The reversal of the gender imbalance in higher education: implications for patterns of assortative mating in Europe

This project will be pioneering the study of demographic consequences of a major recent development in Europe: while men have always received more education than women in the past, this gender imbalance in education has now turned around. Today, women 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. I expect that this will have profound consequences for the demography of reproduction in Europe because mating practices have always implied that men are the majority in higher education. Women tend to prefer partners who are at least as highly educated as themselves, while men tend to choose partners who are at most equally educated. This traditional pattern is no longer compatible with the new gender distribution in higher education. This project will address the implications of this new situation for age-old patterns of partnership formation. Mating patterns and reproduction are crucial for understanding the reproduction of social inequality: “like marries like” in terms of socio-economic status implies that social inequality is enhanced through partner selection because advantageous and disadvantageous economic and cultural resources of two individuals and families are pooled.