no partner for so many educated and egalitarian women
Finding a partner is becoming increasingly challenging for Spanish heterosexual women with higher education and feminist convictions who desire a man who is compatible with them. Sociologist Maike van Damme has calculated that the male deficit for this profile of women is 34% if they consider it important to share egalitarian values, and 25% if they only seek someone with a similar educational level.
That is, a third of heterosexual college women would remain single due to a lack of men unless they decide to pair up “downward,” with men who have a lower level of education than theirs and less egalitarian values than them.
The theoretical calculation is based on 2018 data; the current discrepancy may be even greater
“The figure is the result of a theoretical exercise that assumes an equal number of women and men in the population, that the proportion preferring a partner of the opposite sex is the same for both, and that they wish to partner assortatively (with people similar in educational level or values),” explains Van Damme, “and it is based on data from the latest Fertility Survey, which is from 2018.”
Therefore, and bearing in mind that since that date feminism has been on the rise among women and not so much among men, the sociologist and researcher from the Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED) at the UAB considers it very likely that the mismatch in the search for a partner has worsened and the current male deficit is greater than what her calculations show.
According to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), the gender education gap is widening. As of January 1, 2022, in the age group of 25 to 64 years old, 45% of women had a university degree, compared to 37% of men. However, among younger generations, who have not yet reached the age of 30, the difference is growing: six out of ten women compared to four out of ten men had higher education.
However, Van Damme believes that, more than education, the difficulty of finding a stable heterosexual partner has to do with the fact that, as feminism spreads, the role of men in household chores becomes more important and women seek (and will increasingly seek) a potential partner who values this egalitarian view.
The study by Luis Ayuso, Professor of Sociology at the University of Malaga, published a couple of years ago for the BBVA Foundation on the evolution of couples in Spain already pointed out this phenomenon: for 84% of the women surveyed, the lack of involvement of their partner at home is very relevant when deciding whether to start a relationship or not.
The mismatch in men
25% of men with low and traditional educational levels will not find a similar female partner
In his study (published in issue 35 of Perspectives Demogràfiques from CED), Van Damme creates two indexes that measure people’s gender role values in the private and public spheres based on their responses in the Fertility Survey to questions such as “a working mother can have as close a relationship with her child as a non-working mother”, “for a woman, family should take priority over a career”, “if a woman earns more money than her partner, this is not good for the relationship”, or “when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women”.
And, according to those indices, the values gap between young men and women is, on average, seven percentage points in both the public and private spheres. However, the results vary significantly depending on the educational level of the respondents: it is slightly negative for individuals with low or medium levels of education, whereas there is a male deficit of 17 percentage points in public sphere values, and 12 in private sphere values, among those with higher education.
When analyzing the combination of education and values, Van Damme concludes that, while in the case of women, it is egalitarian women with higher education who have trouble finding a similar partner, in the case of men, it is traditional men with lower education who struggle. “25% of all men with low education and traditional values will not find a female partner with the same education and gender values,” explains the sociologist.
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