educational homogamy lowers the odds of reproductive failure教育同子生殖降低生殖失败的几率.pdfVIP

Educational Homogamy Lowers the Odds of Reproductive Failure Susanne Huber1,2*, Martin Fieder1 1 Department of Anthropology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, 2 Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Vienna, Austria Abstract Assortative mating based on education is a common phenomenon. We investigated whether it affected parameters of reproductive performance such as childlessness, offspring number and age at first marriage. On the basis of the US census from 1980 (n = 670,631 married US couples), we find that the proportion of childless individuals is usually minimal in women married to a husband of the same educational level. This holds particularly true in the highest and the lowest educated women. Educational homogamy is also associated with a lower average age at first marriage. No obvious effect of educational homogamy on a woman’s average offspring number is found, where mean offspring number generally increases both with decreasing woman’s and decreasing husband’s educational attainment. We conclude that educational homogamy reduces the likelihood of reproductive failure. Citation: Huber S, Fieder M (2011) Educational Homogamy Lowers the Odds of Reproductive Failure. PLoS ONE 6(7): e22330. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022330 Editor: Eshel Ben-Jacob, Tel Aviv University, Israel Received March 16, 2011; Accepted June 25, 2011; Published July 26, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Huber, Fieder. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: These authors have no support or funding to report. Competing Interests: The authors have declared t