Female Educational Advancement and Changes in Fertility Behavior:A Study Based on the Couple Matching Perspective
The rise in women's education and shifts in gender roles have profoundly influenced marriage and childbirth.This paper uses household-level data to explore cohort changes in couples'educational matching patterns and their impact on fertility.It finds a decrease in traditional gradient marriages and an increase in highly educated homogeneous marriages and female downward marriages,as well as significant differences in fertility across pairs with different educational matching patterns.Among homogeneous marriages,there was a negative gradient relationship between education and fertility,with highly educated couples having the lowest number of children and probability of having a second child.At the same time,the more educated a wife is above her husband,the lower the probability of having a second child.However,the fertility disadvantages of highly educated homogeneous marriages and women's downward marriages weakened over time.The study reveals the impact of changes in gender roles,the relative status of couples and the gender division of labor on the mechanism of fertility decision-making,which provides a reference for parsing fertility trends and policy formulation.
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