Hypogamy: The New Marriage of Unequals

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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.”

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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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