The End of Hypergamy: Global Trends and Implications

Abstract

The gender gap in education that has long favored men has reversed for young adults in almost all high and middle-income countries. In 2010, the proportion of women aged 25-29 with a college education was higher than that of men in more than 139 countries which altogether represent 86% of the world’s population. According to recent population forecasts, women will have more education than men in nearly every country in the world by 2050, with the exception of only a few African and West Asian countries (KC et al. 2010). The reversal of the gender gap in education has major implications for the composition of marriage markets, assortative mating, gender equality, and marital outcomes such as divorce and childbearing (Van Bavel 2012). In this work, we focus on its implications for trends in assortative mating and, in particular, for educational hypergamy: the pattern in which husbands have more education than their wives. This represents a substantial update to previous studies (Esteve et al. 2012) in terms of the number of countries and years included in the analysis. We present findings from an almost comprehensive world-level analysis using census and survey microdata from 420 samples and 120 countries spanning from 1960 to 2011, which allow us to assert that the reversal of the gender gap in education is strongly associated with the end of hypergamy and increases in hypogamy (wives have more education that their husbands). We not only provide near universal evidence of this trend but extend our analysis to consider the implications of the end of hypergamy for family dynamics, outcomes and gender equality. We draw on European microdata to examine whether women are more likely to be the breadwinners when they marry men with lower education than themselves and discuss recent research regarding divorce risks among hypogamous couples. We close our analysis with an examination of attitudes about women earning more money than their husbands and about the implications for children when a woman works for pay.

Intramarital Status Differences Across Africa's Educational Expansion

“…In nearly all country cohorts, marital homogamy was the most prevalent pairing type, followed by hypergamy and then hypogamy. Counter to the prevailing narrative of "the end of hypergamy" in most international contexts (Esteve et al, 2012(Esteve et al, , 2016, the prevalence of educational hypergamy increased between the earliest and latest observed birth cohorts in the majority of African countries (19 of 32). Of the 19 countries that experienced increasing hypergamy (identified with black borders around the plots; Figure 2), this increase was significant in 12 (heavy black borders; p < .05).…”

“…As access to education becomes more prevalent for men and women—in tandem or at different paces—intramarital differences in educational status also change. Substantial research from various geographic contexts (Blossfeld, ; De Hauw et al, ; Esteve, García‐Román, & Permanyer, ; Esteve et al, ; Mare, ; Schwartz & Mare, ; Smits & Park, ; Smits, Ultee, & Lammers, ) has provided insight into, for example, the increasingly similar education of wives and husbands in the United States (Mare, ) and the withdrawal from marriage among highly educated women in Japan (Raymo & Iwasawa, ). We extend this research into sub‐Saharan Africa, a context characterized by unusual heterogeneity in educational trends, encompassing contexts where attending secondary school has long been typical and contexts where attending any school at all remains exceptional (Frye & Lopus, ).…”

“…In addition, in most world regions where researchers have investigated intramarital differences in educational status, educational access had already reached moderate levels of coverage by the middle of the last century, when historical analyses of this process often begin. Because of the gendered way that education tends to expand (with access tending to benefit boys and men prior to girls and women; Lopus & Frye, ), studies of later stage educational expansion capture a period of time during which women's education rises relative to men's (DiPrete & Buchmann, ; Esteve et al, ; Goldin, Katz, & Kuziemko, ; Grant & Behrman, ), driving a closure or even a reversal of the educational gender gap (Behrman, ; DeRose & Kravdal, ; Lloyd, Kaufman, & Hewett, ). In parts of Africa, in contrast, many individuals born in the middle of the last century had virtually no access to formal schooling, so African data provide the opportunity to examine intramarital educational differences across a stunning range of educational contexts.…”

“…Around the world, scholars have documented a longstanding cultural preference for unions in which husbands are at least as educated as wives and a corresponding opposition toward female status-dominant relationships (Basu, 1998;Hitsch, Hortaçsu, & Ariely, 2010;Tichenor, 2005; for a review, see van Bavel et al, 2018). In the United States and Europe, this distaste for hypogamy appears to have weakened over time: Marriages in which women have higher status are no longer more likely to dissolve (Schwartz & Han, 2014), and attitudinal surveys show a growing acceptance of hypogamy (Esteve et al, 2016). Other evidence, however, suggests that the cultural preference for hypergamy may persist despite a decreasing prevalence of hypergamous marriages.…”

Partner market opportunities and union formation over the life course—A comparison of different measures

“…First, the distribution of educational attainment has become more equal for women and men in many countries (OECD, ). In fact, in Germany, more women than men attain an educational level that entitles them to tertiary education (“Abitur” and “Fachabitur”) (Helbig, ; see De Hauw, Grow, & Van Bavel, , Esteve et al, , van Bavel, for further consequences of the reversed gender gap in education). Second, men and women of equal educational attainment share selective educational meeting contexts for a longer time (Blossfeld, ).…”