by Roseann Lake
“We like our wives to be yogurts,” said the thirty-five-year old Chinese investment banker sitting across from me. “Plain yogurts—so that we can flavor them as we’d like.” On paper, this man—a friend of a friend who had kindly offered to provide his perspective on leftover women, is a solid match for June. Like her, he’s ambitious, well educated, works in a prestigious field, and speaks excellent English. When I sat down to talk with him at his office in the Central Business District of Beijing, I thought I might even play matchmaker and offer to introduce him to one of my accomplished female friends. As it turned out, however, he is surrounded by high-achieving single women at work. While he enjoys their company, he’s not at all interested in marrying his educational or professional equal. Besides, he’s already engaged.
“My fiancée is a plain yogurt,” he explained to me, just two days before his wedding. “She’s low maintenance and doesn’t really have her own ideas. I like her because she’s easy to manage.” And then, leaving me to question whether he was engaged to a human or a dairy cow, he left the office to board the high-speed train that would take him back to his hometown for his bachelor party.
While I wasn’t enraptured by his logic, after working in television journalism in Beijing and forming a tight-knit group of friends over five years, I was familiar with his viewpoint. A general distaste for wives of the flavored variety is dominant enough in China to warrant the now commonly acknowledged idea that the more educated a Chinese woman becomes, the more difficult it is for her to find a life partner. This axiom is true to the extent that Chinese female PhDs are commonly referred to as a “third sex,” because very few men are willing to marry them—not even fellow academics. According to my now betrothed informant, the educations and salaries of more educated women put them on a par with elite males, who have a tendency, if not a cultural obligation, to shy away in favor of more tractable wives.
This wasn’t an issue in the days when boys were considered more worthy of higher education and girls were barely schooled past early adolescence, but over the last sixty years in China, that coin has been flipped.
In 1949, roughly 75 percent of Chinese women over the age of fifteen were illiterate. By 1980, that percentage had dropped to 10 percent, and at present, it is one of the lowest in the world. The push for literacy first began during the Cultural Revolution, as Mao wanted as many people reading his Little Red Book as possible. It has also helped that since 1998, China has tripled the portion of its GDP dedicated to education. More than 60 percent of high school graduates now attend university, as compared to 20 percent just thirty years ago. In the last decade, the number of institutions of higher education in China has more than doubled, and the number of students enrolled in degree courses has sextupled. Leading the charge have largely been Chinese women like June, whose higher-education enrollment rates greatly exceed those of males, and who, since 2011, according to United Nations statistics, have come to represent the majority of bachelor degree earners in China. The downside to this rapid female educational advancement is that for well-educated Chinese women, a dangerous paradox emerges.
“Whatever you do, don’t get physical!” yells June’s mother as her daughter heads out the door for her date.
Far from a histrionic, modern-day Mrs. Bennet, June’s mom is more of a practically minded dating coach. Well aware that her daughter’s education makes her highly appealing to prospective employers, yet highly intimidating to prospective mates, she’s trying to help render her more wifely in the eyes of suitors who might be shaken by her confidence and accomplishments. “After you reject a man physically, you need to lavish him with praise,” she instructs her daughter.
June nods knowingly. “Modern China is like a giant episode of Sex and the City,” she says. “Except that instead of bawdy Samantha, we have our practical and traditional Charlotte-like mothers.” She goes on to explain that traditional Chinese men want to marry virgins, and that most of the marriage-minded blind dates she goes on are completely devoid of romance. “They’re like business meetings,” she says. “It’s not uncommon to talk about marriage on the first date, though physically, it’s imperative for things to move much slower. There’s lots of nodding, and absolutely no touching.”
That her mother is suddenly so proactive about her dating life has come as a surprise to June, whose parents had strongly discouraged her from socializing with the opposite sex until her last year of college (as do many Chinese parents). I know this sounds wildly paradoxical, especially since most parents expect their daughters to get married as soon as they graduate from college, but welcome to the gnarly crosshairs of young adulthood in modern China. As an only daughter, June is all her family has. Her parents are aware of how fierce the job market in China is, and they want to give her every opportunity to succeed and bring honor to their family. At the same time, they also know that if she generates too much success or too much honor, she runs the strong risk of alienating a potential father for their future grandchild; hence the hurry to get her hitched.
Despite being treated like a burning building surrounded by the urgent flames of fading looks, waning fertility, and plummeting value on the marriage market, June doesn’t regret the energy she has put into her education. She just completed an MBA in Beijing and is considering doing a PhD in the United States. Her desire to learn is what makes her so sharp, charismatic, and endlessly resourceful. As we speak about her different degrees, she makes it clear that as a young girl, she didn’t realize how her educational pursuits would affect her romantic prospects. “The bottom line is: we all need advanced degrees to remain competitive in the workforce with men,” she says. “But the new reality is that those same advanced degrees may later bite some of us in the back when it comes time to get married.”
For a country still in the throes of development, China’s numbers of excelling females are commendable, but not entirely surprising. It’s worth noting that between 1975 and 2006, the percentage of American women with at least a four-year college degree nearly doubled—from 18.6 percent to 34.2 percent, but the male percentage only increased one point—from 26.8 percent to 27.9 percent. Today, American women are responsible for over 60 percent of all four-year college degrees earned, over 60 percent of all master’s degrees, and over 50 percent of all PhDs—and they are not the exception. In 67 of 120 nations, including places as diverse as Iran, Venezuela, the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Israel, Brazil, Belarus, Armenia, Jamaica, Panama, Cuba, Italy, Hungary, and Germany, women have gone through a similarly rapid expansion on the educational front, and now earn more college degrees than men.
According to demographers Albert Esteve, Joan García-Roman, and Iñaki Permanyer of the Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics in Barcelona, an increase in female educational attainment has a very direct influence on marriage patterns across the world. In their study, “The End of Hypergamy,” the demographers hypothesize that as countries progress toward more gender-balanced educational distributions, the prevalence of hypergamy tends to diminish. In other words, the age-old idea that a woman must “marry up” to a man with a higher educational level than her own will erode as more and more women attain higher levels of education.
To test their theory, they accumulated marriage and educational data for fifty-six countries spanning the period from 1968 to 2009. Based on this data, they were able to show a steadily decreasing level of educational hypergamy across the world. From 1970 to 1975, for instance, it was more common for women to marry “up” (female hypergamy) than to marry “down” (female hypogamy), but by the year 2000, trends had changed drastically. In twenty-six of the fifty-one countries for which they had data, a majority of women were married to men with lower education than themselves. These included countries as diverse as the United States, France, Jordan, Mongolia, Slovenia, and South Africa.
The demographers conclude that although women’s levels of education have already caught up with and exceeded men’s, highly educated women have not been left high and dry i
n the marriage market. On the contrary, their research shows that as women’s educational levels increase, there’s an almost simultaneous decrease in the trend of men wanting to marry plain yogurts.
While these conclusions bode favorably for the marriage prospects of well-educated women around the world, the demographers are aware that there are a few flagrant exceptions to their findings, even after factoring in different economic and educational development timelines. And as luck (or a heavily paternalistic society) would have it, China is one of them.
In what may sound like a social engineering project gone awry, as Chinese women pile on the mortarboards, their marriage prospects dwindle. That hardly seems fair, but more important, how and why is it true? Do Chinese men have a natural aversion to well-educated wives? Or does the fact that well-educated marriage-seeking women are generally older (because they’ve spent time focused on their studies and careers) work against them more heavily in the mate market?
The answers to all of my questions came in the form of Yue Qian, a now assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Colombia, who at the time I met her, was still a PhD candidate at Ohio State University. On one of Qian’s trips home to China, I meet her at a small café tucked away on the campus of Renmin University (literally “The People’s University”), one of three establishments—the others being Tsinghua and Peking University—attended by China’s best and brightest students. Qian is fresh-faced, with long black hair and bangs that sweep across her forehead in a soft demilune. Something about her smile and her pep reminds me of Sailor Moon, though her voice and composure give her all the trappings of a budding scholar.
As we sit down, she pulls out her doctoral research and treats me to the smorgasbord of log-linear models she used to carefully determine the greatest inhibitor of a Chinese woman’s marriage prospects.
“Generally speaking, Chinese women under the age of twenty-nine get married at much higher rates than Chinese men of the same group,” she explains. This pattern holds true across all levels of educational attainment, except for college-educated women in China, who have a tougher time finding husbands, as their education is perceived as being “linked to strong career aspirations and appears to clash with the role of good wife and mother.” And while the disadvantage that college-educated Chinese women have in finding a mate is pronounced under age twenty-nine, once they hit thirty, Qian says, it soars.
After thirty, however, it not only becomes more complicated for college-educated women to find partners, but for all Chinese women, regardless of their level of education. In other words, it’s as if a Chinese woman is driven off the showroom floor on her thirtieth birthday; she instantly loses her retail value. Add a few graduate degrees, and she’s essentially on clearance.
This is not so for Chinese men, who, as they approach thirty, enter much greener pastures. Men between thirty and forty-nine with a vocational degree or above begin to see an increase in their likelihood of marriage, something that is especially true for college-educated males, who, as they age, all seem to morph into George Clooney and become four times more likely to get married than their female graduate counterparts. This is not true for under-thirty, less-educated males, who are one and a half times less likely to get married than their female counterparts. Basically, Qian’s findings suggest that highly educated men have much better marriage prospects if they delay their marriages until their thirties. For highly educated women, the exact opposite is true: a hitch in time saves nein.
Although marriage is one of Qian’s prime academic interests, much to her mother’s dismay, it’s not a domain she plans to personally familiarize herself with, anytime soon. Qian’s mother lives back in Wuhan; a Chinese city with a population of about 4 million.
She describes her mother as “very social,” and even admits that she’s quite the reputed matchmaker. In fact, Qian’s mother once set up the daughter of a family friend with a man who embodied the elements most sought after in a Chinese male marriage candidate—tall, handsome, well-educated, and from a prominent local family. But before meeting this star young bachelor, it seems the young woman was skeptical of the arrangement and asked Qian’s mother, “If he’s so wonderful, why don’t you introduce him to your own daughter?” Hearing this greatly upset Qian’s mother. It was a reminder of just how helpless she feels in the face of her daughter’s marriage arrangement.
“She’s learned to acknowledge that I am different,” explains Qian. By “different,” the young scholar is referring to the fact that she lives on the other side of the world, and is therefore not very geographically compatible with anyone in her hometown, but also that her parameters for a life partner—when she begins to seriously consider that aspect of her life—will also likely be “different.”
By the time she finishes her PhD, Qian will have spent eight years living and studying in the United States. She’ll also be thirty-one years old, which, according to the research from her own master’s thesis, indicates that she’ll be in the red zone when it comes to finding a mate in China. Finding a mate in her hometown of Wuhan—where her parents hope to spend their golden years near their only daughter—will be even more challenging. Though it is a large city, it is significantly more traditional than places like Beijing and Shanghai. Its inhabitants tend to marry earlier, leaving Qian with few desirable options.
When I ask Qian about the prospect of marrying an American, she responds with mixed feelings. “I’m not familiar enough with the nuances of American culture,” she says. “I think there may be too many inherent differences for that to work out.”
But as our conversation evolves, one last aspect in which Qian is decidedly “different” from the majority of her female compatriots emerges. She cites research from developing economies that shows how in places like China and India, women are far more likely to become engineers or study IT. This isn’t always because they enjoy math or computer science more than women in other parts of the world, but because they know these fields are more lucrative and provide more secure job opportunities.
“Their motivation for studying is external,” says Qian, explaining that external factors (likely pressure from parents) guide their choice of profession. This is in contrast to women like Qian, whose educational pursuits are internal (individually decided), and in many cases, even directly oppose what their parents would have wanted them to study.
On the surface, this all may sound paradoxical. How can Chinese parents, on one hand, push their daughters to do well in school and drive them into fields where they are more likely to find jobs and earn good salaries, while on the other discourage them from doing too well in school or too well at work, at the risk of alienating future mates?
Zhiwei Xu of the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (often described as China’s answer to MIT) is all too familiar with this paradox. As a senior professor and doctoral thesis adviser, he is responsible for nurturing the minds of China’s top computer scientists, a duty that also happens to include managing their marriage prospects. “After a student has been accepted into our doctoral program, I make the effort to meet his or her parents,” he said. “On more than one occasion, parents with a daughter in the program have expressed concern that she might not find a mate. They worry that she’ll be too old for marriage upon completing her post-doc, or simply too educated or intimidating to be desirable as a wife,” he added. Xu, whose own daughter, Xiaomeng, is a happily married assistant professor at the University of Idaho, reassures all jittery parents with great aplomb.
“He’s a bit of a matchmaker,” says Xiao Li Juan, one of his happily hitched post-doc students, who, at thirty-four, has recently had a baby but is already back to work at Intel. Though Professor Xu was not responsible for helping to initiate her romance with her former classmate turned husband, she admits that he’s always been very vigilant of the love lives of his students.
Xiao Li Juan remembers how the professor would always try to organize group lunches
or dinners, so that students from different years could mingle with one another. Once he got to know his students better, he’d ask them about their personal lives, often calling on other students to introduce friends or brainstorm for potential candidates they might get on well with. “It’s an important part of their lives,” he explained over a prodigious spread of dim sum.
As I learned more about how Xiao Li Juan met her husband, I realized that unlike Christy, June, or Zhang Mei, she’s completely unfamiliar with what it’s like to be a sheng nü, because she met her partner in school and married him right after graduation. “The odds were relatively stacked in my favor—my grad program had about six males for every female, so it was actually the men who were more nervous to find partners,” she said. She admits feeling fortunate to have met her husband while still in school, because she can sense that the professional world is a completely different ball game. Though the majority of her peers are still male, most are already married, and the stresses of the daily grind hardly seem conducive to the same kind of courtship opportunities.
This conversation brings me back to my exchange with Qian—the bright young scholar whose discipline (sociology) happens to be filled with women. I think about how it’s a field she entered against the wishes of her parents, whereas Xiao Li Juan chose to study computer science because at the time she was applying to university, it happened to be one of the hottest fields to enter. Things worked out—she seems to enjoy her work, and is certainly very good at it. As Qian’s research suggests, Xiao Li Juan’s post-doc also didn’t pose a problem when it came time for her to get married—something she did before age thirty. But still, I couldn’t help but wonder—what happens to Chinese women who don’t have as many dating options on campus?