You ’ve heard the terms before : golden digger . Trophy wife . They most often apply to cleaning woman whose societal or economical status is " lower " than their hubby . ' You might even know of a few couples where these condition could apply .
But this act of a womanhood vie for " higher status " when marrying also has a scholarly name and a long account . It ’s called hypergamy ( hī - pûr′gə - mē ) . And while the Oxford dictionarydefines hypergamyin neutral terms — " the action of marrying or forming a sexual relationship with a person of a ranking sociological or educational background " — social scientist explicate it in a more gendered way .
" [ Hypergamy ] is when human beings conjoin women of lower status than themselves , " pronounce Christine Schwartz , professor in thedepartment of sociologyat theUniversity of Wisconsin - Madison . Or in other words , when women get hitched with men of higher position , whether it ’s related to training , income or military control .
Scholars have also look at marrying up in other ways , for good example geographically . In the insertion to the journal clause " Cross - Border Marriages : Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia , " author Nicole Constable explains global hypergamy as " the movement of St. Bride from more remote and less evolve fix to increasingly modernise and less isolated ones . "
History of Hypergamy
We might not make love just how far back the tradition of men partner with women of lower condition than themselves live on . Hypergamy can be seen as a natural response to char ’s unfitness in early history to earn a living and " marriage was the only way of life a woman determined her status in sprightliness , " Kay Hymowitzwrote for the Institute for Family Studies .
What we do know is the term hypergamy likely has root in the Hindu custom of women want to conjoin men from higher castes . It was first used in 1881 in the " Panjab Castes , " a book based on the nosecount report of the Panjab province of British India by Sir Denzil Ibbetson . It describes a situation in which a man sought to marry his daughter to a " member of a kinship group " higher-ranking to his , anthropologist T. Mohanadoss explains in the article " Hypergamy and Its Inherent Contradictions . " Mohanadoss write that hypergamy is associated with " the August 15 that man is superior to fair sex . " Interestingly , while this type of marriage raises the status of the bride - bestower — the male parent — it also admits his inferiority to his in - laws .
But if all fair sex are reach to marry up , hypergamy must finally lead to a place where the women at the top of the social ladder wo n’t have anyone to marry , and the men at the bottom wo n’t have woman to conjoin either . That ’s what scholar in the seventies found anyway , Mohanadoss writes .
But that ’s where hypogamy comes in .
Hypergamy vs. Hypogamy
It does take place that men hook up with women of a higher condition , and women " conjoin down . " There ’s a name for that too : hypogamy . Thesociology dictionarydefines it as " a man and wife between a male of low condition to a female of higher status . " There is even a Son for marriage between mass with alike characteristic and statuses . Did you reckon out that it has to be homogamy ?
What ’s changed since that 19th - century anthropological field of study in the Panjab ? Are we more homogamous today ? Or are women still focused on tie up ?
Hypergamy Today
In many countries , the practice of hypergamy has pitch since the earlier research , and part of the reason has to do with the changing part of women in educational activity and the workplace .
" We see that all over the world , this is n’t true in every pillow slip , but the general pattern is that there ’s much less hypergamy than there has been in the yesteryear , " says Schwartz , who contributed to an clause on this subject , " The End of Hypergamy : Global Trends and Implications . "
In plenty of order , it is now more common for women to be more educated than men . That ’s been the trend in the United States since around the 1990s , but it was n’t really recognized until the early 2000s . But women in the United States now havehigher average educationattainment than piece .
That means adult female sometimes have small choice but to marry men with less education than they have . In fact , according to Margarita Chudnovskaya and Ridhi Kashyap , who wrote the academic daybook clause " Is the End of Educational Hypergamy the End of Status Hypergamy ? grounds from Sweden , " in the United States and most European body politic , " the prevalence of educational hypogamy ( women ' partnering down ' ) now exceeds that of educational hypergamy ( men ' partnering down ' ) . "
Add to that the2020 findingfrom the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that women make up more than half of the non - farm project market in the U.S. , and it might seem like hypergamy is on its means out , at least in America .
But there is another factor to consider , and that is economical — agender pay gapto be more specific . " It is genuine that in the United States it ’s now more common for a woman to have more education than her husband than the other way around , but it ’s still less common for women to outearn their manly spouse , " says Schwartz .
For couples married between 2005 and 2009 , just 30 per centum of wife made more money than their husband , she says . " There is a by all odds a divergence in the U.S. at least between training and income . "
Chudnovskaya and Kashyap’sSwedish studyfound that in various type of couples , even when the cleaning woman had high pedagogy , occupational prestige and social class , the man was still a high wage earner . " One reasonable guesswork is that men ’s income advantage is due not to the persistence of hypergamy but rather to the grammatical gender pay gap , which sit down at about 14 percent in Sweden,“writes Hymowitz .
Today , educational hypogamy is more common , but hypergamy still find in the financial region .
Non-hetero Hypergamy
With all this grammatical gender - specific hyper- and hypogamy , where does that forget same - sexual practice or non - binary couples ? Schwartz says we can still speak about these type of relationship statuses .
" It ’s just when one spouse has high status than the other , " she explains . And enquiry has picture that members of same - sex couples tend be more different from each other in terms of instruction .
In her clause " cruise to Familyland : Gay Hypergamy and Rainbow Kinship , " sociologist Judith Stacey says that hypergamous kinship happen more ofttimes among " those who break intimate norms " than among heterosexual person and " gay man can cruise their way of life to creative , multicultural permutation of hypergamous kinship . "
Do Hypergamous Relationships Last?
" There is a perception that still survive that successful woman who are extremely civilize and extremely compensate wo n’t be able to find partners , " Schwartz says . But society around the human beings have alter . In response to these demographic style , increasingly relationships are forming where women have eminent status than their partners , and studies are showing that these wedlock do last .
Astudy publishedin 2018 used Belgian census and register data point for 458,499 matrimony compress between 1986 and 2001 . It found that neither hypogamy nor homogamy was associate with higher divorcement rates . It was educationally hypergamous matrimony — those in which the hubby was more highly educated than the married woman — that had the highest rates of divorce .
