Fearing Such a Lady: University Expansion, Underemployment, and the Hypergamy Ideal in Kampala, Uganda

Abstract

In Uganda, the cultural norm of hypergamy, which dictates that husbands should have higher economic and social status than wives, is pervasive and influential. Yet hypergamy has recently been challenged by women’s gains in education relative to men and by an unemployment crisis leaving educated young men unable to find steady work. Using interviews with recent university graduates in Kampala, we investigate how highly-educated young adults navigate frictions between the hypergamy ideal and these recent transformations in gendered status. Some women reduce the salience of hypergamy by preventing their relationships from becoming serious, while other women intentionally perform the role of submissive housewife while preserving their autonomy. Men reframe their romantic circumstances to underplay their inability to achieve economic hypergamy, portraying educated women as undesirable and characterizing their partners as non-materialistic. These findings reveal how demographic and economic changes reconfigure relationship norms, gendered power dynamics, and family formation processes.

Historically, in both developing and developed contexts, marital systems have been structured by the cultural ideal of hypergamy, which dictates that women should marry “up” in education, income, and other markers of status (Van Bavel, Schwartz, and Esteve 2018). In recent decades, this ideal has been undermined through two contrasting demographic shifts. First, women in several high- and low-income countries have caught up and even outperformed men in educational attainment, leading to steep declines in educational hypergamy (Esteve et al. 2016). Second, in many contexts, young adults face uncertain employment prospects (Beck 2000; Matlon 2016; Sennett 2000) and men entering marriage often struggle to attain the economic stability necessary to serve as sole household earners and to be perceived to have a higher economic status than their female partners (Hunter 2010; Pugh 2015; Silva 2013).

The marital effects of women’s relative gains in education have captured increasing attention from scholars (De Hauw, Grow, and Bavel 2017; Esteve et al. 2016), and research in several countries has empirically linked young men’s poor labor market prospects to women’s retreat from marriage (Gibson‐Davis, Edin, and McLanahan 2005; Nemoto 2008; Yu and Xie 2015). A question that has received less attention is whether, and in what ways, these trends introduce frictions between shared cultural expectations and people’s socioeconomic positioning, especially in settings where the cultural norm of hypergamy has long been fundamental to gender relations (Basu and Aaby 1998).

When hypergamy is socially expected but structural conditions hinder both men and women from achieving this expectation, how do highly-educated individuals navigate their romantic lives? To what extent do men and women challenge the hypergamy ideal, versus seeking to make their actions consistent with it? We address these research questions through an analysis of in-depth interviews with recent university graduates living in Kampala, Uganda. We analyze this topic from a gendered cultural perspective, to show how frictions between structural transformations and gendered expectations are experienced, interpreted, and challenged by men and women on the ground.

Uganda is an ideal case to study how youth grapple with the tensions between hypergamy ideals and changes in women’s social standing relative to men. Uganda’s recent educational and labor market transformations are unique in terms of their rapid pace as well as the stark disconnect between these two changes. While all African countries achieved gains in access to basic education in recent decades, Uganda also achieved a staggering expansion in higher education: its population of university students increased more than tenfold between 2001 and 2014 (UMESTS 2014). And while higher education in other African countries continues to be male dominated, Uganda’s leading universities have achieved gender parity (Onsongo 2009). Unfortunately, this expansion in educational access corresponds with a contraction in formal employment, as the labor supply has far outstripped the demand for new graduates. Uganda is often credited with Africa’s highest level of youth unemployment, with jobs for only 20 percent of university graduates each year (Mwesigwa 2014). Although both transformations are experienced by young men and women, their implications vary according to gender. Unemployment leaves men incapable of fulfilling male provider responsibilities, while achieving higher education renders women a perceived threat to male dominance.

According to cultural sociologists, periods of social transformation are especially suited for examining the dynamism of cultural ideals. Swidler terms these periods “unsettled times,” when “groups or entire societies are involved in constructing new strategies of action” (1986:278). Bourdieu describes periods of rapid social change as triggering “mismatches… between the objective structures and the incorporated structures” (2000:159). In Uganda, the simultaneous increase in women’s higher education and crisis in formal employment provide an opportunity to examine this process of cultural change as it unfolds at the micro-level.

This case also enables us to revisit the theoretical debate around the relationship between transformations in women’s status and changes in ideational dimensions of gender inequality.

Extant research about this relationship has mostly focused on high-income countries, where women’s increasing access to higher education co-occurred with changes in other sources of women’s status (e.g., labor force participation) (Therborn 2004; World Bank 2007). We introduce evidence from a context where women’s education expanded largely in absence of these other transformations.

Theoretical Perspectives on Changing Women’s Status and Gendered Cultural Ideals

The extent to which changes in women’s and men’s relative status transform gender ideals is still an ongoing debate. Classic modernization theories posit that increasing women’s education introduces a “modern” cultural orientation towards marriage, including “co-operation between husband and wife in financial matters, solidarity of the married couple in conflict with kin, [and] shared responsibility for childrearing” (Caldwell 1980:241). The “developmental idealism” perspective asserts that modern families are the root of cultural change in modernizing societies and that increasing women’s educational access is the most effective way to disseminate modern values, such as individualism over collectivism and autonomy over authority (Thornton 2001). In this view, educated elites play a pivotal role in the dissemination of global scripts advocating for women’s rights and gender equality across their personal networks (Pierotti 2013). Both approaches view rising women’s education as bound to dismantle traditional ideals related to gender and family, such as the hypergamy ideal.

Scholars have also theorized that as men’s relative economic status decreases, couples will embrace gender-egalitarian ideals and adopt more equal household labor configurations (Inglehart and Norris 2003; Jackson 1998). Exchange-bargaining approaches posit that relative increases in wives’ earnings improve their negotiating position, leading husbands to take on some housework and child care activities (Lundberg and Pollak 1996). Women’s labor force participation is theorized to promote gender-egalitarian attitudes not only among women, but also among husbands and children (Cunningham 2008; Powell and Steelman 1982). As economic gender inequity subsides, household-level gendered status hierarchies should also erode.

In contrast, other scholars are more skeptical about the cultural implications of shifts in women’s and men’s relative status. The aforementioned modernization theories claim that women’s rising status will lead to increasing gender egalitarianism in homes and workplaces (Caldwell 1980; Jackson 1998), but when political and economic changes enhance women’s societal position (e.g., anti-discrimination legislation, polices improving women’s access to male-dominated jobs), gender inequalities persist (England 2010; Ridgeway 2011). Gender scholars argue this is explained by enduring traditional gender beliefs that lag behind changes in women’s access to resources and power (Ridgeway 2011), enabling the reproduction of gender hierarchies through micro-level interactions in workplaces, families, and romantic relationships. Goode (1982) goes further and posits that men, as any other superordinate group, actively resist movements and social institutions that seek to promote gender equality in order to protect their masculine dominance (see also Pierotti, Lake, and Lewis 2018).

In the U.S., prescriptive gender beliefs—cultural ideals about how men and women should behave—have remained mostly unchanged (Prentice and Carranza 2002; Rudman and Glick 2002). Despite increases in women’s earnings and labor force participation, gender essentialism—“the notion that men and women are innately and fundamentally different in interests and skills” (England 2010:150)—remains prominent (Charles and Grudsky 2004; Knight and Brinton 2017). Other research has demonstrated the endurance of the male breadwinner ideal, even as men and women across national contexts increasingly espouse gender-egalitarian beliefs (Gerson 2011; Thébaud 2010).

Empirical Evidence on Declining Hypergamy, Gender Ideals, and Couple Dynamics

Hypergamy is a gendered phenomenon; changes in the gendered status order exert unique effects on the romantic lives of men versus women. The direction of change matters as well: improving women’s education has different implications than declining men’s economic prospects. On the side of women, scholars have investigated whether the hypergamy ideal leads to marriage market penalties for educated women. Assessments of the marriage penalty for university-educated women in Africa have yet to be conducted, but women with secondary education or higher marry at older ages and are less likely to ever marry than less educated women (Gyimah, 2009; Ikamari, 2005; Bledsoe, 1990). Qualitative accounts reveal that university-educated women in East Africa perceive themselves to face a marriage penalty due to their educational attainment (Latvala, 2006; Namatende, 2016). Meanwhile, in high-income contexts, being highly educated no longer reduces women’s chances of marrying, nor does it increase their likelihood of divorce (Schwartz and Han 2014; Van Bavel et al. 2018).

The hypergamy ideal also shapes how educated women behave within marriages. In Ghana and South Africa, highly-educated women married to equally-educated men have greater bargaining power regarding housework and intra-household decision making (Bhana & Pillay, 2012; Oppong, 1970). However, research conducted across national contexts, including Africa, shows that highly-educated women tend to minimize their earning power once married (Bertrand, Kamenica, & Pan, 2015; Lewis, 1977; Silva, 2013) and women who out-earn their husbands compensate by doing more housework or by acquiescing in household decisions (Bittman, et al. 2003; Brines 1994).

Regarding men’s declining economic position and their resulting inability to provide for women, in West Africa, worsening labor market conditions are associated with delayed marriage for men (Antoine, Djire, and Laplante 1995; Calvès and Depledge 2007; Marcoux and Piché 1998; see Lichter et al. 1992 for a similar finding in the United States). Men’s deteriorating financial prospects affect dating behavior as well: underemployed men in African cities avoid serious relationships despite longing for intimacy, triggering emasculation and resentment (Matlon 2016; Sévédé-Bardem 1997; Wyrod 2016).

Once married, the maintenance of economic hypergamy is a paramount concern for men, especially when their wives are also formally employed (Hunter 2007; Silva 2013). American men describe earning less than their spouses as a transgression that leads to marital conflicts and poor relationship quality (Pugh 2015; Silva 2013). In some cases, men respond to this transgression by reinforcing gender essentialism in other spheres, a process known as gender backlash. In several African countries, increasing women’s education is associated with a higher prevalence of intimate partner violence (Behrman 2018; Cools and Kotsadam 2017). In Uganda and South Africa, men’s inability to satisfy the hypergamy ideal increases their likelihood of pursuing other sexual partners, to reassert their dominant status in the sexual domain (Hunter 2007; Morrell 2001).

Recent Changes in Education, Employment, and Marriage in Uganda

In 1990, Uganda had only one university, Makerere University, created by the colonial government to prepare male urban elites for civil service. A generation later, Uganda now has over 40 universities and has also made notable improvements in university-level gender diversity; Makerere University achieved gender parity in 2010 (Mugagga 2010) and other universities more recently followed suit. In Kampala among all women aged 25–29, the proportion with post-secondary education increased from 2% in 1995 to over 40% in 2016 (NSO-Macro 2017).

This educational expansion has coincided with a crisis in formal employment opportunities. National Planning Authority data show that 87% of youth who leave school each year fail to find work (Ahimbisibwe 2017). At the university level, in 2014 over 40,000 Ugandans graduated from universities, but only 8,000 high-skilled jobs were available nationwide (Mwesigwa 2014). The 2014 census revealed that 58% of Ugandans were unemployed and seeking work (Walubiri 2016) and in 2017, only 13% of young adults reported any wage work, of which 9% reported skilled jobs (Rwabizambuga 2018).

These simultaneous trends have produced a notable decline in educational hypergamy in Uganda. Among women born between 1950 and 1991, the intramarital gap in mean years of education decreased from 2.75 years to less than one year, even as husbands’ mean years of education increased from 5 years to about 9 years (authors’ calculations, NSO-Macro 2017). The ratio of wives’ to husbands’ mean years of education reveals the relative difference between partners, net of this increase in men’s schooling. In 1950, wives had about half the education of their husbands, while in 1990, they had achieved about 90 percent as much education as their husbands (authors’ calculations, NSO-Macro 2017).

Research suggests that the cultural expectations for youth have not caught up with these demographic and economic changes. In Uganda, two sets of prescriptive ideals continue to reinforce the status hypergamy norm (Oppong 1970; Wyrod 2016). As in other contexts (Thébaud 2010), the male breadwinner ideal, which prescribes that men be primary income earners and economic decision makers, remains central to masculine identity (Wyrod 2016). Despite the fact that Uganda’s unemployment crisis hinders the economic prospects for both educated men and women, because of the salience of this cultural ideal for men’s marriageability, this employment crisis has much more severe implications for men in terms of their relationship experiences. In recent years, as women have entered the modern workforce, men, perceiving these gains as challenging their identities, seek to limit their partners’ economic activity (Kyomuhendo and McIntosh 2006). Similarly, the female submissiveness ideal—a prohibition against women expressing assertive agency—continues to shape women’s relationship behavior. The colonial period brought new opportunities for women’s economic and social independence (Kyomuhendo and McIntosh 2006). In response, a new gender ideology, the “domestic virtue model,” demanded that women should stay home and submit to male authority (Kyomuhendo and McIntosh 2006; Oppong 1970). Recent evidence confirms that both the female submissiveness and male breadwinner ideals remain salient among young urban Ugandans (Wyrod 2016).

These prescriptive ideals are part of a broader system of traditional customs and expectations surrounding marriage in Uganda, which are changing in response to increasing educational attainment, urbanization, and other developmental processes (Atekyereza 2001; Bantebya, Muhanguzi, and Watson 2014). For most ethnic groups in Uganda, the marriage process begins with an elaborate “introduction” ceremony during which the families come together and the groom’s family presents the bride’s family with lavish gifts, often including cows and money (Kaduuli 2006; Mujuzi 2010). While some women’s organizations have challenged this practice of bridewealth, it remains widespread and adds to the financial pressure facing educated young men trying to marry. Traditionally, couples were expected to settle on the land of the paternal father, though these customs are increasingly undermined as young people (and particularly highly-educated youth) strive to live in Kampala (Mujuzi 2010; Parikh 2007). Nonetheless, these patrilocal norms continue to shape gendered power dynamics within marriages, as Uganda’s political system often fails to recognize women’s right to inherit or purchase land under their own name (Tripp 2004). Polygyny is also common in much of Uganda; in 2016, about 26 percent of Ugandan women reported co-wives; this proportion is smaller for women living in Kampala (18 percent) and for women with post-secondary education (14 percent; authors’ calculations, NSO-Macro 2017).

A generation ago, extended family networks typically oversaw partner selection and facilitated unions, but today’s youth, particularly those who are highly educated, are increasingly meeting through friends and alumni networks, and engaging in extended periods of courtship before deciding to marry (Bocast 2017; Cole 2009; Hunter 2010; Parikh 2016). As a result of this extended premarital period, along with urbanization, globalization, and the rise of the consumer economy across Africa, economic exchanges flowing from men to their female partners have shifted away from survival and homebuilding and towards consumption and lifestyle maintenance (Hunter 2010). Similar to what has been observed in Kenya and South Africa (Hunter 2010; Mojola 2014), even poor men in Uganda are expected to pay “upkeep” for their partners, including expenses including mobile phones, clothing, hair treatments, and other items (Higgins et al. 2014; Parikh 2016). These expenses mount for more elite women, who must pay to look the part and to participate in the cosmopolitan social scene through appearance in clubs, malls, and other expensive social spaces (Spronk 2012). In the face of pervasive underemployment, these expectations of gendered financial exchange lead many educated young men to feel inadequate in the eyes of their female classmates, and to fear being excluded from the dating and marriage market altogether (Hunter 2010; Matlon 2016; Wyrod 2016).

Data and Methods

This study draws on 45 semi-structured interviews conducted in Kampala in 2016 with individuals who had graduated from university within the past 5 years. The interviewing team included Margaret Frye, an American sociology professor, along with an American graduate student and three experienced Ugandan qualitative interviewers. Respondents were matched with interviewers of the same gender. Interviews occurred in private offices and averaged about 90 minutes. All names used here are pseudonyms.

We developed a semi-structured interview guide after conducting five pilot interviews and seeking feedback on drafts from several local informants. This guide began with questions about respondents’ family background and early schooling, then asked about their university experience including detailed questions about their romantic lives during university. The guide then asked respondents to describe their experiences since graduation and closed with a discussion about relationship norms.

We used snowball sampling, beginning with nine seeds and asking each respondent to provide names of friends who fit our sampling criteria and might wish to participate. These criteria shifted during the study, to ensure that we achieved variation in university attended, social class background, and place of origin (Kampala versus other districts). Overall, we spoke with students from 7 universities in Kampala. Table 1 provides relevant socio-demographic information about our sample.

Table 1:

Sample characteristics

		Women	Men
Age
	20–24	6	1
	25–29	19	13
	30–35	0	6
Employment Status
	Unemployed	15	7
	Part-time employment	6	7
	Employed	4	6
Marital status
	Single	7	11
	Casual relationship	9	3
	Committed relationship*	8	5
	Married	1	1
Total		25	20

^*Relationships in which individuals expect to get married.

Respondents’ relationship status differed by gender: most women reported a romantic partner (17/25) or husband (1/25), while most men were single (11/20). All but two respondents described long and protracted struggles to find work. Most were either unemployed (22/45) or employed part-time (13/45) in small-scale side businesses or short-term contract work. We use the term “underemployed” to encompass all of these scenarios. Lastly, most respondents were between 25 and 29 years old (32/45).

All interviews were transcribed and read in full several times by both authors. Rather than coding and separately analyzing excerpts related to different analytic themes, we took a holistic approach and examined each interview as a coherent narrative. We wrote detailed memos about each interview and created a spreadsheet summarizing topics discussed by and attributes of each respondent. We then compiled an outline summarizing major themes that emerged from the interviews regarding marriage and romantic relationships, and added relevant examples from each interview that reflect these major themes. For parsimony, we selected only a few quotations to describe each theme here, but will gladly provide additional textual evidence upon request.

Results

Educational Hypergamy: Challenges for Highly-Educated Women

Female respondents’ life circumstances violate the hypergamy ideal because having graduated from universities, they have achieved a status symbol previously reserved for men. In their romantic lives, female graduates know that they are expected to remain submissive, but express appreciation for the independence they gained through attending university. They thus experience friction between the modern futures they envision for themselves and the subservient and domiciliary behavior that men expect from a partner, even a highly-educated one.

We can begin to understand this tension by examining what attending university means for women. Across Uganda, cultural norms prescribe that women remain at home until marriage, and attending university is often the only permissible pathway out of the family compound besides marriage (Bantebya et al. 2014). For young women, going to university means leaving their homes, where strict rules are enforced, and moving to a dorm, with no supervision. When asked how they imagined university life before arriving on campus, most female respondents recall their excitement over this residential independence and the freedom it implied. Sylvia describes, “I was going to be free from home, I would do anything I want, no curfew. You know, it felt good because I knew I was growing up. I had started living on my own, it was a whole new experience.” Many respondents also described developing a sense of autonomy and individual responsibility at campus (16/25). For instance, when describing how living on campus was different from living at home, Nakkazi says, “There is no one who pushes you, it is all about you. After getting your tuition, the rest is about you, till the time you sit for the exams then your Lecturer judges whether you have passed or not.”

Graduates signify the transformative nature of higher education by verbally and materially distinguishing themselves—in terms of tastes, interests and life trajectories—from women who have not gone to university. Joan explains that after entering university, she struggled to connect with female friends from home: “Because if I am attending university and you all are married, what will we discuss? Nothing. If I am studying and you stopped in form 6, what will we discuss? Nothing. I will be talking about coursework and you don’t know these things.” Like Joan, most of the women we interviewed view their status as graduates as a core component of their personal identity that marks them as modern, independent women; distinct from their less educated peers, most of whom married while the respondents were at campus. Through remaining active in the cosmopolitan “graduate” social scene in Kampala through attending bars, maintaining their appearance, and eating out with friends, they render visible these distinctions between themselves and their less educated peers.

Yet, as women in their 20s in a context of universal and relatively early marriage, female graduates also grapple with strong social pressure to marry. Although all but one of our respondents envision getting married in the future, almost three quarters reject the economic dependency that marriage entails for women and struggle to reconcile this dependency with their modern, independent “graduate” identities. Dembe clearly illustrates this position: “I want to look for money, job first then man next, if no job no man (laughs). I want financial security in the beginning before I do anything… I think getting married to someone when you’re nowhere means you are depending on them and I don’t want depend on anyone.” Like Dembe, most female graduates (17/25) are afraid that once they get married, they will lose the freedom and independence they gained in university.

Beyond these concerns about economic dependency, some respondents (13/25) also dismiss the expectation that women be socially submissive in committed relationships. For example, Diana asserts that “men here in Kampala are going to rule a girl they are dating, like you are supposed to do whatever they want you to do, which is not the right thing. So I find dating here very hard.” This narrative of men “ruling” women often emerges when female respondents describe marriage. The highly educated women in our sample thus foresee a variety of tensions when trying to reconcile their independence gained in university with the gendered ideals surrounding marriage and romantic relationships.

Economic hypergamy: Challenges for Underemployed Men

Male respondents’ life circumstances violate the hypergamy ideal because their inability to secure stable employment in a slack labor market renders them incapable of providing financial support to their partners, which is often described as a pre-requisite to romantic relationships in Kampala. Thus, although the employment crisis affects the livelihoods of both educated men and women, it especially hurts young men’s marital opportunities given the prevalence of economic hypergamy ideals. Indeed, most men (15/20) describe relationships in which women contribute economically as invalidating their masculinity. As Kato explains: “we men have a traditional [idea] that the man should command, now…the woman is the one feeding you, doing everything, you become a woman, so that people… may have those tendencies of fearing such a lady.”

This expectation that men should provide leaves men struggling to begin and maintain romantic relationships both while at campus and afterwards. For instance, Isaac never had a serious relationship during university because of financial pressures: “You have to give her money for lunch and breakfast (…) then there is the issue of buying her handouts. If at all she doesn’t have the money you have to rescue her, becoming a liability to you.” Men also cite competition with older men as a reason why they remain single. Among those who do manage to begin relationships, half of our respondents recall breaking up with university girlfriends upon realizing they could not afford to maintain their partners’ lifestyles. For example, Robert explains why he ended his two-year relationship with Flavia, a fellow student: “She will expect outings, she will expect you to buy things like clothes for her. I was staying in one room, and imagine this girl is a year ahead of me, she has graduated and I am still a student.” Although Robert seems to care for Flavia, he ended the relationship when financial constraints eclipsed the obligations he felt towards her. Years later, Robert is single and continues to struggle to find partners due to his inability to provide.

If romantic relationships require men to amply provide for women, this pre-requisite is even more stringent when it comes to marriage. In our sample, only one male respondent is married, and only five are with partners they expect to marry. Though they hope to marry, all of the men who are not currently married or engaged explained that they are waiting for the right timing, financially and professionally. Young educated men describe a recurrent tension between marriage formation and economic well-being. Respondents not only view good financial standing as a pre-requisite to marriage, but often view serious relationships as harming their chances to improve their economic situation.

Navigating Challenges to the Hypergamy Ideal

Having described the different types of friction that men and women experience between their life circumstances and the hypergamy ideal, we now turn to the strategies they use to manage these tensions in their romantic lives. Comparing across gender, we find that these strategies differ not only in content but also in form: women often described strategies of action (23/25)—things they did, or avoided doing—while men often described strategies of representation (18/20)—rhetorical devices that they used to reframe their romantic circumstances to bring them closer in line with their material conditions. A second axis of distinction is the temporal horizon of these strategies. One group of graduates mitigates this friction by deploying strategies in the short-term (23/45), which enable them to avoid or postpone compliance with hypergamy ideals. Meanwhile, another group of respondents deploys strategies in the long-term (16/45), managing their behavior, expectations, and narratives surrounding a particular relationship in order to align their lives more closely with the hypergamy ideal or, alternatively, to reduce the salience of hypergamy for their romantic lives. This distinction between short-term and long-term strategies does not cleanly map onto the duration of respondents’ romantic relationships; instead it reflects the temporal horizon they envision when working to manage this cultural friction in the present.

Educated women and short-term strategies: keeping love at arm’s length.

More than half of women in relationships (11/18) manage the tension between their educational status and hypergamy ideals by using short-term strategies that, regardless of how long they have been in a relationship, enable them to maintain their independent and cosmopolitan status. These strategies allow them to keep their relationships at “arm’s length,” allowing them to remain in the city and avoid moving home to live with their families. They also prevent the relationships from becoming more serious, at which point the hypergamy ideal might hinder these women from taking advantage of this residential independence and investing in their goals.

One way to keep relationships at “arm’s length” is to select partners whose life circumstances foreclose the possibility of the relationship progressing to marriage—partners who are already married to someone else or who live far from Kampala, with little expectation of women joining them. These men provide some economic assistance to their girlfriends, enough money to allow them to go out regularly and maintain their appearance, but there is no expectation that the relationship will become serious and involve more time or greater emotional commitment. Seven female respondents described their current relationship as following this type of arrangement, and four additional women described other university-educated women pursuing this strategy. Surprisingly, these women depict their partners’ lack of availability as an advantage rather than as a problem. These low-maintenance relationships allow women to preserve their independence and invest in careers, but also conform to gendered relationship ideals, as their partners operate as providers. Sylvia has been in a long-distance relationship for two years. Her boyfriend, who she met in university, moved to the US to work and sends her monthly “upkeep.” Although they have been together for a long time, Sylvia seems to like their arrangement: “[It is] very comfortable because he is not stressing, he doesn’t command, so I am happy and you know long distance relationships, you can’t start arguing over issues but if someone is close, they observe everything you do.” Sylvia defines this relationship as “very comfortable” because her boyfriend’s absence allows her to fully display her independence without falling under his scrutiny. Like Sylvia, three other women in our sample were dating men who were living or working outside of Uganda.¹

Another example is Diana, who has been unemployed since she graduated and gets most of her income from her married partner. Despite the fact that he seems open to settling down with her, Diana is not interested: “He tells me he wants to settle with me, that’s very funny because he has a wife, okay I just need support from him but in terms of relationships, I wouldn’t take him as my boyfriend.” This passage makes her intentions of dating someone that is not available, but capable to provide for her, very transparent. In this quote, we also gain insight into graduates like Diana’s poignant “need” for financial support (see Mojola 2014); although the money that Diana gets from her partner is used for consumer purchases and dining out, appearing well put together and participating in the cosmopolitan life of Kampala is requisite for maintaining a graduate social identity. Joanita further explains the utility of this type of arm’s-length relationship for graduate women: “The reason why they go for married men [is] they don’t want to be slowed down by men, they want to be able to see their own success. You find yourself being the second wife because you think ‘this man will not take all my energy’… not wanting to deal with a full relationship.” This quote illustrates how these arm’s-length relationships enable educated women to develop their own careers and maintain some autonomy, while also complying with economic hypergamy ideals.

Selecting partners who are ineligible for marriage is not the only way that highly educated women work to keep their relationships at arm’s length. Among women in our sample who are dating “available” men (i.e., not long-distance or already married), almost half describe intentionally postponing marriage and constraining their commitment to their partners (4/10). When Priscilla finished her degree, her family advised her to marry as soon as possible. Yet she explained she wanted to secure employment before getting married: “Because I never studied to get married, I studied to get a job”. Currently, although she is dating a man she describes as “wanting it [marriage] too much”, she resists his efforts to advance their commitment.

In a country where early marriage is predominant, a woman intentionally delaying marriage until she reaches her late 20’s—as these women describe doing—is highly unusual, even for highly-educated women. So why are these graduates in arm’s-length relationships postponing marriage? One common answer to this question is that they feel pressure to find a stable job before marriage, because men are more likely to object to their working outside the home if they try to start working after getting married. For example, Alice, who has been in a relationship for five years, explains: “If a man finds you and you have your job, there is no way he will stop you from working but [if] you get married to him and you start looking for a job, he might say no. That’s why I want to get my job first because when you find me with my job, there is no way you will stop me.” Alice reasons that if she gets married while employed, her spouse will have less leverage to demand that she stay home. Postponing marriage buys women like Alice time to pursue their desired pre-marriage conditions before conforming to submissive ideals. What is puzzling about these narratives is that in reality most of these women have not been able to find jobs at all, and thus the likelihood of them establishing high-powered careers that their husbands might object to is quite low. This suggests that marriage delay is primarily a strategy to preserve the possibility of establishing a professional career and, perhaps more importantly, to maintain independence in the short-term.

Educated women and long-term strategies: The art of performing submissiveness.

A smaller group of educated women who are in relationships (6/18) deploy longer-term strategies to grapple with the frictions between their educational status and hypergamy ideals. What differentiates these strategies is that they enable women to directly deal with the challenges to hypergamy ideals in the “day to day” of their relationships, in contrast to pushing these tensions off into the future horizon. To mitigate the potential for their educational status to threaten their relationships, these women perform the role of the submissive partner, while preserving a more agentic role in the relationship. These women emphasize that submissiveness is a performance—they describe themselves as acting submissive and “letting the man think he is in charge.” Joan describes, “Yah, you are not supposed to act like you know everything, sometimes you have to give them room to decide.” Most female interviewees perceive that being educated is not a problem for men as long as they perform the family role that is expected of them. As Brenda explains, “I think what most [educated women] do is you have to make them feel like he is superior to you. One thing I have realized about men is that they like to be superior.”

One important context for performing submissiveness is in front of guests or distant relatives. Although from the beginning of their relationship Ritah managed to convince her boyfriend to help her in the kitchen, this arrangement dissipates when they are hosting guests in their home: they change their behavior and intentionally adopt a more traditional routine. Ritah explains that her boyfriend cannot perform domestic duties in front of others as a sign of respect: “As a husband, in our society if people are around, you respect your husband. You don’t just treat him like a maid or something.”

Another way of performing submissiveness in serious relationships is to limit the threat of women’s money. Given the importance of maintaining economic hypergamy, women’s money needs to be introduced into households prudently so that it does not threaten these norms. This is executed by earmarking women’s earnings to specific items with little significance for the household, while major household expenses are purchased by the husband. As Sarah describes, “In Uganda I see a man has to evaluate whether a woman could have a job. She doesn’t have to pay any bill if a woman is working, I mean if she is working it’s her money to look nice and hers and her kids, not to run home affairs.” Regardless of whether or not a woman is working, men expect their role as providers to remain unchallenged. By giving women’s money a distinct use and meaning, the threat of women being perceived as breadwinners is reduced.

Underemployed men and short-term strategies: Undesired, not unattainable.

While about three quarters of our female respondents are currently in a relationship, more than half of our male respondents are single and many have been so for several years. Among male graduates, we find two short-term strategies to deal with their inability to fulfill the provider ideal and their resulting prolonged singlehood. Both involve ways of reframing or representing their situations as aligned, rather than out of sync, with cultural expectations. First, about half of single male respondents represent their single status as a temporary state resulting from misaligned marital aspirations between men and women. They describe educated women as wanting to marry and form a family right after they graduate, when they themselves are not yet ready to commit to that type of relationship. In other words, they convey that their inability to date university-educated women is a result of the women being in an irrational hurry to get married, rather than a result of their own inability to provide. As Simon describes, “one thing is that girls get desperate at the time they are leaving university… They get desperate, I don’t know if they think age is catching up with them, but they want to be married that’s the fact.” Some male respondents state that very few women want to be independent and get a job after university; they believe that most female undergraduates instead prioritize getting married. Joseph explains in regards to university women: “Most of them are dating older guys, older guys who are working and what not. Because they hope by the time they finish they can actually get married. That is what they think.”

What is puzzling about these narratives is that they have little empirical support, at least judging from the life trajectories and aspirations of our female respondents. Only one female respondent is married, while others’ relationships vary from cohabitation to low-maintenance dating, and few female respondents described having close friends who are married either. Three of our respondents got pregnant while in university, but none of them got married, an intentional choice for at least two of these women. Further, the majority of women in our sample describe prolonged and intensive efforts to secure stable employment, lasting through years of frustration and financial precarity. As depicted above, many respondents describe intentional efforts to postpone marriage, even when in serious relationships with working partners. The lack of empirical foundation for these narratives suggests that they operate for single men as strategies of representation to deal with the tensions of their current position in the dating scene.

Male graduates also frame their problem as time-limited—they believe they will be in a different economic situation in the future and will be able to fulfill the provider ideal. Several respondents describe how older men earn good salaries and restore their status in the romantic realm, for example, Isaac says, “For men, when you reach 30, you’re more likely to be sought out by young females who are in their early 20s, mid 20s. When you hit 28 they feel you’re a responsible guy… you ought to have done something for yourself and you can fund them.” This conviction, shared by most of our male interviewees, not only works as a short-term relief strategy, but also enables men’s gender ideals to remain fundamentally unchanged. Most male graduates thus do not question the validity of hypergamy ideals; they describe themselves as simply waiting to comply with them when they have secured employment and their female peers have matured and are no longer in such a frenzy to marry.

Second, half of the single male graduates assert that educated women are undesirable marriage partners altogether. This strategy of representation allows them to mitigate the status threat of remaining single by dismissing educated women as potential wives. They claim that university degree-holders are unfit to follow traditional gender expectations as they developed “show-off” or “prideful” character traits while at campus, as Simon and Robert describe in the following excerpts, when explaining why they prefer less educated women:

Simon: “I think it is because you know education also comes along with pride, if it makes me feel better, it increases my self-esteem, then why wouldn’t it increase the woman’s self-esteem? Such a woman believes she should not be stepped on, she can’t be submissive. Biblically and even in the African traditional society it was designed by the society that a woman had to be submissive.”

Robert: The higher [girls] go in terms of education the higher they esteem themselves. They take themselves to be untouchable,.. they don’t even listen, they don’t want to listen. They take themselves to be the same level with the man…Unless the girl came from a very good family, that’s when they can still understand the meaning of the husband or the man. But others once they get books they replace the man with their books yah, and so the man is just a supplementary kind of thing. So I hate that.

These passages reflect the stark contrast that male graduates draw between women’s education and their ability to conform to gendered norms of female submissiveness and male dominance, which both Robert and Simon view as necessary for a successful marriage. By fostering self-confidence and altering women’s expectations for gendered power dynamics within households, university education makes women undesirable as partners for these men.

Underemployed men and long-term strategies: What money cannot buy.

When male graduates are married or in committed relationships, particularly if they come from a lower class background, they often deploy long-term representational strategies to portray their current relationships as conforming with hypergamy ideals. About half of these “attached” male respondents assert that their relationships are non-materialistic. Although these men want to fulfil the provider ideal, they describe their partners as having fewer material expectations than most women. Dennis, for example, feels connected to his girlfriend because “she is not materialistic like she will not want to be with you because you have to buy her something, or because you want to take her out.” He proudly describes how she prioritized their relationship over material needs: “Like I told her next year I want to buy a car, she tells me ‘but do you know what, we start with land and build something that could save us so that we can’t spend much on rent and so on.’ So that’s the support I need.”

By representing their partners as committed to them regardless of financial provisions, men like Dennis reduce the weight of the hypergamy ideal on their shoulders. Kato has been married for six years to a university-educated woman. He expresses that he feels pressure because “she [his wife] comes from a well to do family, she has never worked, so it’s upon me not to bring misery to her.” Indeed, Kato mentions several needs that he failed to sufficiently provide for his family—including a private health clinic for his children and gas for their car. However, he asserts that his wife did not marry him for money, but instead for their deep connection:

“I was lucky that this was my friend and she knew me from childhood… Most people engage in relationships for interests, some maybe wanting to marry into a rich family… Some [relationships] are genuine, people marry because they love each other, they have been friends. But the majority are trying to get quick money.”

When he fails to provide, Kato is reassured by the fact that his bond with his wife is rooted in love, not money.

About a quarter of single male respondents expressed a similar distinction when recalling their previous relationships. Alex provides a clear example of these “non-materialistic love” accounts: “My relationship was truly based on love, because much as later I [provided] from the little that I would get, it was not the biggest point. The biggest point was that I cared and she cared, because there was a time we didn’t have money but we lived on.” In this excerpt, Alex draws a boundary between men who use money to attract and keep their partners and men like him who do not. These narratives thus reframe their inability to fully fulfil the provider ideal as affirming their own self-worth and the quality of their relationships.

Finally, two respondents actually reject the premise underlying the hypergamy ideal. Instead, they depict their relationships as having modern egalitarian characteristics and celebrate the fact that their partners assume an equal share of the financial burden. Marvin, for example, describes his girlfriend as different from other girls because she is hardworking and intelligent, qualities that will be helpful when they get married:

Marvin: With her studying, she is acquiring knowledge and she is going to make money, you are going to make money, you are both going to make money, which is your money, both of you. I mean I have seen my parents build our home together, not saying this is the man or this is the woman who should be contributing…I mean whoever has the money will lend a hand, which makes it better for everyone, your kids also.

This quote illustrates that in part due to his upbringing, Marvin views both himself and his partner as providers for the family. Unlike other male respondents, Marvin portrays her advanced education--and her willingness to assume a “breadwinner” role--as a positive attribute.

While we have focused primarily on gender comparisons, social class background is also an important axis of distinction. Social class background is difficult to neatly categorize in rapidly developing and urbanizing contexts like Kampala, particularly in the case of university graduates, many of whom perceive themselves to have already experienced some degree of class mobility even if they haven’t yet achieved stable employment. We used parental education and families’ difficulty in paying for school fees as rough proxies for social class background. Among women, we did not find much evidence of social class differences in strategies used within relationships. However, most of the women who are single come from a wealthy background. It might be that these women are able to afford being single, without relying on a man’s economic support, or that they are less attractive to men because of their higher economic status, potentially threatening hypergamy norms. The main class difference that we found for men was that respondents who praise their partners for being non-materialistic mostly came from lower class backgrounds. Presumably men in this group see the provider ideal as especially difficult to attain in the near future, thus being more prone to enact long-term strategies to reconcile this economic inability with their romantic lives.

Conclusion

Across contexts, the cultural ideal of hypergamy has historically shaped marriage and romantic relationships. However, rapid educational expansion and a labor market crisis have altered the relative status of men and women, making this ideal more difficult for many couples to achieve. This article examines the cultural frictions surrounding hypergamy trends in Uganda, which recently attained rapid gains in women’s higher education but has also suffered a severe employment crisis for educated youth. We ask: how do highly-educated men and women navigate their romantic lives in a context where a pervasive cultural ideal is misaligned with the structural conditions on the ground?

Our findings reveal that the hypergamy ideal is a source of anxiety for most respondents. Despite evidence that the prevalence of hypergamy has declined markedly in Uganda, within their own lives, men and women cite strong cultural pressure to form partnerships in which husbands have higher status than wives. And yet both groups find their own biographies and current life circumstances to be at odds with these expectations. Educated women navigate tensions between men’s expectations of submissiveness and their own independent self-identities and ambitious career aspirations. Meanwhile, underemployed men struggle to initiate or maintain relationships without the means to materially support their partners.

The strategies that graduates use to deal with these tensions vary according to both gender and temporal horizon. Among women, we find two strategies of action. Some women strive to maintain their independence in the short-term through cultivating arm’s-length relationships and preventing them from progressing to a more serious stage, at which point the hypergamy ideal would become more salient. Another group of women deploy long-term strategies that engage with the routine challenges to hypergamy that occur within their relationships, performing submissiveness and earmarking women’s money to trivial expenditures. In contrast, male graduates deploy strategies of representation to reframe their romantic circumstances and inability to provide in a more favorable light. In the short-term, these narratives enable men to align their singlehood with cultural expectations by either claiming a timing mismatch with educated women or framing them as undesirable marriage partners. Most men in relationships deploy long-term strategies that reduce the weight of the breadwinner ideal on their shoulders, characterizing their partners as non-materialistic and willing to make economic sacrifices.

Respondents also differ in whether they try to overturn or work within the cultural system of hypergamy. Many respondents seek to realign their material circumstances with cultural expectations: both the case of men representing their relationships as “non-materialistic” and that of female graduates performing submissiveness reflect efforts to conform to hypergamy ideals in spite of women’s elite educational status and men’s underemployment. In contrast, a few respondents describe more radical responses, such as the women who try to postpone marriage to preserve their independence or the two male respondents in egalitarian relationships who reject the breadwinner ideal.

These findings show how the cultural system of marriage and intimate relationships is—and is not—transformed by rapid shifts in the relative status of men and women. Although we document cases where respondents reject hypergamy ideals, most respondents describe efforts to conform to this set of gendered beliefs. This suggests a lag between transformations in women’s access to education and changes to the ideational dimensions of the gender system. While their own opinions were often more nuanced, respondents tend to view the opinions and preferences of the opposite gender as reflecting their most extreme versions, those that most closely cohere to the hypergamy ideal. Male graduates describe educated women as being desperate for marriage, while women describe men as intending to “rule them” and not allowing them to work after marriage. These findings support gender scholars’ argument that our perceptions of other people’s gender beliefs tend to lag behind our own, which slows the transformation of gender status systems as we act upon these assumptions (e.g., Ridgeway 2011).

Even as many more Ugandan youth have access to higher education than did a generation ago, university graduates remain a select group, more likely to come from urban and well-off families (Jansson, Bukuluki, and Hojer 2017). Nonetheless, with women’s outperforming men at all levels of school, and with the employment crisis affecting unskilled and high skilled workers alike, the frictions that we document in this paper are likely to be felt, albeit less acutely, by other social strata as well. Although the strategies we document for navigating these tensions are likely to be unique to university graduates, considering the role that the educated elite often plays in driving processes of modernization and cultural change, particularly around issues of gender equity and family life, these patterns may shape family formation behavior among the less educated as well (Caldwell 1980; Pierotti 2013).

As transformations of women’s status relative to men unfold around the world, the findings in this article are likely to be valuable for understanding cultural frictions experienced by men and women, especially where gender systems are simultaneously challenged by men’s declining status and women’s increasing access to power and resources. Although our sample represents the specific case of Uganda’s educated elite, we believe the tensions and strategies experienced by this group can shed light on the implications of status asymmetries unfolding in other contexts. In India, women’s gains in education and employment combined with sex ratio imbalances have generated a profound crisis of masculinity, expressed through surging rates of violence against women (South, Trent, and Bose 2014). In the U.S., where young men’s ability to achieve economic independence has declined and women’s education surpassed that of men, both men and women forgo relationships and instead embrace narratives of self-reliance (Silva 2013). In these and other settings, the ways that men and women manage their romantic lives in the face of gendered ideals that have fallen out of step with structural conditions reveal new insights into the relationship between cultural and demographic change.