assortative mating
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2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean R David ◽  
Erina A Ferreira ◽  
Laure Jabaud ◽  
David Ogereau ◽  
Héloïse Bastide ◽  
...  

Adaptive introgression is ubiquitous in animals but experimental support for its role in driving speciation remains scarce. In the absence of conscious selection, admixed laboratory strains of Drosophila asymmetrically and progressively lose alleles from one parental species and reproductive isolation against the predominant parent ceases after 10 generations. Here, we selectively introgressed during one year light pigmentation genes of D. santomea into the genome of its dark sibling D. yakuba, and vice versa. We found that the pace of phenotypic change differed between the species and the sexes, and identified through genome sequencing common as well as distinct introgressed loci in each species. Mating assays showed that assortative mating between introgressed flies and both parental species persisted even after four years (~ 60 generations) from the end of the selection. Those results indicate that selective introgression of as low as 0.5% of the genome can beget morphologically-distinct and reproductively-isolated strains, two prerequisites for the delimitation of new species. Our findings hence represent a significant step towards understanding the genome-wide dynamics of speciation-through-introgression.


Demography ◽  
2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Acton Jiashi Feng

Abstract Existing research on assortative mating has examined marriage between people with different levels of education, yet heterogeneity in educational assortative mating outcomes of college graduates has been mostly ignored. Using data from the 2010 Chinese Family Panel Study and log-multiplicative models, this study examines the changing structure and association of husbands' and wives' educational attainment between 1980 and 2010, a period in which Chinese higher education experienced rapid expansion and stratification. Results show that the graduates of first-tier institutions are less likely than graduates of lower-ranked colleges to marry someone without a college degree. Moreover, from 1980 to 2010, female first-tier-college graduates were increasingly more likely to marry people who graduated from similarly prestigious colleges, although there is insufficient evidence to draw the same conclusion about their male counterparts. This study thus demonstrates the extent of heterogeneity in educational assortative mating patterns among college graduates and the tendency for elite college graduates to marry within the educational elite.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Avril Macfarlane

<p>There is a growing concern internationally about levels of income inequality, and the negative effect this has on the functioning of societies both in terms of productivity and social harmony. An unexpected contributor to inequality is assortative mating - the phenomenon of “like marrying like”. Educational attainment is highly correlated with income; when two highly educated people partner and form a household they are more likely to appear at the top of the household income distribution, while couples with only primary or incomplete secondary education appear at the bottom. Therefore the greater the propensity to mate assortatively the more unequal the distribution of household income becomes.   I ask two questions of the relationship between educational assortative mating and household income inequality. Firstly, how do countries (in Europe) differ in their degree of educational assortative mating? Secondly, what is the evidence that such differences are reflected in indicators of household income inequality?   My study differs from the prevailing approaches to this question by taking a geographical approach. Instead of comparing a single country over time and monitoring the correspondence between assortative mating and income inequality, I compare a wide range of countries, using a uniform instrument, at one point in time. In order to do so I draw on the unit records of 29 countries from the European Social Survey administered in 2012.   From these unit record data I have been able to identify two important patterns. Firstly, there is a clear presence of educational assortative mating in each country. However, the degree differs and it does so primarily as a reflection of the overall level of education in the country. Rising levels of education lower the returns for education, in turn making assortative mating comparatively less attractive. As a result, the level of assortative mating, compared to what would be expected under random conditions, is lower in highly educated nations. The lowered level of assortative mating in highly educated nations reduces the barriers to social mobility through marriage for those without university educations. Consequently, household income inequality is seen to be intrinsically related to assortative mating, although the outcomes can be mitigated by redistribution policies.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Avril Macfarlane

<p>There is a growing concern internationally about levels of income inequality, and the negative effect this has on the functioning of societies both in terms of productivity and social harmony. An unexpected contributor to inequality is assortative mating - the phenomenon of “like marrying like”. Educational attainment is highly correlated with income; when two highly educated people partner and form a household they are more likely to appear at the top of the household income distribution, while couples with only primary or incomplete secondary education appear at the bottom. Therefore the greater the propensity to mate assortatively the more unequal the distribution of household income becomes.   I ask two questions of the relationship between educational assortative mating and household income inequality. Firstly, how do countries (in Europe) differ in their degree of educational assortative mating? Secondly, what is the evidence that such differences are reflected in indicators of household income inequality?   My study differs from the prevailing approaches to this question by taking a geographical approach. Instead of comparing a single country over time and monitoring the correspondence between assortative mating and income inequality, I compare a wide range of countries, using a uniform instrument, at one point in time. In order to do so I draw on the unit records of 29 countries from the European Social Survey administered in 2012.   From these unit record data I have been able to identify two important patterns. Firstly, there is a clear presence of educational assortative mating in each country. However, the degree differs and it does so primarily as a reflection of the overall level of education in the country. Rising levels of education lower the returns for education, in turn making assortative mating comparatively less attractive. As a result, the level of assortative mating, compared to what would be expected under random conditions, is lower in highly educated nations. The lowered level of assortative mating in highly educated nations reduces the barriers to social mobility through marriage for those without university educations. Consequently, household income inequality is seen to be intrinsically related to assortative mating, although the outcomes can be mitigated by redistribution policies.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 116-127
Author(s):  
Fernando Antonio Ignacio González ◽  
◽  
Juan Antonio Dip ◽  

This paper seeks to quantify the impact of educational assortative mating on income inequality among households in Argentina. We use microdata from two household surveys conducted by the National Institute of Statistics and Census: The Permanent Household Survey and the National Survey of Risk Factors. We construct contingency tables and perform a regression analysis to study the existence of educational assortative mating. We also present counterfactual simulations of random re-matching of observations. The results show that a sizeable proportion of couples are educationally homogamous (45%). Comparing the Gini coefficients calculated in the real matching and the simulated scenarios, we observe a reduction of up to 4 points. Thus, the educational assortative mating represents a relevant dimension to explain income inequality. Our results recommend considering this matching pattern when defining optimal income taxes; this is, if there is a high positive covariance between the income of both members of the couple, it seems appropriate, from a redistributive point of view, to define income taxes at the household level and not at the individual level (as is currently the case in most countries, including Argentina).


PLoS Genetics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (11) ◽  
pp. e1009883
Author(s):  
Laurence J. Howe ◽  
Thomas Battram ◽  
Tim T. Morris ◽  
Fernando P. Hartwig ◽  
Gibran Hemani ◽  
...  

Spousal comparisons have been proposed as a design that can both reduce confounding and estimate effects of the shared adulthood environment. However, assortative mating, the process by which individuals select phenotypically (dis)similar mates, could distort associations when comparing spouses. We evaluated the use of spousal comparisons, as in the within-spouse pair (WSP) model, for aetiological research such as genetic association studies. We demonstrated that the WSP model can reduce confounding but may be susceptible to collider bias arising from conditioning on assorted spouse pairs. Analyses using UK Biobank spouse pairs found that WSP genetic association estimates were smaller than estimates from random pairs for height, educational attainment, and BMI variants. Within-sibling pair estimates, robust to demographic and parental effects, were also smaller than random pair estimates for height and educational attainment, but not for BMI. WSP models, like other within-family models, may reduce confounding from demographic factors in genetic association estimates, and so could be useful for triangulating evidence across study designs to assess the robustness of findings. However, WSP estimates should be interpreted with caution due to potential collider bias.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate H. Choi ◽  
Patrick A. Denice

The share of U.S. marriages involving wives with an educational advantage over their husbands has increased in recent years. Prior work has examined the relationship between educational assortative mating and wives’ labor market participation, but they have not assessed how this relationship varies by race/ethnicity. Drawing on 28 waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we estimate group-based development trajectories to investigate whether the association between educational assortative mating and wives’ income trajectories varies across racial/ethnic groups. White wives are more likely than black and Hispanic wives to be a secondary earner. Black wives are more likely than white and Hispanic wives to be the primary earner. For white wives, higher relative levels of education are associated with greater contribution to couple’s total income. Black wives in educationally hypergamous unions are less likely than other black wives to be a primary or equal earner. For Hispanic wives, differences in income trajectories by educational assortative mating are small and statistically insignificant. Like family structure, the impact of educational assortative mating differs across racial/ethnic groups. Educational assortative mating is a weaker correlate of black and Hispanic wives’ income trajectory than white wives’ income trajectories.


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