Educational Assortative Mating and Couples’ Linked Occupational Trajectories in China

Jian Song, Renmin University
Bo Hu, Renmin University of China
Yang Zhang, Renmin University of China

Educational assortative mating profoundly influences couples’ division of labor; however, we know little about how it shapes couples’ paired occupational trajectories. We employed multi-channel sequence analysis to discern types of couples’ linked occupational trajectories based on the couple-level data from China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS), and multinomial logistic models to examine how educational assortative mating is associated with couples’ occupational trajectories. For most occupational types, husbands had more advantaged or at least similar occupational trajectories than their wives. Couples in educational hypergamy were likely to have occupational trajectory types with husbands having some advantages; couples in educational hypogamy were likely to have occupational trajectory types with wives having some advantages. The specialization and resource bargaining perspectives provide more powerful explanations than the “doing gender” perspective. Chinese couples tend to choose the occupational arrangement that maximizes the family’s economic interests rather than the one that best conforms to gender norms and expectations.

Keywords: Gender Dynamics, Human Capital, Education, and Work, Families, Unions and Households, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination

See extended abstract.