We all know that Chinese families produce more sons than daughters, something like 118 to 100. So you'd guess that scarcity makes all Chinese women good marriage prospects, yes? No, it turns out highly educated Chinese women are finding it difficult to land "qualified" husbands.
Carefully reading the Foreign Policy article which reports this trend, reading more or less between the lines, you figure out that many Chinese men are marrying women who have less education. In China almost all educated men marry but uneducated men often do not.
What is happening in China resembles the pattern we had here in the U.S. some years ago. Men normally married women who did not challenge them in terms of education and career achievement.
My sense is that this pattern of men "marrying down" is no longer as prevalent in the U.S. Today I believe male doctors marry doctors instead of marrying nurses, attorneys marry attorneys instead of legal secretaries, etc. It probably took a generation or two to mostly get past the "marry down" pattern.
