The Impact of Marriage Squeeze on Age at First Marriage in China

Baihui Ouyang, Renmin University of China
Wei Chen, Center for Population and Development Studies, Renmin University of China
Jinjv Liu, Beijing City University

The study examines the impact of China's gender imbalance, resulting from the one-child policy, on marriage postponement, particularly as skewed sex ratios from the 1990s cohorts began entering marriage in the 2010s. This demographic trend coincides with a noticeable delay in the age of first marriage. While previous research attributes this delay to economic development or higher education expansion, we hypothesize that marriage squeeze resulting from gender imbalance significantly influences marriage postponement. Using China’s data from population census and sampling survey, we first revealed patterns of marriage squeeze measured by matching sex ratio by province. Then through multilevel survival analysis, provincial-level marriage squeeze showed significant negative effects on the individual risk of first marriage for both genders, though the influencing mechanism and degree differed. Furthermore, marriage squeeze provides the greatest contribution among all the factors and accounts for over two-thirds of the explained variation in marriage delay, surpassing the impact of education and HDI. This suggests that gender imbalance plays a crucial role in the observed trends in marriage postponement in China.

Keywords: Gender Dynamics, Families, Unions and Households, Multi-level modeling

See extended abstract.