The End of Hypergamy: Global Trends and Implications

The gender gap in education that has long favored men has reversed for young adults in most upper-and middle-income countries. This reversal has major implications for the composition of marriage markets, assortative mating, gender equality, andmarital outcomes such as divorce and childbearing. We focus on the implications for assortative mating and, in particular, for educational hypergamy: the pattern in which husbands have more education than their wives. We present findings from an almost comprehensive world-level analysis using census and survey microdata from 420 samples and 120 countries for the period 1960-2011. The reversal of the gender gap in education is strongly associated with the end of hypergamy and increases in hypogamy (wives having more education that their husbands). We provide near universal evidence of this trend, examine whether women are more likely to be the breadwinners when they marry men with lower education than themselves, discuss recent research regarding divorce risks among hypogamous couples, and examine attitudes about women earning more than their husbands.