The reversal of the gender gap in education and relative divorce risks: A matter of alternatives in partner choice?
Authored by Andre Grow, Bavel Jan Van, Christine Schnor
Date Published: 2017
DOI: 10.1080/00324728.2017.1371477
Sponsors:
European Union
Platforms:
No platforms listed
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Mathematical description
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
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.
Tags
Education
preferences
assortative mating
Mate Choice
United-states
Women
Marriage markets
Gender
Life-course
Trends
Divorce
Repartnering
Marriage market
Sex ratio
Agent-based computational modelling
Skewed sex-ratios
Marital dissolution
Spousal
alternatives