"The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued [college] applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.”

"We have told today's young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today's most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How's that for an unintended consequence of the women's liberation movement?

The elephant that looms large in the middle of the room is the importance of gender balance. Should it trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants? At those colleges that have reached what the experts call a "tipping point," where 60 percent or more of their enrolled students are female, you'll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers.

Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.”

Many American women today might have opposed the affirmative action of a generation ago that benefited men in the workplace, yet judging from a study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, male economic privilege may actually serve the interest of women when it comes to marriage. Looking at patterns of wage and gender inequality in 64 countries, the study found that both factors significantly correlate with higher levels of marital "sorting," where, for example, a woman marries a man of higher career or educational status.

The researchers looked at data from twenty studies of mostly European countries and the United States comprising the Luxembourg Income Study, thirteen Latin-American household surveys, and the 1997 British Household Panel Study. After creating a sample for each country as well as measures of marital sorting and skill premiums, their regressions yielded "a positive relationship between sorting and [wage] inequality across countries." Even after controlling for differences between Latin American countries (which have a relatively greater degree of both inequality and marital sorting) and European countries (which have the reverse), the correlation remained significant.

In testing the relationship between gender inequality and marital sorting, the researchers looked at World Bank data on pay differences, two alternative measures of gender equality developed by the U.N. Development Programme, and their own skill premium measure. In every measure of female status, the regressions yielded negative and statistically significant correlations with the dependent variables explaining sorting (p<.10 or less for all coefficients). In other words, where women earned a greater fraction of male wages, where their workforce participation rate was higher, and where "gender development" was greater, marriages were more likely to be between individuals of the same social class, as the cost to men of "marrying down" increased. As the economists frame it: "Societies with more gender discrimination will ... have greater sorting, as women will tend to marry for money than for love."

The economists think lower levels of marital sorting are a plus for the economy, in part because sorting also negatively correlated with per capita income. Yet they overlook the obvious, that with lower levels of martial sorting, women are marrying less, whether for love or for money. The economic impact of that trend may be more difficult to measure, but if less sorting means fewer marriages, perhaps the old arrangement that yielded the reverse is worthy of some attention.