Esteve Albert, Schwartz Christine R, Van Bavel Jan, Permanyer Iñaki, Klesment Martin, Garcia Joan
Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics (Barcelona).
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Popul Dev Rev. 2016 Dec;42(4):615-625. doi: 10.1111/padr.12012. Epub 2016 Nov 21.
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.
长期以来有利于男性的教育领域性别差距在几乎所有高收入和中等收入国家的年轻人中出现了逆转。2010年，在超过139个国家中，25至29岁拥有大学学历的女性比例高于男性，这些国家的人口总计占世界人口的86%。根据最近的人口预测，到2050年，除了少数几个非洲和西亚国家外，世界上几乎每个国家的女性受教育程度都将高于男性（KC等人，2010年）。教育领域性别差距的逆转对婚姻市场的构成、选型婚配、性别平等以及离婚和生育等婚姻结果都有重大影响（范·巴韦尔，2012年）。在这项研究中，我们关注其对选型婚配趋势的影响，特别是对教育上的男高女低现象的影响：即丈夫的教育程度高于妻子的模式。就分析中所涵盖的国家数量和年份而言，这是对先前研究（埃斯特韦等人，2012年）的重大更新。我们利用来自420个样本和120个国家、涵盖1960年至2011年的人口普查和调查微观数据进行了一项几乎全面的世界层面分析，并得出以下结论：教育领域性别差距的逆转与男高女低现象的终结以及女高男低现象（妻子的教育程度高于丈夫）的增加密切相关。我们不仅为这一趋势提供了几乎普遍的证据，还将分析范围扩大，以考虑男高女低现象终结对家庭动态、结果和性别平等的影响。我们利用欧洲微观数据来研究当女性与教育程度低于自己的男性结婚时，她们是否更有可能成为家庭经济支柱，并讨论最近关于女高男低夫妻离婚风险的研究。我们通过考察人们对女性收入高于丈夫的态度以及女性外出工作对孩子的影响来结束我们的分析。
