Look who’s on top of the marriage market
Margaret Wente
Well-educated, high-income women have always had trouble finding mates. That’s because men were always expected to be of higher status than their wives, or at least equal in status to them. (…)
Times have changed. Today, the hottest properties on the marriage market are women with newly minted Harvard law degrees and high earning prospects. The more educated your daughter is, the more likely she is to have eligible suitors begging for her hand. “In a reversal of historical trends, elite women have become the most likely to marry,” June Carbone and Naomi Cahn conclude in their new book Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family. (…)
In fact, in more than 60 per cent of heterosexual U.S. marriages between 2005 and 2009, the wife has had more education than her husband, according to a new study co-authored by Ms. Schwartz and data analyst Hongyun Han. And that’s okay.
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So that’s the good news. The bad news is that marriage markets are diverging as never before. At the other end of the ladder, low-skilled, poorly educated men are increasingly shut out of job and marriage markets. Women lower down the ladder face a dwindling supply of eligible mates. So they marry less and divorce more. “Young women who used to get pregnant and marry the father still get pregnant,” say Ms. Carbone and Ms. Cahn. “It’s just that they no longer marry the father.”