Five Decades of Marital Sorting in France and the United States – The Role of Educational Expansion and the Changing Gender Imbalance in Education

Over the past half-century, higher education expansion and changing gender imbalances in education have reshaped the educational composition of the partner market. Nonetheless, the impact of these concurrent trends on educational sorting in unions and marriages remains unclear. Using data from France (1962–2011) and US (1960–2015), we examine how (a) educational expansion and (b) the changing gender-education association contributed to changing sorting outcomes in marital and non-marital different-sex unions. Counterfactual decomposition techniques revealed two main trends. First, the changing gender-education association – apart from educational upgrading – has promoted rising hypogamy (she is more educated than he) and declining hypergamy (he is more educated than she). Second, educational expansion is associated with rising proportions of homogamous, hypogamous, and hypergamous unions involving more educated individuals and declines in these union types with less educated women and men. However, the impact of these changes on overall homogamy and heterogamy trends differs across countries. For example, while the increasing supply of highly educated individuals has promoted hypogamy in France it has offset hypogamy in the United States. Our findings contribute to ongoing debates about the structural effects of educational expansion and the reversing gender imbalance in education on the formation of different-sex unions.