A new study from scholars affiliated with Yale University has examined how people’s marriage choices can promote gender equality within households, while simultaneously increasing income inequality between households. The study was conducted by Ilse Lindenlaub, associate professor of economics at Yale, and two former Yale Ph.D. students: Paula Calvo, assistant professor of economics at Arizona State University, and Ana Reynoso, assistant professor of economics at the University of Michigan.
According to the authors, people tend to marry similarly-educated partners. They predicted that couples with similar educational backgrounds would be more likely to work a similar number of hours and share household duties more equally than couples with different levels of education, where the more-educated partner typically spends more time at work and the less-educated partner spends more time on household responsibilities. This could translate to more “progressive” marital roles in similarly-educated households and more “traditional” marital roles in other households.
However, as highly educated people increasingly marry other highly educated people and less-educated people increasingly marry other less-educated people, the authors theorize that inequality between households would increase as highly educated families are more likely to benefit from two high-earning careers.
The authors confirmed these theories by analyzing over two decades of data from the German national household survey. Between 1990 and 2016, the authors found German spouses’ household responsibilities became increasingly more complimentary. While gender gaps within households were reduced, income inequality between households increased.