Why There Are "Left-over" Women

Since the reform and opening up in China,women's education level has been significantly improved caused by institutional change and economic returns to education,etc.With the enrollment expansion of colleges and universities,the number of female college and graduate students is increasing gradually as well as the female proportion of the new entrants in colleges and universities.So when gender differences shrink or even disappear within the same education level especially when the sex ratio decreases in higher educated population,then the difficulty of marriage matching rises for higher educated women(female marriage squeeze in higher education marriage market).Then“leftover woman”phenomenon occurs.Our paper empirically studies the effect of marriage squeeze that is sex-ratio,and sex-ratio within the same education level(homogeneous educational sex ratio)on women's marriage decision-making,like age at first marriage and the probability of getting married.On this basis,our paper mainly focus on marriage squeeze for higher educated women and then using data to explain why leftover ladies are crowded in big cities.Our paper uses CFPS data in 2010,Statistical yearbook of China's population and employment data from the year 1981—2010 and China statistical yearbook data from the year 1993—2010 to estimate the specific influence of sex ratio,sex-ratio within the same education level on women's age at first marriage and the probability of getting married on provincial and prefectural level respectively using multiple OLS regression model.Our study finds that low educated(high school and below)women's marriage decisions are more affected by overall sex ratios,while higher educated(above high school)women's marriage decisions are more affected by sex-ratios within the same education level.When considering higher educated women's marriage decisions and education being divided into two categories—high school and below,junior college and above,the empirical results show that other things being equal,when overall provincial sex ratio of higher educated group increases by 10 percentage points,higher educated women's age at first marriage would be advanced about 0.5 years earlier on average;On prefectural level,when the sex ratio of higher educated young group aged 20-34 years old increases by 10 percentage points,the probability of getting married for higher educated women within the same age group would increase by about 1.34 percentage points other things being equal.When marriage market is divided into city and rural areas,the effect of sex ratio at the same education level(homogeneous educational sex ratio)on urban higher educated women's marriage is more obvious comparative with that effect on urban low educated women's marriage or rural women's marriage.When the sex ratio of higher educated young group aged 20-34 years old increases by 10 percentage points,the probability of getting married for higher educated women within the same age group would increase by about 1.6 percentage points other things being equal.