Long odds for love

Denise Rose has a master’s degree in counseling. Her most recent ex-husband has a high school diploma.”I’m the only one I know who married beneath me,” sighs the twice-divorced Knoxville, Tenn., resident.

But then, as she starts naming her friends and family, Mrs. Rose realizes she is far from alone. Several women she knows have higher levels of education than their husbands. Their marriages just didn’t end quite so badly.

From Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” to John Gray’s “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” the battle of the sexes has been a common theme for writers. But that struggle has become more desperate — and promises to become more so, says political science professor Andrew Hacker.

Talk of a “gender gap” long ago entered the political lexicon, but Mr. Hacker says that while women have improved their levels of educational and career attainment, these gains have not added to their prospects for romantic success.

In his latest book, “Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Men and Women,” Mr. Hacker finds evidence of diverging trends in marriage and divorce, educational aspirations and politics:

• According to the Census Bureau, among wives ages 25 to 34 who have bachelor’s degrees, 35.6 percent of their husbands have a lower level of schooling.

• Women who earn more than $100,000 a year are twice as likely to have never married and almost four times as likely to get divorced, compared to other women.

• Only 6.8 percent of divorces were filed jointly, while 60.7 percent were initiated by wives and 32.5 percent begun by husbands, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

• In 1970, 72.9 percent of female college graduates had their first child by age 30, while now only 36.6 percent of that same demographic are mothers, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

• In the 1996 presidential contest, 43 percent of male voters supported President Clinton compared with 54 percent of female voters — the largest gender gap in the history of presidential elections.

• In 2000, 57.2 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 48.9 percent of Ph.D.s and 42.7 percent of medical degrees were awarded to women, as compared with women in 1960, who received only 38.5 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 10.5 percent of Ph.D.s and 5.5 percent of medical degrees.

Although the trend toward women’s educational advantage crosses all socioeconomic levels, the trend is more pronounced among low-income groups, says Wayne Upshaw, senior scholar at the Washington-based Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.

“If you look at the problem, it is really distributional, meaning that it happens in a certain sector — the most glaring being the lower-income sector,” Mr. Upshaw says.

Boys from low-income families are turned off to education at an early age, he says, and they never seem to catch up from there.

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