Wednesday, July 28, 2010

"Los Caballeros Las Prefieren Brutas"

"Gentlemen prefer them dumb." It's the title of a Colombian telenovela, a less famous book, and if you like generalizations based on academic sociological surveys, it's apparently true.

According to a study from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government reported on by BBC Mundo, educated women in Latin America are less likely to marry than their less educated counterparts.

The report, titled “‛Schooling Can’t Buy Me Love’: Marriage, Work, and the Gender Education Gap in Latin America,” also shows that educated women (those having a secondary education or higher) were also more likely, when they did marry, to marry less educated men. 40% of Colombian and Brazilian educated women fell into this category, compared to 16% of American women.

From the study:
“The simplest explanation is that skilled men in the US and Latin America differ in their valuation of the returns to having a stay-home wife versus a working wife,” the authors explain. “US skilled men prefer a working skilled wife to a stay-home wife, while Latin American men do not. Latin American women prefer a skilled husband who supports her desire to work, but Latin American men would prefer a lower-skilled wife who stays home."
Image Source: Coroflot.com
Online Sources: BBC Mundo, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Wikipedia

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