No End to Hypergamy when Considering the Full Married Population

Daniela R. Urbina, Margaret Frye and Sara Lopus

Population and Development Review, 2024, vol. 50, issue 3, 909-922

Abstract: The worldwide expansion of female educational opportunities in recent decades has prompted demographers to assess the frequency with which women marry up (hypergamy) or down (hypogamy) with regard to education. A series of articles documented dramatic and nearly universal declines in hypergamy over time and across female educational advantage. However, this previous work investigated hypergamy only in the context of unequal educational pairings, excluding couples with equal levels of education (homogamy) from their analyses. Here, we argue that the prevalence of hypergamy should instead be assessed in relation to all marriages. We apply this approach to the case of Latin America, where women have made important gains in schooling relative to men. Using census microdata spanning 105 birth cohorts in 16 countries, we demonstrate that, rather than declining, hypergamy has increased in most countries over time and remains relatively stable across female educational advantage. Meanwhile, the prevalence of educational homogamy has declined considerably in most countries and across the axis of female educational advantage, an important trend that emerges only when homogamy is incorporated into the analysis.

Date: 2024
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