A sea change in relationships is taking place as everyone adjusts to the new reality of women being better educated and in some cases more preferred than men in the workforce. Especially unsettling to some men is their role as second-best earner in the family. As a recent Pew Research Center report documents, 22% of men with "some college" are now outearned by their wives, up from 4% in 1970.
Social scientists agree that the education mismatch these women executives experience with men is a significant player behind the increase in college-educated women choosing single motherhood.
This mismatch signals the emergence of a phenomenon studied more commonly in the animal kingdom than in the human one—the "operational sex ratio," the scientific term describing what happens when one sex outnumbers the other. In human populations, gender balances can tilt following world wars or times of migration (think California Gold Rush), resulting in a shortage of men or women of marriageable age. Currently, the most blatant outbreak of the operational sex ratio is playing out in China, where sex screening or, worse, infanticide has led to an estimated 32 million more males under the age of 20 than females.
The situation in the U.S. is the sex in short supply—in the pool of the college-educated—that makes the rules. Women are feeling the pinch from years of gender imbalances on college campuses, where today nearly 58% of all bachelor's degrees and 62% of associate's degrees are earned by women. Given that women prefer to find a well-educated, reliable earner as a husband, this creates a simple math problem. Well-educated women can't find enough equally or better-educated men to marry.
Today, more and more well-educated women have to ask themselves: Am I willing to "marry down"?
Source: The Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2009
