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The Sunday Paper – Hard to Get: The Scarcity of Women and the Competition for High-Income Men in Urban China

China has way more marriageable men than women. Surely then women seeking men should be in luck? In theory, yes. In practice though, and especially for higher educated and earning women, this is demonstrably not the case.

The phenomenon of ‘leftover women’ is evident throughout economically better developed Asia but the researchers, David Ong, Yu Yang and Junsen Zhang and authors of the paper highlighted today, wanted to look at the phenomenon specifically as it occurs in China.

Part of the problem is that women seek male partners who earn more than they do. This is a global truth but the problem is exacerbated when lots of women start to earn more, as in China, in recent years. Men who marry expect their salary to persist and aren’t too fussed whether a partner brings added income to the partnership; but women who intend to have children have to calculate a loss of earnings associated with this. The higher a woman’s income the higher earnings differential they have to achieve to make a union ‘work’.

The real problem though is (few should be surprised to learn this) men look for attractive partners irrespective of their incomes. What’s been happening in China, the research shows, is pretty girls of modest means who might have been prepared to settle for a poor but honest spouse in the past are now focusing attention more diligently on the newly-bigger pool of high earning males.

Despite therefore a favorable sex-ratio for women the competition for high earning males has gone up at the same time as smart/well-paid women are being more choosy. Who said life is fair?

There’s some impressive science behind these conclusions, a lot of it made possible by the interrogation of online dating platforms, and if you’d like to read the paper in full (the conclusion in detail begins on P.33) you’ll find it via this link Scarcity Of Women.

Happy Sunday.

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