The Gender-Gap Reversal in Education and Its Effect on Union Formation: The End of Hypergamy?

摘要

Union formation is in many ways a gender-asymmetrical process. This asymmetry has been a characteristic both of societies in which marriages are arranged and of those in which they are based on romantic love (Coontz 2005; Goody 1983). Although arranged marriages are often gender-symmetrical within such characteristics as ethnicity, race, caste, or religion, the conditions and implications of marriage for women and men are highly asymmetrical, as exemplified by the ancient custom of dowry. As societies underwent the transition from arranged to free-choice unions, individual characteristics gradually took precedence over ascribed ones in mate selection, and educational attainment became a major structuring dimension within-marriage markets (Kalmijn 1998; Mare 1991; Smits, Ultee, and Lammers 1998; Blossfeld and Timm 2003; Schwartz and Mare 2005; Smits and Park 2009). While educational homogamy remains the rule, educational hypergamy has been pervasive within heterogamous unions. (Educational hypergamyrefers to those unions in which the wife has a lower educational attainment than her husband, homogamy to unions between persons of similar education.) Several studies have documented the former ubiquity of hypergamy and its gradual disappearance over time in a limited number of countries (Schoen and Cheng 2006; Qian 1998; Esteve and Cortina 2006; Esteve and McCaa 2007). The extent to which this trend of decreasing hypergamy is connected to the worldwide rise in female educational attainment is the subject of this article.