Within the couple, often more educated women than men – Liberation

Of the pre-war generations, the pursuit of long studies women condemned to celibacy. Nowadays, women are more often the holder of the highest degree in marriage. This is what sociologist Milan Bouchet-Valat INED called inversion of the degree hypergamy, in an article published in early April in the journal People . His team came to this conclusion by analyzing the data from the survey “study of family history 1999″ and other studies on the latest generations. Here is what comes out.

Female graduates are less single

Since the generation born in 1950, educated women have as much likely to live in couple the least educated. Although for the “super graduates” to graduate the top, catching only arrived in the 60s For women less educated, the researchers observed the opposite trend. In 2008, thirty women cadres lived mostly couples that workers and employees, while the reverse was true in 1990. The rise in the level of education therefore condemns more women to celibacy.

Upheaval of the “marriage market”

the graduates were few before the war. In France, women 25 to 64 years are now more educated than men, according to the latest OECD study on the subject. Their chances of couples have nice to have risen 20% to 25% of women with higher education of recent generations remain single.

. The marriage market has changed but the “model gendered “torque persists. Unqualified Men are more often single, which shows that the social status of the man is more important than that of his spouse.

A calendar of history

There is no incompatibility between prewar further education and forming a couple, or, in the words of François de Singly sociologist in 1987, “a hinge fault between the timing of the formation of the school and the dot presentation schedule on the marriage market.”

Despite the evolution of female hypergamy, women still have a ways to go. The author relativizes this progress in finding the career inequalities: “The increase in the level of female education did not guarantee them equal careers than men [...], or modify deeply the division of domestic work “

Rouguyata Sall