Gender-Egalitarian Attitudes and Assortative Mating by Age and Education

In the last decades, conventional patterns of assortative mating have been challenged by changes in the gender-gap in education. In many countries, educationally hypogamous unions (i.e. the woman is more educated than the man) now outnumber hypergamous unions (i.e. the man is more educated than the woman). The extent to which such structural changes have also been accompanied by gender egalitarian attitudes has not yet been investigated. This paper fills the gap by focusing on both age and educational assortative mating, using data from wave 1 and 2 of the Generations and Gender Surveys for 6 European countries. I investigate the role of gender-role attitudes of single men and women, measured in the first wave, on their age and educational assortative mating outcomes observed in the second wave. To this aim, I applied multinomial logistic regressions, and used as reference outcome category remaining single in the second wave. Compared to non-egalitarian men, I found that men holding gender-egalitarian views are more likely to form hypogamous unions instead of remaining single, in terms of both age and educational assortative mating. Egalitarian women are more likely than non-egalitarian women to form age-hypogamous unions instead of remaining single, but they are less likely to form educationally hypogamous unions. I discuss the implications of these results in relation to the convergence of mating preferences between men and women.