Women's Education and Family Behavior: Trends in Marriage, Divorce and Fertility
By A. Isen, Betsey Stevenson. Social Science Research Network, 2010
274 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper examines how marital and fertility patterns have changed along racial and educational lines for men and women. Historically, women with more education have been the least likely to marry and have children, but this marriage gap has eroded as the returns to marriage have changed. Marriage and remarriage rates have risen for women with a college degree relative to women with fewer years of education. However, the patterns of, and reasons for, marriage have changed. College educated women marry later, have fewer children, are less likely to view marriage as "financial security", are happier in their marriages and with their family life, and are not only the least likely to divorce, but have had the biggest decrease in divorce since the 1970s compared to women without a college degree. In contrast, there have been fewer changes in marital patterns by education for men.
Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f5f1f0ee31bc63abc2445849ec4280330708f3ed
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Citations in the corpus
- Personality and marital surplus (2012, background): “The Big 5 personality traits are defined as follows by Hogan and Hogan (2007): Openness vs. closedness to experience: The degree to which a person needs intellec- tual stimulation, change and variety.”
- Do Highly Educated Women Choose Smaller Families (2015, unknown): “Finally, Preston and Sten Hartnett (2008) and Isen and Stevenson (2010) found similar patterns for cohorts born through the late 1950s.1 Using data from the American Community Survey, we present below evidence that the cross-sectional relationship between fertility and women’s education in the U.S.…”