Search

This study examines within- and cross-country trends and differences in marital sorting by education in Europe. Unlike previous research on assortative mating, our study focuses on the outcomes of the partner search process. We investigate how variations in (a) structural opportunities (educational composition of potential partners) and (b) assortative mating (non-random matching by education) have shaped trends and differences in educational sorting outcomes. Using vital statistics data on all marriages contracted from 2000 to 2020 in Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Italy, we decompose trends and differences in educational sorting outcomes into these two components. Within countries, trends in educational homogamy and hypogamy have been stable or increasing while hypergamy has declined. However, the drivers of these trends varied across countries. For example, in Sweden, shifts in assortative mating and structural opportunities led to more marriages between equally educated spouses, while in Italy, the rise in homogamy stems solely from changes in assortative mating. Within each year, homogamy and heterogamy levels varied between countries. Our findings demonstrate that these cross-country differences can be primarily attributed to variations in assortative mating rather than in opportunity structures. This study adds to recent research studying the structural causes of trends in sorting outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND Theories of partner selection emphasize the principal role of available partners in the relationship market. As education is a common socioeconomic attribute through which individuals choose a mate, macrostructure theory highlights the importance of the asymmetric change in educational attainment seen in Europe. As women increasingly participate in tertiary education, this restructuring might result in the decline of traditional hypergamous unions. OBJECTIVE We aim to verify previous results confirming the decline of educational hypergamy and the rise of hypogamy, which has been found to be related to women's growing educational advantage. We also wish to provide a current picture of this process in Europe by looking at the youngest cohort available during the analysis. METHODS We pooled nine waves of the European Social Survey and examined trends in seven cohorts. Apart from simple percentage differences in education, we reconstructed the indices of female educational advantage (F-index) and the prevalence of hypergamy (Hindex), with provided correlation statistics and fitted linear trend lines. RESULTS Our results corroborated the findings of previous multi-country analyses. In nearly all selected countries, women were more present in higher education than men, resulting in a uniform increase in the female educational advantage. Parallel to this, hypergamy declined through the cohorts, which correlated with women's emerging educational lead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seasonal migration is a complex and variable behaviour with the potential to promote reproductive isolation. In Eurasian blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla), a migratory divide in central Europe separating populations with southwest (SW) and southeast (SE) autumn routes may facilitate isolation, and individuals using new wintering areas in Britain show divergence from Mediterranean winterers. We tracked 100 blackcaps in the wild to characterize these strategies. Blackcaps to the west and east of the divide used predominantly SW and SE directions, respectively, but close to the contact zone many individuals took intermediate (S) routes. At 14.0° E, we documented a sharp transition from SW to SE migratory directions across only 27 (10-86) km, implying a strong selection gradient across the divide. Blackcaps wintering in Britain took northwesterly migration routes from continental European breeding grounds. They originated from a surprisingly extensive area, spanning 2000 km of the breeding range. British winterers bred in sympatry with SW-bound migrants but arrived 9.8 days earlier on the breeding grounds, suggesting some potential for assortative mating by timing. Overall, our data reveal complex variation in songbird migration and suggest that selection can maintain variation in migration direction across short distances while enabling the spread of a novel strategy across a wide range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of occupational resources (field of occupation, socio-economic status, and income) in the odds of having a highly educated partner, having a partner with lower education, and staying single. The analysis of the EUSILC 2013 data demonstrate that women with better jobs and higher incomes have higher odds of living in a homogamous union with a highly educated partner. The data also show that if high resource women do not live with highly educated men, they are less likely to marry down compared to women with fewer resources and are more likely to stay single. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that women working in female-dominated professions are more likely to marry down and that the effect of the field cannot be explained by fewer personal resources. We also tested the idea that the link between individual resources and living arrangements is moderated by the female employment rate. We demonstrate that women are more likely to partner down in countries with higher female labor force participation. However, this tendency does not hold for high-income women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have found a high degree of assortative mating for educational attainment (r = .56). However, this can be confounded by cohort effects or country effects, where certain nations may have more pronounced assortative mating than others. In addition, method variance regarding how educational attainment is measured may also result in heterogeneity of effect sizes. Effect sizes were gathered from various datasets and from academic literature, resulting in a large collection of effect sizes (k = 1498, n = 9,159,098), spanning 84 different countries. Assortative mating for educational attainment was stronger than what previous literature suggested (r = .66, [.64, .68]), largely due to the fact that assortative mating for educational attainment is stronger when latent methods are used. The strongest predictors of assortative mating for education between countries were individualism (r = -.61, p < .001) and HDI (r = -.56, p < .001). Assortative mating over time was found to vary by region. Capitalist Europe experienced an increase in assortative mating for education, while Communist Europe experienced a decrease. The United States had a non-linear trend in assortative mating for educational attainment, as it decreased from 1875 to 1926, increased from 1926 to 1945, decreased from 1945 to 1958, increased from 1958 to 1977, and decreased from 1977 onwards., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Using population register data from Norway (n = 209,532) and Sweden (n = 592,491), this study addressed the relationship between partner choice and the timing of first marriage. We considered all migrant-background individuals born between 1972 and 1989 who were either native-born or who immigrated prior to age 18, relative to 10% random samples of the majority populations. The results demonstrate that marital timing patterns of migrant background individuals who married exogamously (that is, with a majority-background spouse or across their global region of origin) were more similar to the majority populations than among those who married endogamously (that is, with another migrant-background individual originating in the same global region). However, among immigrant-background individuals who endogamously married, there was evidence of a shift toward the Scandinavian pattern of later marriage across generations. Taken together the results provide an important starting point for investigations into the family life-courses and social position of children of immigrants in Europe, an increasingly large population subgroup currently entering family formation ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While men have always received more education than women in the past, this gender imbalance in education has turned around in large parts of the world. In many countries, women now excel men in terms of participation and success in higher education. This implies that, for the first time in history, there are more highly educated women than men reaching the reproductive ages and looking for a partner. We develop an agent-based computational model that explicates the mechanisms that may have linked the reversal of gender inequality in education with observed changes in educational assortative mating. Our model builds on the notion that individuals search for spouses in a marriage market and evaluate potential candidates based on preferences. Based on insights from earlier research, we assume that men and women prefer partners with similar educational attainment and high earnings prospects, that women tend to prefer men who are somewhat older than themselves, and that men prefer women who are in their mid-twenties. We also incorporate the insight that the educational system structures meeting opportunities on the marriage market. We assess the explanatory power of our model with systematic computational experiments, in which we simulate marriage market dynamics in 12 European countries among individuals born between 1921 and 2012. In these experiments, we make use of realistic agent populations in terms of educational attainment and earnings prospects and validate model outcomes with data from the European Social Survey. We demonstrate that the observed changes in educational assortative mating can be explained without any change in male or female preferences. We argue that our model provides a useful computational laboratory to explore and quantify the implications of scenarios for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)