OUP accepted manuscript

Men have historically attained more education than women, but this gender imbalance in education has reversed in many countries. In recent cohorts, the wife typically has as much as or more education than the husband. Using data from the European Union’s Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (N = 95,389 for 27 countries), this article investigates to what extent the newly emerging pattern of educational assortative mating is associated with a higher proportion of women who out-earn their partners in Europe. We find that this proportion varies on the country level between 20 per cent and almost 50 per cent for childless women and is generally much lower for women with small children. However, if a woman is better educated than her partner, this clearly increases the odds that she earns more than half of the couple’s joint earnings. This happens to such an extent that it reduces the effect of motherhood on the wife’s relative earnings: college-educated mothers of school-age children with less educated partners are nearly as likely to be main breadwinners as college-educated childless women in a homogamous union.