This is a large multinational study of European countries on the specific question of hypergamy and assortative mating by education level. Assortative mating is the observation in psychology and behavior that men and women tend to pick similar partners (looks, class, education, etc).

The authors find that hypergamy has decreased in almost all Western countries and that homogamy/hypogamy are now the dominant mating pattern.

This is a confirmation of a large number of previous studies.

Abstract:

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.

Our results verify the findings from previous years, using a newer dataset and detailed cohort perspective, and confirm the decline of hypergamy as women gain advantage in education, with only four countries out of 27 showing some remnants of a male educational lead.

Previous Results:

Esteve, García-Román, and Permanyer examine census data from 56 countries, 11 of them European, focusing on the association between female educational advantage and the number of hypergamous relationships (2012). For all the countries they find strong evidence that the two are associated: that is, as the average level of women’s education grows hypergamy begins to decline, and traditional marriages are outnumbered by educationally hypogamous couples. This is supported by Esteve et al., with an extended roster of countries (2016). Results of this study suggest not only that women increasingly participate in tertiary education and partner hypogamously, but also that Europe is spearheading this change in assortative mating patterns. Esteve et al. also find signs of the consequences of this structural change: in the 27 examined European countries, women become main breadwinners more frequently, and egalitarian attitudes are more prominent. Finally, De Hauw, Grow, and Van Bavel employ multilevel analysis to unravel the link between the emerging educational gender gap and changes in educational assortative mating in Europe (2017). Their descriptive results show that in older cohorts, homogamy is most common, followed by hypergamy, and while homogamy retains its dominance, hypogamy has become widespread in most of the 28 nations by the youngest examined cohort (1970‒1979).

This overall dominance of homogamy and the emergence of educational hypogamy as the second most prominent relationship type in Europe is supported by several country-specific studies (Correia 2003; Esteve and Cortina 2006; Katrňák 2008; Dribe and Nystedt 2013; Krzyzanowska and Mascie-Taylor 2014; Maenpaa 2015). While our analysis is mainly concerned with European countries, it should be noted that the European trends are in line with findings from other parts of the world, as results also point at the decline of hypergamy in the United States (Qian 2016), in Asia (Borkotoky and Gupta 2016; Fukuda, Yoda, and Mogi 2019), in Latin America (Ganguli, Hausmann, and Viarengo 2014), and in sub-Saharan Africa (Pesando 2019).

Current Results:

Looking at the figure and the table, it is clear that all countries have passed the dotted line indicating a 0% difference. Considering the 27 nations together (and adjusting for population size), the difference between genders in Europe has changed from ‒3.28% to 8.93% between the oldest and the youngest cohort, indicating that the slight male advantage has become a female advantage.

All in all, we can conclude that Esteve, García-Román, and Permanyer (2012) and De Hauw, Grow, and Van Bavel (2017) were right in their assessment that, generally, in Europe the growing percentage of women with upper-level education surpasses that of men, on some occasions by a considerable amount. In agreement with De Hauw, Grow, and Van Bavel (2017), Switzerland, Germany, and Austria show no substantial female advantage, which further highlights these countries as late adopters of the overall trend in Europe.

Education:

Figure 1 - http://imgur.com/a/8Jidyc4

Figure 2 - http://imgur.com/a/SXE54KK

What does this mean for men and women in the relationship market? Mainly, as women overtake men education-wise, the relationship market restructures in a way that makes hypogamy more likely, paving the way for the decline of hypergamy. To examine the weakening of hypergamy across Europe, first, Figure 3 and Table A-5 present the trends of the prevalence of hypergamy (H-index). As the H-index shows the log of the number of hypergamous couples divided by the number of hypogamous couples, a value lower than zero means that in non-homogamous unions there is a greater number of couples where women have an educational advantage.

Once again, a similar trend can be seen for all 27 examined countries, indicating a general decline in hypergamy. According to the pooled sample the emergence of hypogamy is notable, as the value of the H-index has decreased from 0.41 to ‒0.48 in Europe. The detailed country-specific tendencies show that in 23 nations out of 27, hypogamy took over by the youngest cohort. This was especially the case in Portugal (‒1.21), Lithuania (‒1.28), and Poland (‒1.45), where hypogamy overcame traditional unions by the largest degree, as De Hauw, Grow, and Van Bavel (2017) also note it in their earlier results. Meanwhile, Austria (0.17), Switzerland (0.26), and Germany (0.37), with the addition of Slovakia (0.29), were again shown to lag behind the common trend, as in these countries hypergamy was still dominant, even in the youngest cohort. To summarize, the presented results confirm previous findings in the literature.

In Figure 4 the negative linear relationship between female educational advantage and the prevalence of hypergamy is clearly visible, as higher values of the F-index are associated with lower values of the H-index. The correlation measure also confirms this (r = ‒0.88, p < 0.0001), even with the 95% confidence intervals considered. This suggests that the two indices are indeed negatively connected, as Esteve, García-Román, and Permanyer (2012) and Esteve et al. (2016) proposed. This finding also corroborates the results of De Hauw, Grow, and Van Bavel’s (2017) multilevel regression modelling, as they reveal that women’s likelihood of partnering upwards declined as the gender gap in education reversed in favour of women. The inclusion of the differences in tertiary education between the gender acted in the expected way, as the data indicates that the negative linear trend is accompanied by an increasing gap in tertiary education in favour of women, signified by the progressive change in the colours of the figure’s data points.

Hypergamy by country and cohort:

Figure 3 - http://imgur.com/a/qH26Px8

Figure 4 - http://imgur.com/a/yOZrLp3

The decline of hypergamy in Europe holds true for all ages:

Lastly, to look at the current state of the growing female educational advantage and the decline of hypergamy in Europe, we focused on the youngest cohort (those born in or after 1980) of all the countries in Figure 5, with the values for the oldest available cohort presented as a reference. As visible during the examination of the merged figure, the correlation between the F-index and H-index still holds for both the oldest (r = ‒0.80, p < 0.0001) and the youngest (r = ‒0.67, p < 0.0001) cohort.

Summary Statement:

Considering the current work and previous studies, it can be concluded that hypergamy is becoming increasingly infrequent in Europe. On the contrary, educational hypogamy is rapidly advancing to second position, behind homogamy, which hints at what the future holds for educational assortative mating patterns in Europe: homogamy, followed by hypogamy, with a relatively low number of traditional hypergamous unions.

https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/7/default.htm