The advantage of daughters in hypogamous families: parental heterogamy and educational outcomes among children of highly educated parents

Abstract

ABSTRACT Increasing female educational attainment across OECD countries is making hypogamy a widespread phenomenon. This trend provides an opportunity to re-examine the effects of educational assortative mating on children's educational outcomes. This research explores the effects of hypergamy, homogamy, and hypogamy on gender differences in children's expectation of university graduation and actual college graduation. For the first purpose, logistic regression with country fixed-effects is applied to individual-level data from PISA 2015; a similar analysis is carried out for the second purpose with data from the European Social Survey. Three characteristics make us expect higher female advantage among children of hypogamous couples: higher probability of mothers being the main family breadwinner; higher probability of gender value conflict, eventually leading to family breakup and the father's absence; and the possibility that the father's occupation discourages sons from pursuing higher education. A systematic female advantage is indeed found among children of hypogamous couples in terms of expectation of college graduation and actual college graduation. Among the possible mechanisms behind this female advantage, only the father's and the mother's occupation could be explored with the data at hand, but none of them explain this advantage.