It’s over, Cinders, no prince is coming
In the Mad Men TV series, Don Draper married his secretary Megan
THE story of Cinderella may never be more than a fairy tale. The high-flyers
in society are becoming less likely to find love outside their peer group, a
study has found.
Instead of company bosses marrying their secretaries and doctors their nurses,
the intelligentsia are increasingly pairing off into power couples at
university — or “mating factories”, as one sociologist has described them.
This “educational segregation” is resulting in increasing inequality. Research
by the National Bureau of Economic Research in America, now being replicated
in the UK, found a marked rise in “positive assortative mating” — marrying
someone similar to yourself. The trend widens the income gap between
households because, for example, two married lawyers earn far more than two
The study of US census data, led by Jeremy Greenwood at Pennsylvania
University, found that 48% of married men with university degrees in 2005
had wed female graduates, up from