Year: 2015
Type: report
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: While men have historically attained more education than women around the world, this gender imbalance in education has reversed in many countries. In these countries, the wife now typically has as much or more education as the husband, while it has always been the other way around in the past. Using the 2007 and 2011 rounds of the EU-SILC (N=95,498 for 27 countries), this paper investigates to what extent the newly emerging pattern of educational assortative mating is associated with a higher proportion of women who outearn their partners in Europe. We find that this proportion varies on the country level between 20% and almost 50% for childless women and between 3 and 25% for women with toddlers. If a woman has more education than her partner, this clearly increases the odds that she earns more than half of the couple income. This happens to such an extent that it may offset the motherhood penalty: college educated mothers of school age children with a less educated partner are as likely to be the main breadwinner as college educated women without children but with a college educated man. However, large country heterogeneity remains that cannot be explained by educational pairings.
Source: Lirias
Authors: Klesment, Martin, Van Bavel, Jan
Institution: KU Leuven
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: European Commission
OpenAlex ID: W2254997021