The New Marriage of Unequals

Once upon a time, it was fairly common for highly educated men in the United States to marry less-educated women. But beginning in the mid-20th century, as more women started to attend college, marriages seemed to move in a more egalitarian direction, at least in one respect: A greater number of men and women started partnering up with their educational equals. That trend, however, appears to have stalled and even reversed in recent years. Gaps in educational experience among heterosexual couples are growing again. And this time? It’s women who are “marrying down.”

Researchers debate whether marriage between educational equals—homogamy—is on the decline. But one thing is clear: The phenomenon of women marrying men with less education than themselves, what academics call “hypogamy,” is on the rise. In fact, women are now more likely to marry a less-educated man than men are to marry a less-educated woman.

Christine Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, shared data with me on trends in the educational profile of heterosexual married couples from 1940 to 2020. According to her calculations, in 2020, American husbands and wives shared the same broad level of education in 44.5 percent of heterosexual marriages, down from more than 47 percent in the early 2000s. Of the educationally mixed marriages, the majority—62 percent—were hypogamous, up from 39 percent in 1980. Crunching the numbers slightly differently, Benjamin Goldman, an economics professor at Cornell University, found that among Americans born in 1930, 2.3 percent ended up in a marriage where the woman had a four-year degree and the man did not. Among the cohort of those born in 1980, that figure was 9.6 percent. (This trend is hardly unique to the United States; hypogamy is becoming more common all over the globe.)

It’s a fragile time for gender relations in the United States. Young women and men appear to be diverging politically. Fewer people are dating, marrying, or having kids. Some commentators argue that there aren’t enough suitable bachelors to meet the standards of accomplished modern women. Meanwhile, a growing “manosphere” claims that women’s advancement is to blame for all manner of struggles experienced by lonely, unmoored men. Yet for all the worry that a chasm is opening between men and women, the rise in the number of hypogamous couples suggests that some men and women are doing what men and women have always done: coupling up regardless of differences and figuring out a way to get along. “It’s clear,” Goldman told me, “that understanding the dynamics of these couples is key to understanding the future of marriage.”

The rise of the better-educated wife raises all sorts of questions we don’t have complete answers to: What is drawing people to these relationships? Have women’s strides in the labor market given them more latitude to marry whomever they love, or are they just settling? How are these couples dividing paid and unpaid work? Are they happy, or is their unconventional setup a strain? We don’t even know if the couples in these unions are particularly progressive, Nadia Steiber, a sociology professor at the University of Vienna who is leading a multiyear project studying hypogamy, told me. Some people might imagine that women married to less-educated men are über-feminists happy to shirk traditional gender roles. And yet, men with less education tend to hold more traditional views on gender—which could suggest that the highly educated women marrying them also hold, or are at least open to, more traditional views.

For all that remains unknown about the dynamics of hypogamous relationships, a growing body of research suggests that women are indeed marrying less-educated men simply because that’s who is available—not necessarily because of changing preferences. In 2021, about 1.6 million more women than men were enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States, Clara Chambers, a research associate at Yale University, told me. But according to a recent paper she co-authored with Goldman and Joseph Winkelmann of Harvard University, marriage rates among college-educated women have been broadly stable. The explanation for that is fairly straightforward: Without enough college-educated men to go around, college-educated women must be marrying men without a degree. Evidence that the rise of hypogamy is largely a response to these demographic constraints—rather than to, say, women’s economic empowerment, the increase in online dating, or shifts in preferences—has been found in many countries.

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Even if shifting norms and preferences aren’t driving the rise of hypogamy, they do seem to be evolving in conjunction with it. The World Values Survey, which explores how values and beliefs vary by country and shift over time, routinely asks people whether they agree that “if a woman earns more money than her husband, it’s almost certain to cause problems.” Schwartz and her research colleagues have found that in countries where women have more education and hypogamy is more prevalent, people are less likely to agree with that statement. And the fact that women and men are coupling up despite their educational gaps indicates that preferences are perhaps more flexible than some people assume. Various studies suggest that “preferences are not this fixed thing,” Schwartz said. People respond “pretty quickly to the availability of partners.”

It’s important not to overstate the change under way here: Educational achievement does not map neatly onto earnings. Some research has found that women in hypogamous marriages, in the United States and abroad, are a bit more likely than other women to earn as much as or more than their husbands, Schwartz told me, but most don’t. Steiber’s research in Austria found that women with more education than their husband took a smaller hit to their earnings after having a child than other Austrian mothers did, but not by much—and that their families still tended to fall into the male-breadwinner pattern after kids entered the picture. That is, women’s educational advantage may draw husbands and wives closer to economic equality—but men still usually have the economic advantage.

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Recent research can help shed light on why this is. When Goldman, Chambers, and Winkelmann looked at how the earnings of non-college-educated men have fared over the past several decades, they found that men married to college-educated women have done comparatively well for themselves; their earnings have gone up a bit over time, even after accounting for inflation. But the earnings of non-college-educated men who aren’t “marrying up” have dwindled considerably. In other words, college-educated women are partnering up with the highest-earning men without degrees, Goldman said. “The remainder of non-college men are really struggling.”

The persistence of men’s tendency to outearn their wives was evident in conversations I had with people in hypogamous relationships from around the country. In some cases, I spoke with both partners, and in others I spoke only with the wife. The extent of the couples’ educational gap varied—but the man was the breadwinner in most of these relationships. For instance, Mitchell Self, who lives in central California, has been with his wife, Mary, since high school. He did farm labor for a while after graduation, then transitioned into welding and founded his own company. Mary attended a nearby college and graduated with a degree in geospatial studies. She’s now caring for their two young children full-time, and while she’s glad to have a degree, she doesn’t think she’ll ever be the breadwinner in their marriage. “He will always be able to make a lot more money than I could ever make,” she said.

Some couples I spoke with told me that the husband’s income was what had allowed the wife to pursue her education in the first place. When Allison Hiltz met her now-former husband, she was working in retail. Neither of them had a four-year degree. She finished her bachelor’s, and then the two moved to Colorado, where she earned a master’s degree in public policy and, later, a seat on the Aurora city council—all of which she was able to do, she said, only because her husband made enough as a diesel mechanic in the trash industry to keep them financially afloat.

The few breadwinning wives I interviewed had high levels of education. Sonia Ben Hedia Twomey was an undergraduate when she first met her husband, John Twomey, who has a bachelor’s degree in business and works in the auto industry in Austin. Sonia eventually earned a Ph.D. and is now a computational linguist for a major tech company. John’s job makes decent money, he told me, “but it doesn’t make her money.”

For the most part, the wives and husbands I interviewed didn’t think of their educational gap as a problem. Another Mary, who asked to be identified only by her first name given the sensitive nature of the topic, recently earned a master’s degree and is married to a man who has yet to complete his undergraduate work. “He’s very educated,” she told me. “He just doesn’t have a bachelor’s.” She would like for him to finish his degree, mainly for the professional opportunities, she said. But she and other women I spoke with told me that they didn’t believe that formal education automatically translated to smarts or intellectual curiosity—and that they felt on pretty equal footing with their husbands.

In a few cases, women floated the possibility that they’d avoided tension in their marriage because their husbands earned more than they did. Perhaps, they suggested—alluding to entrenched gender norms—earning less than one’s wife would feel like a greater threat to a man’s masculinity than having less education?

For what it’s worth, the Twomeys told me that Sonia’s breadwinning didn’t bother either of them—although other people are sometimes weird about it. After Sonia gave birth to their first child, it was John who left his job to care for their baby boy. The decision just made sense: Day-care prices where the couple live are high, John was burned out at work, and he relished the opportunity to bond with his son. But when the couple mentioned their arrangement to friends, family, and co-workers, many people reacted with surprise or confusion. John’s parents seemed almost concerned. “It blew their minds,” he told me.

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Stay-at-home-dad life could also feel isolating when John ventured into public, he told me. On weekday mornings, when he would head to a park or museum with his son, he was invariably the only man around. “I was like, I’m sticking out here,” John told me. “People probably think I stole a child.”

So far, the social weirdness of their arrangement hasn’t been enough to rock the Twomeys’ marriage. But Hiltz, the Colorado woman who served on her city council, said that it was. People who work in local politics, which is not terribly lucrative, are generally well aware that high-earning spouses may be subsidizing their colleagues’ political careers, Hiltz told me. But where she lives, the assumption is usually that the spouse is a doctor or a lawyer. When people would inquire about her husband’s work, and “he would say, Oh, I work in trash, you could see people’s minds spin,” Hiltz told me. “It was at times uncomfortable.” In that sort of indirect way, Hiltz does think their education gap contributed to the demise of their marriage: The doors that her education unlocked for her meant she spent time in environments that could end up being socially awkward for both of them. When I spoke with Jack Hiltz, Allison’s ex, he agreed that ultimately, it felt as if they were inhabiting different worlds.

These sorts of societal influences can be tough on a marriage. Steiber pointed me to a recently published study of heterosexual partners in Europe, which suggested that the relationship between the educational matchup of a couple and their well-being depends, to an extent, on the prevailing norms in their given country. But norms aren’t immutable. It used to be that hypogamous marriages were more likely than others to end in divorce. Yet recent analyses of marriages in Europe and the United States suggest that this is no longer the case.

These trends don’t prove that the culture is shifting. But they might offer a reason to be cautiously optimistic about society’s ability to adjust to new realities. After all, cultures are made up of people. And “people are adapting,” Schwartz told me. Perhaps, with time, more of society, too, will learn to adapt to the shifting status of women and men.