On the one hand, it follows that as women‟s socioeconomic status improves, well-educated women may be less confined to marrying the typical breadwinner male partners, who tend to be older and better educated than themselves, and instead have a wider range of choice of potential partners. In turn, a trend toward educational hypogamy may become more prevalent as women move up the social ladder. On the other hand, it is also possible that high living costs in modern societies not only make women‟s earnings valuable in a marriage but also cause a continued reliance on men‟s economic resources as a key criterion for establishing a family, and thus hypergamy still prevails.