Are men intimidated by highly educated women? Undercover on Tinder

In this study, we examine the impact of an individual's education level on her/his mating success on the mobile dating app Tinder. To do so, we conducted a field experiment on Tinder in which we collected data on 3,600 profile evaluations. In line with previous research on mating preferences from multiple fields, our results indicate a heterogeneous effect of education level by gender: while women strongly prefer a highly educated potential partner, this hypothesis is rejected for men. In contrast with recent influential studies from the field of economics, we do not find any evidence that men would have an aversion to a highly educated potential partner. Additionally, in contrast with most previous research - again from multiple fields we do not find any evidence for preferences for educational assortative mating, i.e. preferring a partner with a similar education level

Anthropometry of love: Height and gender asymmetries in interethnic marriages

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Economics and Human Biology. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We argue that differences in height distributions, combined with a simple preference for the husband to be taller than the wife, can help explain these ethnic-specific gender asymmetries. Blacks are taller than Asians, and we argue that this significantly affects their marriage prospects with whites. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis using data from the Millennium Cohort Study. Specifically, we find that ethnic differences in propensity to intermarry with Whites shrink when we control for the proportion of suitable partners with respect to height. © 2010 Elsevier B.V

Changes in educational assortative mating in contemporary Spain

This article analyses patterns and trends in educational assortative mating of the Spanish women born between 1920 and 1969 using data from the 2001 Spanish Census. By means of loglinear models we examine the following issues: i) intensity and changes in educational assortative mating patterns; ii) crossing barriers across educational thresholds and iii) degree of symmetry between male and female patterns. Results show that education matters in the composition of unions: people tend to marry assortatively according to their education. However this pattern clearly differs across cohorts and between educational groups, being higher for the extreme categories. The most notable trends are 1) the increasing intensity of homogamy among the more educated and 2) the incipient extinction of the traditional female hypergamic pattern.2001 Census, assortative mating, educational attainment, marriage, Spain

Marriage choices and social reproduction

This article studies the relationship between partner selection and socioeconomic status (SES) attainment and mobility in five rural parishes in southern Sweden, 1815-1894. Three different aspects of partner selection are considered: age, social origin, and geographical origin. We use an individual-level database containing information on the SES origin (parental land holding and occupation), age difference, and place of birth of the married couple. The results show a powerful association between partner selection and SES attainment and mobility. Social heterogamy was particularly important, but age heterogamy and geographic exogamy was also clearly related to both SES attainment and mobility.age homogamy, geographic endogamy, intergenerational social mobility, partner selection, social homogamy, socioeconomic attainment

Immigration and Status Exchange in Australia and the United States

The claim that marriage is a venue for status exchange of achieved traits, like education, and ascribed attributes, notably race and ethnic membership, has regained traction in the social stratification literature. Most studies that consider status exchanges ignore birthplace as a social boundary for status exchanges via couple formation. This paper evaluates the status exchange hypothesis for Australia and the United States, two Anglophone nations with long immigration traditions whose admission regimes place different emphases on skills. A log-linear analysis reveals evidence of status exchange in the United States among immigrants with lower levels of education and mixed nativity couples with foreign-born husbands. Partly because Australian educational boundaries are less sharply demarcated at the postsecondary level, we find is weaker evidence for the status exchange hypothesis. Australian status exchanges across nativity boundaries usually involve marriages between immigrant spouses with a postsecondary credential below a college degree and native-born high school graduates.

Hypergamy, cross-boundary marriages, and family behavior

We study the rise in marriages between residents of HK and China following the handover of HK to China in 1997. Cross-boundary marriages accounted for almost half the marriages registered in HK in 2006. Because of large differences in male income between China and HK, marriages of HK men with Mainland women outnumbered those of HK women with mainland men sevenfold. Following the handover, HK women had lower marriage, higher divorce and higher emigration rates. These outcomes are predicted by our matching model and contradict the hypothesis that cross-boundary marriages were driven by rising education of HK women

Immigration and Status Exchange in Australia and the United States

The claim that marriage is a venue for status exchange of achieved traits, like education, and ascribed attributes, notably race and ethnic membership, has regained traction in the social stratification literature. Most studies that consider status exchanges ignore birthplace as a social boundary for status exchanges via couple formation. This paper evaluates the status exchange hypothesis for Australia and the United States, two Anglophone nations with long immigration traditions whose admission regimes place different emphases on skills. A log-linear analysis reveals evidence of status exchange in the United States among immigrants with lower levels of education and mixed nativity couples with foreign-born husbands. Partly because Australian educational boundaries are less sharply demarcated at the postsecondary level, we find is weaker evidence for the status exchange hypothesis. Australian status exchanges across nativity boundaries usually involve marriages between immigrant spouses with a postsecondary credential below a college degree and native-born high school graduates.educational assortative mating, immigration, status exchange

Marriage and the crisis of peasant society in Gujarat, India

This contribution takes marriage as the example of a crisis of production and reproduction in rural India. Through the juxtaposition of ethnography separated by six decades, we detail a shift away from land and agriculture as the primary markers of status among the Patidars of central Gujarat, western India, in favour of a hierarchical understanding of international migration. The paper discusses the disconnect between a cultural revolution in favour of migration, and the failure of many to live up to their own cultural standards. More broadly, we reflect on the forces that simultaneously strengthen and dissolve caste inequality in the context of India's uneven growth

Lady and the Trump: Status and Wealth in the Marriage Market

We examine a hitherto unexplored aspect of intergenerational transmission of economic standing, namely culturally determined status markers and their valuation in the marriage market. We take nobility to be such a status marker. We propose a two-trait extension of the optimal sorting model in Becker (1973). Using data on Swedish marriages we test the hypothesis that nobility have a greater probability of marrying up in terms of wealth. Our main finding is a sizeable and statistically significant positive effect for nobility. We use unique data on the evolution of nobility to make some predictions about the longevity of this institution.Marriage; Status; Intergenerational Transmission; Nobility