Trends in Women’s Educational Advantage and Divorce in East and West Germany

Couples in which wives have more education than their husbands have been found to be more likely than other couples to divorce. But this relationship varies across time and place. We compare the relationship between spouses’ relative education and marital dissolution across four birth cohorts born between 1951 and 1990 in East and West Germany using 37 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984-2021) and Cox proportional hazard models. The comparison between East and West Germany provides contrasting levels and trends in women’s education, employment, and gender cultures, with East Germany persistently being a more gender egalitarian context compared to West Germany. Our results show that marriages in which wives have more education than their husbands are less stable in West Germany, but not in East Germany, where the point estimates indicate that these couples are more stable than other couples, but this association is not statistically significant. We do not find evidence of cohort change in these associations in either East or West Germany. These findings are consistent with the idea that the consequences of non-traditional gender arrangements are weaker in more egalitarian contexts and confirm that notable differences between East and West Germany persist after reunification.