Weddings between the boss and the secretary could soon be a thing of the past.
Research has found that educational high-flyers are increasingly choosing equally academic partners.
Often they are finding a mate at university instead of meeting one at work – who may have been from different social and academic background and at a different career level
Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research, in the US, found a significant rise in similarly educated couples marrying, with similar results being found in British studies.
Nearly half of married graduate men had married female graduates in 2005, compared with just a quarter in 1960, a study of American census data by Pennsylvania University found.
At the other end of the scale, nearly 60 per cent of women who had only been educated to high school level were married to men of the same education in 2005, compared to just over 40 per cent in 1960.
The changes stem from the larger numbers of women going to university, social mobility experts said.
John Goldthorpe, emeritus fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, told the Sunday Times: 'If you go back to the 1960s you would have a big sex difference - the nurse marrying the surgeon, the busines
sman marrying the secretary.
'Over the past 20 years women have caught up with men in the proportion going into higher education. They are going in their mating years and therefore universities are becoming big mating factories.'
But experts fear the trend is creating greater inequality in household incomes, as successful and low-earning couples stayed apart.
A US postgraduate couple could earn 119 per cent more than the average income in 2005, but a postgraduate woman married to a man who had not finished high school would earn 8 per cent less than average.
Economics professor Stephen Machin, of University College London, said: 'It suggests a polarisation of skills in households. It's been a driving factor behind inequality and most people would say that's not good.'
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