Gender-Roles, Attitudes, and Hypogamous Unions’ Formation

Alessandra Trimarchi , Institut National d’Études Démographiques (INED)

Individuals typically form unions where the man is older than the woman, and where the man is at least as educated as the woman. These unions’ patterns are conventionally considered more stable and more fertile. Recently, gender-egalitarian attitudes have been found to positively affect unions’ stability and couples’ fertility. Such attitudes may already play a role at the time of mate selection, but there is hardly research about this so far. By means of Generations and Gender Surveys for six countries and multinomial logistic regressions, I investigate the association between single men and women’s gender-roles attitudes (measured in wave 1) and union formation patterns (measured in wave 2). Results suggest that egalitarian men are more likely to form hypogamous unions, i.e. the woman more educated than the man, rather than remaining single. Egalitarian women, instead, are less likely than other women to be in hypogamous unions rather than remaining single.

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 Presented in Session 9. Marriage, Family, Households, & Unions; Gender, Race, & Ethnicity