Partners’ Resources and Partner Choice: Gender Inequalities in Education, Income, and Socio-Economic Status

Pau Baizan , Universität Pompeu Fabra

This paper investigates how partners’ education, socioeconomic status, and income influence partner choice. I compare two different approaches to conceiving and measuring partners’ socioeconomic resources. The traditional approach implicitly looks at the absolute value of socioeconomic resources, while the second approach refers to them as a ‘positional good’. Data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey and conditional logit models are used. Preliminary results using an absolute approach show a pattern in which both educational homogamy and women partnering down predominates. By contrast, when a positional perspective is adopted, the highest odds of marriage formation are found for the matches that minimize the educational difference between partners’ ranking positions in their respective marriage queues, consistently with a choice mechanism in which competition for partners’ resources prevails.

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 Presented in Session 57. Flash Session Assortive Mating, Education and Social Class