![]() ![]() Given past research, this is plausible, but there are also strong reasons to expect that having more education than one’s husband may matter less for marital outcomes today than in the past. ![]() Does this mean that the reversal of the gender gap in education has created a situation in which men and women are increasingly forming marriages that are likely to end in divorce? Furthermore, the two studies that have examined trends in the relative likelihood of divorce for couples in which wives have more education than their husbands found no evidence that this association has weakened ( Heaton 2002 Teachman 2002). Although the reference groups, control variables, and statistical significance of the results vary from study to study, previous research has typically shown that marriages in which wives have more education than their husbands are 27 to 38% more likely to dissolve ( Bumpass, Castro Martin, and Sweet 1991 Goldstein and Harknett 2006 Heckert, Nowak, and Snyder 1998 Kalmijn 2003 Phillips and Sweeney 2006 Teachman 2002 Tzeng 1992). Previous research has consistently shown that couples in which wives have the educational advantage are more likely to divorce. In the United States, wives’ education exceeded husbands’ by the early 1990s, shortly after the reversal occurred in the population ( Schwartz and Mare 2005). On average, wives have more education than their husbands in almost all countries in which the gender gap in education has reversed ( Esteve, García-Román, and Permanyer 2012). One potential consequence of the reversal of the gender gap in education is the growing number of marriages in which wives have more education than their husbands. But the reversal of the gender gap in education also has potentially far-reaching consequences for marriage markets, family formation, and relationship outcomes. Much of the literature on the reversal has focused on its causes, pointing to the growing disadvantage of sons with less educated or absent fathers, girls’ better academic performance in high school, and the growing returns to education for women ( Buchmann and DiPrete 2006 Charles and Luoh 2003 DiPrete and Buchmann 2006 Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko 2006). Both men and women complete more schooling than in the past, but beginning in the mid-1980s women’s college completion rates began to surpass men’s in the United States ( Buchmann and DiPrete 2006). The decline and eventual reversal of the gender gap in education represents a dramatic reversal of a long-standing social gradient in the United States and other countries ( OECD 2010). ![]() These results are consistent with a shift away from rigid gender specialization toward more flexible, egalitarian partnerships and provide an important counterpoint to claims that progress toward gender equality in heterosexual relationships has stalled. ![]() Another key finding is that the relative stability of marriages between educational equals has increased. In particular, we confirm that marriages in which wives have the educational advantage were once more likely to dissolve, but we show that this association has disappeared in more recent marriage cohorts. Our results show a large shift in the association between spouses’ relative education and marital dissolution. Using data on marriages formed between 19 in the United States, we evaluate whether this association has persisted as the prevalence of this relationship type has increased. Previous studies have found this type of union to be at higher risk of dissolution. One possible consequence of this is the growing number of marriages in which wives have more education than their husbands. The reversal of the gender gap in education has potentially far-reaching consequences for marriage markets, family formation, and relationship outcomes. ![]()
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