Women are so picky.
We're gold diggers who want to marry up and would never deign to marry someone less educated than us.
If you're on the internet, or just a human being alive today,
you've heard something along the lines of this narrative.
College-educated women refuse to date down, and it's creating a crisis of marriagelessness.
There's just one problem with this narrative.
It's not true.
My name is Jerusalem Dempsis.
I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good On Paper,
a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.
Joining me today is Benny Goldman.
He's a professor of economics at Cornell and the co-author of a fascinating paper chock full of narrative violations about the dating and marriage markets.
Benny shows that the rates of marriage for college-educated women
as they've faced difficulties finding a partner at the same education level,
have remained relatively stable.
How?
Because they're marrying men without college degrees.
But what's happening to women with the least education?
If you look at the 25th percentile of the education distribution,
roughly three-quarters of women born in 1930 were married.