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The Transition to First Marriage in China, 1966–2008: An Examination of Gender Differences in Education and Hukou Status

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Abstract

Using retrospective life history data from the 2008 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), this study examines the entrance into first marriage in China, a country that has been experiencing profound socioeconomic changes for the past several decades. We examine educational differences across rural and urban regions and across gender as determinants of marriage. Results reveal that for rural women, increasing education (especially from the least educated to middle levels of education) decreases marriage chances. For urban women, increasing education does not affect their marriage chances, net of other factors. For the former, results are consistent with the broad East Asian cultural practice of women “marrying up.” For the latter, we argue that modernizing forces (e.g., improvements in education) have reduced the incidence of this practice. We also find effects attributable to unique features of the Chinese institutional context, such as the rural/urban divide and effects of the household registration (Hukou) system.

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Notes

  1. We attempted to deal with this problem by adding period fixed effects (i.e., year dummy variables) to our model. Although researchers who developed age-period-cohort models (e.g., Yang and Land 2006) suggest that age, period, and cohort measures can simultaneously be included in a regression model, provided that (for example) age is introduced as a curvilinear effect, when we tried this approach, period measures were highly collinear with age and cohort measures. Although we were able to estimate the model, due to the collinearity issue we do not present it with our final results (although it is available on request). We note that, except for estimates related to cohort measures (which became nonsignificant), other estimates from that model matched those of our final model (e.g., Model 1), so period-specific factors had no particular bearing on our results.

  2. Unfortunately, this strategy introduced collinearity between the main effect of age and its squared term. We attempted to diminish this problem by mean-centering the age variable before taking its square, but doing so created convergence problems in some models, so we ultimately abandoned this approach. In a separate set of models, we used a linear spline with knots at 25 and 30 years of age. Differences in the slope of all age coefficients were statistically significant, and confirmed a curvilinear pattern of marriage by age.

  3. Indeed, the error bar for rural women with a rural Hukou is particularly large, consistent with the notion that high levels of education there were uncommon, therefore increasing the uncertainty in the coefficient estimate.

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Acknowledgments

Piotrowski’s efforts on this research were supported in part by a Faculty Enrichment Grant from the University of Oklahoma. Piotrowski would like to thank the Carolina Population Center (CPC) and the East West Center (EWC) for providing office space and other resources during the writing of this paper. Chao received a Grasmick fellowship from the Sociology Department of the University of Oklahoma to support his contribution to this paper. The authors would like to thank Susanne Choi, S. Philip Morgan, and Ronald R. Rindfuss for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Oklahoma, 780 Van Vleet Oval, Kaufman Hall 331, Norman, OK, 73019, USA

    Martin Piotrowski & Lu Chao

  2. Department of Sociology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong

    Yuying Tong & Yueyun Zhang

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  1. Martin Piotrowski
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Correspondence to Martin Piotrowski.

Appendix

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Table 3 Discrete Time event history probit regressions of transition to first marriage (dummy variable parameterization of three-way interaction)
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Piotrowski, M., Tong, Y., Zhang, Y. et al. The Transition to First Marriage in China, 1966–2008: An Examination of Gender Differences in Education and Hukou Status. Eur J Population 32, 129–154 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-015-9364-y

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