Educational Assortative Mating Patterns in Highly Educated Contexts: The Role of the Field of Education

Pau Baizan , Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Clara Cortina , Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Western societies have experienced a fast and radical educational expansion that has led young birth-cohorts to massive achievement of tertiary education and has altered assortative mating patterns. In order to capture more accurately educational assortative mating for the highly educated we propose the use of more specific measures of education that reflect better the status of the spouses. We expect that there is a hierarchy in the partnership market value of the field of education and that we should find high level of homogamy for each field of education, as a result of partners’ preferences and partners’ relative availability. We use data from the Spanish Fertility Survey 2018 which provides detailed retrospective information of the educational and (corresidential) partnership histories of 14556 women, belonging to the birth-cohorts born between 1962 and 1999. We apply event history techniques to model the transition from being unpartnered to enter a partnership (married or unmarried). Our analytical strategy starts with a competing risk analysis of the women’s union formation transition, according to the different levels and fields of education of their partners. In order to determine whether the couple is homogamous, hypergmous or hipogamous, we plan to use conditional logit models. Preliminary results indicate strong levels of educational homogamy by educational level and even stronger homogamy by field of education for women with tertiary education, especially among those with the highest prospective socio-economic status (applied sciences).

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 Presented in Session 43. Homogamy and intermarriage