Assortative Mating across Multiple Status Dimensions

Marriage is an important mechanism through which inequalities within and between households are generated and maintained. Studies of marital sorting typically examine partners’ similarity in a single dimension- like education, race, or earnings- but multiple status characteristics can interactively shape individuals’ assortative mating behavior. This project draws on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine spousal similarity on a rich set of demographic and status characteristics. In a first set of analyses, we use unsupervised classification techniques to document the prevalence of different types of partnerships across multiple demographic and status characteristics. Our preliminary findings document a substantial degree of homophily in couples’ demographic and status characteristics in the first year of partnership, and identify distinct variations in the gendered division of paid and unpaid labor. These patterns have remained remarkably stable over the past 20 years.