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Does a Woman’s Biological Clock Have a Price?
Research by Wharton's Corinne Low examines the economic trade-offs women face in balancing career and family timing, and the need for more gender-equitable policies.…Read More
knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu
Human vs. Reproductive Capital
"While Low’s first study finds a $7,000 price tag on each year marriage is delayed, her second study, “The Human Capital – ‘Reproductive Capital’ Tradeoff in Marriage Market Matching,” forthcoming at the Journal of Political Economy, models the real tradeoffs this consideration creates in women’s school and career investments.
People who are higher income or higher education typically marry partners who are also higher income or higher education. This is a phenomenon economists refer to as “assortative matching.” Low documents a key deviation from this pattern: Throughout the 20th century, graduate-educated women have married poorer spouses than college-educated women, despite being higher earning themselves. Every other education level yields richer spouses.
Why? Education may increase “human capital,” but because it takes time, it decreases “reproductive capital,” especially for educational investments that take longer and are later in life.
Low shows that when you acknowledge this duality in women’s school investments, you can predict that education will be viewed as a positive thing in the marriage market, up to a point, but will start to detract from women’s marriage market “value” when it interferes with fertile years.
Low said her research illuminates how women pay for investing in their careers and education with a “tax on the marriage market.” This makes entering careers requiring lengthy investments, which also tend to be the highest paying, less appealing for women, and may help explain the persistent gap in representation for women at the top of the corporate ladder.
It’s not all bad news, though. Recently, graduate-educated women have started marrying richer men than college-educated women, and also marrying at higher rates and divorcing less.
Low’s explanation: the shrinking American family. Because everyone is having fewer children, graduate women aren’t facing quite the same disadvantage. The preference for smaller families seems to be a bit of an equalizer for women across the board.
“People have documented this phenomenon of a reversal of fortune for educated women on the marriage market — that they used to marry less, get divorced more, have fewer children. And now, things are improving. But I show this has not been driven by college-educated women at all, but rather graduate-educated women, and that’s because of reproductive capital,” Low said. “A graduate degree and the subsequent career investment really do cut into those reproductive years when you want a large family.”
Low’s work further suggests that this marriage market improvement could be leading to a greater willingness for women to pursue educational investments, with women’s graduate school enrollments now outpacing men’s."