Racial/Ethnic Variation in the Relationship Between Educational Assortative Mating and Wives’ Income Trajectories

Abstract

Prior work has examined the relationship between educational assortative mating and wives’ labor market participation but has not assessed how this relationship varies by race/ethnicity. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we estimate group-based developmental trajectories to investigate whether the asso ci a tion between edu ca tional assortative mat ing and wives’ income tra jec to ries varies by race/ethnicity. The presence, prevalence, and shapes of prototypical long-term income trajectories vary markedly across racial/ethnic groups. Whites are more likely than Blacks and Hispanics to follow income trajectories consistent with a traditional gender division of labor. The association between educational assortative mating is also stronger for Whites than for Blacks and Hispanics. White wives in educationally hypogamous unions make the greatest contribution to the couple’s total income, fol-lowed by those in homogamous and hypergamous unions. Black and Hispanic wives in hypogamous unions are less likely than their peers in other unions to be secondary earn­ers. These find­ings under­score the need for stud­ies of the con­se­quences of edu-ca tional assortative mating to pay closer attention to heterogeneity across and within racial/ethnic groups.