach including 118 countries and more than 258 observations spanning from 1960 up to 2011. Methodologically, we develop counterfactual modelling techniques to compare observed patterns of marital sorting with expected patterns derived from alternative structural and assortative mating conditions. Our findings indicate that changes in college marital sorting and increases in polarization between college- and non-college-educated populations are overwhelmingly driven by structural constraints, namely the expansion of college education. Instead, educational assortative mating plays a limited role - accounting only for 5% of the observed changes in marriage market polarization.

Partners' Educational Pairings and Fertility Across Europe

We provide new evidence on the education-fertility relationship by using EU-SILC panel data on 24 European countries to investigate how couples' educational pairings predict their childbearing behavior. We focus on differences in first-, second-, and third-birth rates among couples with varying combinations of partners' education. Our results show important differences in how education relates to parity progressions depending on the education of the partner. First, highly educated homogamous couples show a distinct childbearing behavior in most country clusters. They tend to postpone the first birth most and display the highest second- and third-birth rates. Second, contrary to what may be expected based on the "new home economics" approach, hypergamous couples with a highly educated male and a lower-educated female partner display among the lowest second-birth transitions. Our findings underscore the relevance of interacting both partners' education for a better understanding of the education-fertility relationship.

Trends in Childlessness Among Highly Educated Men in Sweden

Among men with post-secondary degrees in Sweden, one in four are childless by age 45, and this level has been constant over time (in this study, for men born 1956–1972). This high level of childlessness is somewhat surprising in the context of a significant gender imbalance among the highly educated (and thus the relative scarcity of highly educated men). In this study, I examine differences in childlessness among the highly educated by studying how educational prestige, social class, and income are associated with the likelihood of becoming a father. Higher income and social class background are positively associated with fatherhood, and this association has not changed over time. Educational prestige (higher degrees, or degrees from traditional universities) is not positively associated with fatherhood, while 2-year degrees have become more positively associated with fatherhood over time. The findings of this study suggest that socioeconomic resources are important for men's family formation in Sweden compared to educational resources, contrary to expectations from educational homophily and partner market perspectives.

His and Her Education and Marital Dissolution: Adding a Contextual Dimension

Educationally hypogamous marriages, where the wife is more educated than the husband, have been expected to be less stable than other educational pairings, in part because they do not conform to social norms. With the reversal of the gender gap in education, such marriages have become more common than in the past. Recent research suggests that this new context might be beneficial for the stability of hypogamous unions compared to other educational pairings. Here, we investigate how educational matches in married couples are associated with divorce risks taking into account the local prevalence of hypogamy. Using Belgian census and register data for 458,499 marriages contracted between 1986 and 2001, we show that hypogamy was not associated with higher divorce rates than homogamy in communities where hypogamy was common. Against expectations, marriages in which the husband was more educated than the wife tend to exhibit the highest divorce rates. More detailed analysis of the different types of educational matches revealed that marriages with at least one highly educated partner, male or female, were less divorce prone compared to otherwise similar couple types.

His and Her Education and Marital Dissolution: Adding a Contextual Dimension

Educationally hypogamous marriages, where the wife is more educated than the husband, have been expected to be less stable than other educational pairings, in part because they do not conform to social norms. With the reversal of the gender gap in education, such marriages have become more common than in the past. Recent research suggests that this new context might be beneficial for the stability of hypogamous unions compared to other educational pairings. Here, we investigate how educational matches in married couples are associated with divorce risks taking into account the local prevalence of hypogamy. Using Belgian census and register data for 458,499 marriages contracted between 1986 and 2001, we show that hypogamy was not associated with higher divorce rates than homogamy in communities where hypogamy was common. Against expectations, marriages in which the husband was more educated than the wife tend to exhibit the highest divorce rates. More detailed analysis of the different types of educational matches revealed that marriages with at least one highly educated partner, male or female, were less divorce prone compared to otherwise similar couple types.

The reversal of the gender gap in education and relative divorce risks: A matter of alternatives in partner choice?

Recent evidence from the United States suggests that the reversal of the gender gap in education was associated with changes in relative divorce risks: hypogamous marriages, where the wife was more educated than the husband, used to have a higher divorce risk than hypergamous marriages, where the husband was more educated, but this difference has disappeared. One interpretation holds that this may result from cultural change, involving increasing social acceptance of hypogamy. We propose an alternative mechanism that need not presuppose cultural change: the gender-gap reversal in education has changed the availability of alternatives from which highly educated women and men can choose new partners. This may have lowered the likelihood of women leaving husbands with less education and encouraged men to leave less educated spouses. We applied an agent-based model to twelve European national marriage markets to illustrate that this could be sufficient to create a convergence in divorce risks.

Educational Pairings, Motherhood, and Women's Relative Earnings in Europe

As a consequence of the reversal of the gender gap in education, the female partner in a couple now typically has as much as or more education compared with the male partner in most Western countries. This study addresses the implications for the earnings of women relative to their male partners in 16 European countries. Using the 2007 and 2011 rounds of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (N = 58,292), we investigate the extent to which international differences in women's relative earnings can be explained by educational pairings and their interaction with the motherhood penalty on women's earnings, by international differences in male unemployment, or by cultural gender norms. We find that the newly emerged pattern of hypogamy is associated with higher relative earnings for women in all countries and that the motherhood penalty on relative earnings is considerably lower in hypogamous couples, but neither of these findings can explain away international country differences. Similarly, male unemployment is associated with higher relative earnings for women but cannot explain away the country differences. Against expectations, we find that the hypogamy bonus on women's relative earnings, if anything, tends to be stronger rather than weaker in countries that exhibit more conservative gender norms.