Marriage, Assortative Mating, and Family Inequality

The second demographic transition has transformed family formation around the world. Depending on where we live, more people delay or forgo marriage, cohabit instead, or remain single. As marriage, an important social institution, has become more selective of those with education and economic resources, patterns of assortative mating differ across union types. This session provides a platform to share work on the mating process broadly conceived: market availability — the structure and composition of marriage markets that shapes who can be matched — together with the preferences that determine who partners with whom; selection into marriage, cohabitation, and other unions; and the resulting patterns of sorting across societies. Together, these processes sort people not only into partnerships but into different union types, where like increasingly pairs with like, deepening inequality between haves and have-nots.