Gaining Power, Getting Weight: Educational Assortative Mating and Infants’ Birth Weights in China

Worsening infant health is a growing problem that is documented globally. In addition to medical accounts, social scientists attempt to explain disparities in infant health with structural factors. Among them, family demographers are interested in the parental impact and find that both maternal education and paternal education are crucial for infant health. Recently, they have also juxtaposed maternal and paternal education and investigated the impact of parental educational assortative mating on infant health. Evidence reveals that educational homogamy is beneficial for infants’ health by reducing the likelihood of low birth weight in the United States. China, where the reversal of the gender gap in education and the low fertility simultaneously happen, can possibly contribute to this strand of literature. However, relevant research is barely done. This proposed study, employing the Diagonal Reference Model (DRM), aims to examine the relationship between parental educational assortative mating and infants’ birth weights in the context of China. Using the pooled data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2010 to 2020, this study reveals threefold findings. First, both paternal education and maternal education are beneficial for infants’ birth weights. Second, paternal education and maternal education play similar roles in infants’ birth weights. However, regional disparities and parity differences are discovered. In urban China, maternal education gains more significance from the first parity to the second parity and plus. Whereas, maternal education loses significance across parities in rural China. Third, net of maternal and paternal education, educational homogamy and hypogamy are found to be beneficial for infants’ birth weights, compared with hypergamy. That is to say, only when women achieve more power in a marriage dynamic will infant health benefit from the marriage. This finding echoes the positive social impacts of the declining rates of hypergamy.