A working paper by economists Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman and Joseph Winkelmann finds that gender gaps in education are contributing to declining marriage rates among less-educated women in the United States. The paper, titled "Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates," examines how shifts in college attainment have reshaped the marriage market.
Women are now more likely to graduate from college than men in the United States. In recent years, female students have made up almost 60 percent of undergraduate students, outnumbering men by more than two million according to a government estimate. Women with four-year degrees now substantially outnumber men with four-year degrees on college campuses.
The study suggests that college-educated women have largely maintained high marriage rates by increasingly marrying men without a college education, and that these women tend to partner on average with higher-earning men in that demographic group. Women without a college education are left with a shrinking pool of economically stable husbands, according to the paper, which finds that this group has experienced a plummeting marriage rate, with many raising their children by themselves.
Many men who did not get a college education have been much more likely to end up on drugs, in prison, and unemployed. The United States increasingly has what might be called "missing economically stable men," a phenomenon that may help explain the rise of single-mother households and could be one driver of worsening inequality.
Economists refer to the tendency of people to marry individuals with similar socioeconomic and educational backgrounds as "assortative mating," which is one important driver of growing inequality. Educated people with high earning potential tend to marry other educated people with high earning potential. "Folks tend to marry people who look like them," said Clara Chambers, a research fellow at Yale University who will begin a PhD in economics at Harvard this fall.
Comparable demographic imbalances have been documented elsewhere. A study of post-World War I France found that the men who remained in France tended to marry up, pairing with women from higher social classes that had been inaccessible before the war. For decades, men in China have substantially outnumbered women, an imbalance scholars have referred to as "missing women." China's government launched the One Child Policy in 1979, which limited couples to having one child, and many couples sought to have a boy rather than a girl because of traditional son preference and concerns about economic prospects. China has since ended the policy, and research has suggested that women in modern China have become more likely to marry up.