Research co-authored by Rena Zito in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology shows that despite public policies that assume otherwise, disadvantaged women are rarely able to meet and marry financially secure men.
Americans today are much freer to pursue relationships across religious, gender and cultural lines, but is it just as easy to step across economic lines? Perhaps not.
New research co-authored by Assistant Professor Rena Zito points out that financially disadvantaged women tend to marry people within their same class and with the same level of educational attainment – which, in turn, may hinder their own economic advancement and likely reinforces intergenerational poverty.
“Social Capital and Spousal Education” will appear in an upcoming edition of the journal Sociological Focus.
The study examined how patterns of socializing influence the education level of a person’s eventual spouse. People tend to socialize within their immediate network of friends and family who, according to Zito, share similar interests and socioeconomic backgrounds. If people only socialize within that close network, it seems logical that the people they date will have the same educational experience. If they socialize outside their network, they will meet a wider range of people and improve their chances of meeting someone who makes more money.
When it comes to improving one’s financial lot, data indicate that a person needs to be in a position where they can meet an “economically attractive” partner. “We wondered whether disadvantaged women’s access to financially secure potential spouses was part of their romantic lives,” Zito said.
The short answer is no. What Zito and co-author Mindy Vulpis of North Carolina State University found is that financially disadvantaged women rarely interact with men outside of their immediate network of friends and relatives, which often limits their access to financially successful men.
Zito said that people frequently base their mate selection on education, making it difficult for those of lower social classes to move up through marriage.
While it is not necessarily true that more education means making more money, those who are more educated have wider access to other educated people, which gives them a higher chance of marrying someone who is financially stable.
As people of similar educational and economic levels marry, the gap remains between the wealthy and the poor. Couples pass on their financial standing to their children, and the cycle begins anew.
Their work appears to offer hope. The research suggests that the best way to find an affluent spouse is to socialize outside of one’s neighborhood. This is especially true for those in low-income neighborhoods, who have limited opportunities to meet partners of a greater educational background where they live. However, the study finds that this rarely happens in real life.
There are multiple organized settings that can play a part in shaping someone’s potential partner pool, including schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, family networks and voluntary associations.
Zito joined Elon’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology in 2014. Her research focuses on the social roots of adolescent behavior, with a particular emphasis on family influences on youth law violation and other outcomes. She teaches courses in criminology, family sociology, and quantitative research methods.
Zito hopes her research will shed more light on the way people meet potential partners. Even as spouses are increasingly different from one another along religious, racial and ethnic lines, they have become increasingly similar to one another educationally and, therefore, financially. While those patterns have emerged, Zito hopes the research will explain why they have occurred.
“There had been some research on how people meet, and we wanted to add to that conversation,” she said.