英國高學歷女性被迫“下嫁”

Intelligent women forced to 'dumb down' and find a less-educated man to marry

2011-11-08 09:47

Looking for love: Research suggests women are find it more and more difficult to find men of a similar social status.

Women are overtaking men in education and in the workplace, a senior Government minister said yesterday – creating a new generation of stay-at-home fathers.

Universities minister David Willetts predicted relationships and traditional household structures will be transformed as the fairer sex powers ahead, and women earn more than their male partners.

Successful women will have to ‘marry down’ by choosing partners less qualified than them – and may increasingly select men based on how supportive they might be to their careers, rather than whether they can support them financially.

And experts say women will often become the main breadwinners, with more men staying at home to look after children.

Mr Willetts said there was clear evidence from schools that boys are ‘lagging behind’, and are being overtaken by female students at university.

He said: ‘I am not against women having those advantages but there is now a rather striking gap, if you look at the statistics, where it looks as if approximately 50 percent of women are graduating from university by the time they’re 30 and perhaps about 40 percent of men.’

He added: ‘It may lead to changes in the patterns of household living. So there are some deep questions here.’

The Philadelphia-based Pew Research Centre study, published in The Atlantic magazine, suggests female graduates are being put in similar situation to that faced for some time by black women.

In America, 70 percent of black women have no husband and there are twice as many black women as black men with university degrees.

Many educated British women believe there is already a dearth of traditional husbands.

Claire Davis, 33, who works in financial services and lives in south London, told The Times: 'I have a good job, my own flat and I can pretty much do what I want, but a lot of the men I meet aren't really of the right calibre.

'If I look at the friends I went to university with, the men don't tend to be doing as well as the women.'

(Read by Emily Cheng. Emily Cheng is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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英國一位政府高級官員昨日透露，英國女性在受教育程度和職場上正在趕超男性，這將早就新一代“全職爸爸”。

大學事務大臣戴維?威利茨預言，隨著女性快速前進，加之收入超過男性伴侶，婚戀關系和傳統的家庭結構將發生轉變。

成功女性將不得不選擇不如自己的男性“下嫁”，而且將可能越來越多地根據男性是否能支持自己發展事業，而不是根據男性能否提供經濟后盾來選擇伴侶。

專家稱女性將更多地成為家庭的主要經濟支柱，同時會有更多男性待在家中照看小孩。

威利茨說，有來自學校的明顯證據表明，男孩們正在“落后”，在大學里他們也同樣被女生趕超。

他說：“我不反對女性有這些優勢，但現在兩性間的差距相當顯著，從數據來看，約有50%的女性在30歲前從大學畢業，而大學畢業的男性大概只有40%。

他補充說：“這可能會導致家庭生活的模式發生變化。所以這里存在著一些深層次的問題。”

費城的皮尤調查中心的這一研究指出，女大學畢業生的處境與一段時期以來黑人女性所遭遇的困境相似。該研究發表在《大西洋月刊》上。