l Women’s Economic Standing, Marriage Timing, and Cross-National Contexts of Gender

Proponents of the theory of specialization and exchange hypothesize that in any national con-text, women’s higher economic standing will de-crease their chance of marriage. Some re-searchers suggest, however, that only in industrialized countries with a high degree of role differentiation by gender does the inverse relationship between women’s economic stand-ing and the chance of marriage exist. To eval-uate contrasting cross-national predictions, I test with longitudinal data and standardized methods whether the inverse relationship exists in 3 similarly affluent industrialized countries that vary in their degree of role differentiation by gender: the United States, Japan (a context more differentiated by gender than the United States), and Sweden (a context less differenti-ated by gender than the United States). Con-trary to the prediction that develops out of the theory of specialization and exchange, results indicate that women’s higher levels of income discourage first marriage formation in Japan, but encourage it in the United States and Swe-den. Does the expanding economic role of women weaken the institution of marriage in all contexts or only in contexts where men’s and women’s roles are highly differentiated? Although this is