She didn’t think it strange at the time, but when solicitor Fiona Thatcher married her solicitor partner Aaron Brooks, she became the third generation in her family to marry someone in the same job.

Her parents are both doctors. Her mum’s parents both worked in the post office. Her dad’s parents both served in the navy.

“I’m a third-generation mono-occupational coupler,” she jokes. Even her husband has pedigree: both Aaron’s parents are teachers.

Asked if she knows other dual-lawyer couples, Fiona replies: “Unfortunately, yes. We cling together.” She tallies 10 couples, including four just in her team at work.

Despite her parents and grandparents both marrying someone in the same job, Fiona never guessed her future husband would be a lawyer.

“I definitely didn’t think, based on my experience at uni, that I would end up with a lawyer,” the 35-year-old says.

“Most law students are introverted and perfectionist and, well, a bit socially inept.”

Unfortunately for Fiona (or, perhaps, fortunately – the pair from the Darlinghurst in Sydney have been married for three years and have a 2-year-old son), the most likely match for a solicitor is another solicitor, according to an ABC analysis of 2021 census data.

Among the married population, the likelihood that a solicitor is married to another solicitor is 20 times that of the general population, according to an ABC analysis of census figures. Put another way: more than 13 per cent of married solicitors have a solicitor wife or husband, while less than 0.7 per cent of married people are married to solicitors.

Provided exclusively to the ABC, the data reveals for the first time our most and least likely matches, given our jobs. It covers over 43,000 job combinations and more than 2.8 million couples (including 31,600 same-sex couples) in Australia at the time of the 2021 census, and over 28,000 job combinations and 1.9 million couples (including about 23,000 same-sex couples) in the 2001 census.

Turns out it’s not just lawyers, doctors or teachers who stick to their own when it comes to love. In 38 per cent of more than 470 jobs held by working couples, the top choice of partner was someone in the same job.

This jumps to 66 per cent after adjusting for workforce sizes (since there are far more, say, truck drivers than barristers).

It’s just one aspect of a broader phenomenon known as “assortative mating”, meaning the tendency to choose partners very much like ourselves. These similarities span a remarkable gamut, from demographic traits like age, race and education, to physical traits like attractiveness, height and body shape, to psychological and personality traits like anxiety, neuroticism and self-esteem.

Fiona says her and Aaron are so similar, it can lead to wild clashes of opinion. She catalogues their similarities: “Physique: skinny twigs. Natures: competitive, stubborn, kind. Politics: both very left wing.”

They both also “very much like to be in control” and each partner reckons they’re “the smartest person in the room, which obviously we can’t both be,” Fiona reasons. 

Luckily, they’re both also “very fair-minded”, she adds.

That a couple can resemble each other so closely on so many levels is striking but not unusual, studies show.

“It’s the most common mating pattern globally,” says Queensland University of Technology (QUT) behavioural economist and senior research fellow Stephen Whyte.

“You see it in every single culture, in every single country. It’s universal.”

Skip ahead to explore more data:

Matchmaker, matchmaker, find me a… mirror

Ranked by percentage, the top 24 of Australia’s most common couples are married within the same job. In the top two jobs – caravan and campground manager, and livestock farmer – more than half of married workers are married to each other.

This comes as little surprise to Tamworth dairy farmer James Wakely. He reckons most farmers he knows are married to other farmers.

“You don’t really meet anyone else,” he says. “Like, the only other people that I could talk to would be other people in dairy farming and it just gets boring … My workplace stories are the same as theirs, so you end up just, sort of, trailing off.”

James met his daycare teacher wife Patricia in a Facebook singles group. Just 86 or 0.3 per cent of Australia’s 27,285 livestock farmers are married to early childhood educators, making them half as likely to marry a daycare teacher compared to the general partnered population.

(Throughout this story, we’ll use the terms “marriage” and “partnership” interchangeably, to refer to a “couple relationship”. In the romantic language of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this is defined as “two people usually residing in the same household who share a social, economic and emotional bond usually associated with marriage.”)

The list of their differences is impressive: James loves movies, especially horror; Patricia “can’t watch movies without getting bored, hates horror,” he says. James likes “good music” especially metal; Patricia “only listens to radio and background noise”. James likes sweet food; Patricia likes savoury. James enjoys dancing; Patricia doesn’t. James drinks coffee; Patricia doesn’t. You get the idea.

“I don’t actually think we have anything in common,” the 33-year-old says.

So what keeps them together? “I reckon it’s probably that she calls me on my shit,” he says.

“And we’ve always got something to talk about.”

The couple have started going on date nights where one partner plans the date in secret and the other has to go along with it. It’s been great, James says. Well, mostly. 

“One time I took her paintballing,” he says. I ask if Patricia had fun. 

He pauses. “I think she enjoyed shooting me,” he says.

Within the married population, nearly three-quarters (73 per cent) of caravan park and campground managers are married to each other, and more than half (57 per cent) of livestock farmers are married to other livestock farmers. (In fact, three of the top five jobs on this list are farmers.)

Also in the top 20 are hotel and motel managers (31 per cent) GPs and resident medical officers (24 per cent) cafe and restaurant managers (23 per cent), funeral workers (22 per cent), dentists (22 per cent) and police (21 per cent).

Tellingly, the highest-ranked exceptions to the same-job rule are still strongly linked by industry or workplace:

• 17 per cent of meat boners/slicers and slaughterers are married to packers, ranked 25th
• 14 per cent of mixed crop and livestock farm workers are married to mixed crop and livestock farmers, ranked 34th (and 13 per cent of livestock farm workers are married to livestock farmers, ranked 46th)
• 13 per cent of surgeons are married to practice managers, ranked 45th
• 12 per cent of waiters are married to chefs, ranked 48th

Adjusting for the size of occupations propels less common jobs to the top of the list. Caravan park and camping ground managers remain in the top spot but are now followed by nurserypersons and funeral workers. All three are more than 600 times as likely to marry their own compared to the general married population.

The first exception to the same-job rule, air transport professionals and travel attendants, doesn’t feature until 104th place (69 times more likely to marry compared to the general married population). This is followed by specialist physicians and anaesthetists (ranked 124th, 54 times more likely to marry).

Census data doesn’t tell us the jobs a couple had when they met, only the jobs they had at the time of the census. But a couple of trends stand out. 

For example, the list of most common couples is dominated by agricultural and nature-focused roles usually located in regional areas. This shows how strongly proximity affects who we marry, according to Dr Whyte.

Regional towns are generally less diverse than cities and most people choose a partner from their immediate pool, he explains. So, if you live in a regional area, the odds are higher that your soulmate will be very similar to you. After all, you can’t fall in love with someone you never meet.

Also notable is that the jobs most likely to stick to themselves are low skilled roles in which people work closely in groups, Dr Whyte adds.

Among same-sex couples, farmers, hotel and motel managers, veterinarians, defence force members, cleaners and police feature among the jobs with the highest rates of in-marriage.

The researchers the ABC spoke to for this story said more research was needed to understand how assortative mating worked among same-sex couples.

The ABC’s analysis suggests female same-sex couples are more likely than both male same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples to partner within the same job: nearly one in five (18 per cent) have a partner with the same job, compared to 11 per cent of male same-sex couples and less than 7 per cent of opposite-sex couples.

Katie and Noriko, from Hamilton Hill in Perth, are among more than 4,600 same-sex couples in which both partners have the same job. Unlike most, however, they’ve had two distinct matching careers.

“When Noriko retired as a graphic designer I asked her if she would like to work with me surveying land and houses. We worked together for 10 years before both retiring,” Katie says. The couple also practise and teach Japanese martial arts together.

Katie tells me they first met on a basketball court at a lesbian event in Japan. It was 1985.

“Somebody got the basketball stuck between the hoop and the board, and I – strange that it may seem – was the smallest person there, so Noriko offered to put me on her shoulders to get the basketball,” the 67-year-old says.

“The strange thing was, neither of us could really speak the other’s language … [But] there must have been something there because we spent about half an hour trying to say one sentence to each other with the help of the old-fashioned dictionary.”

The pair eventually discovered they shared a whole range of common interests despite coming from different cultures and continents.

Nearly one in five female surveyors in same-sex relationships are partnered with another surveyor, making them 115 times more likely to partner compared to the general population. (These figures should be treated with caution, however – there were only 10 such couples recorded in the 2021 census and the ABS adjusts low numbers for confidentiality reasons.)

The data also reveals that our youngest working generations Gen Z and Millennials tend to have the most diverse partnerships.

In 36 per cent of jobs, Gen Z women are most likely to marry or partner with someone in the same job, compared to 56 per cent for Boomer women.

For Gen Z men, the figure is 21 per cent, compared to 35 per cent for Boomers.

University of Melbourne sociologist Belinda Hewitt says the explosion of internet dating means younger couples are more likely to date people who are different to themselves.

“There’s some evidence that online dating opens you up to a wider range of people than you would meet through your social circle or through work or school,” she says.

However Dr Whyte says it may be because younger generations are concentrated in low-skilled and casual roles. These offer less job stability, so also less opportunity to find a partner in the same job.

“I see it with my 20-year-old son. He’s constantly changing jobs and job roles because he is at the mercy of his employers and a growing casualisation of low-skilled roles.”

Female CEOs marry other CEOs. Male CEOs marry office managers

In more than half of jobs (56 per cent), the most likely match for working women is someone in the same job.

Not so for men. Among men, the figure drops to 34 per cent – with some of the most noteworthy exceptions to the “same-job rule” among high-status professions.

Take chief executives. In 2021, 13 per cent of female CEOs and managing directors were married to another CEO or managing director, making this their most likely match. (Advertising, PR and Sales Managers came a distant second, at just under 4 per cent.)

Male CEOs, on the other hand, were still more likely to marry an office manager (7 per cent) or general clerk (6 per cent), with CEO or managing director scraping in third (4 per cent).

The story is similar with general managers. Female general managers are most likely to marry a CEO or managing director, followed by a general manager. Male general managers are mostly likely to marry a general clerk.

Same again with surgeons: women surgeons are most likely to marry another surgeon, while male surgeons are more likely to marry a practice manager or registered nurse, with surgeon coming in sixth.

One explanation is the persistence of gender norms that have historically encouraged women to “marry up” the social ladder, while men tended to marry across or down.

“It is still fairly common for men to ‘marry down’, especially if they have particularly high status,” says Professor Hewitt.

“It might be that someone in that managerial area is actually looking for someone who will be more of a homebody, be the one to work part time.

“It’s about somebody else picking up all those other bits and pieces in your life,” she says.

It’s also a numbers game. It’s hard to marry a female CEO or surgeon because there just aren’t that many of them. In the 2021 partnered population, male CEOs outnumbered female CEOs three to one (36,237 v 11,108). The ratio among surgeons was nearly five to one (3,779 v 820).

But the landscape is changing. Other high-status jobs like lawyer and doctor have seen some of the biggest increases in women workers since the 1970s – and likewise, the biggest leaps in same-job matching, University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Christine Schwartz says.

This massive influx of women into numerous professions has fuelled the rise of a new dominant couple type: the dual professional.

Schwartz’s own study of job matching among US couples found the percentage of dual-professional couples nearly tripled between 1970 and 2015-17.

The trend is similar in Australia. In 2021, more than half (51 per cent) of professional men were in dual-professional couples, up from 38 per cent in 2001, the ABC analysis found. The share of every other dual-class couple either fell or remained constant over this period. (Australia’s workforce has changed a lot over 20 years, so this comparison combines broad job groups.)

“It used to be that male doctors would be more likely to marry nurses. Now, there’s been huge rises in male doctors being married to female doctors,” Professor Schwartz says.

But this is by no means typical of every job class or profession. In many jobs, the gender imbalance remains deeply entrenched.

“High-status professionals have experienced the most rapid occupational gender desegregation,” Professor Schwartz says.

“There’s a lot more occupational segregation in jobs like plumbers, childcare workers, electricians.”

The least common couples span the class divide

Mechanic Jason Hamilton might not describe it as “occupational segregation” but he sure knows what it is. Asked whether the idea of marrying another mechanic had ever appealed to him, he first seems confused, then bursts out laughing.

“I can honestly say it’s never crossed my mind,” the 28-year-old says. “There’s just not that many female mechanics … I don’t think I’ve ever even met one.”

His story checks out. In 2021, 89,079 of Australia’s 90,793 motor mechanics – that’s 98 per cent – were male, according to census figures.

Jason met his solicitor wife Marlee Viero on Tinder in 2017. The couple from Preston in Melbourne are among just 95 mechanic-solicitor couples in Australia. (All involve a male mechanic and female solicitor.)

“You know what’s funny,” Marlee says. “I know two other couples the same as us and all the wives drive a Toyota Yaris.”

Marlee says she cancelled on Jason twice before they managed to go on a date.

“There was something about him that made me shy because I am not a shy person at all. I think it was his confidence, the way that he was so forthcoming,” the 32-year-old says.

That confidence was a refreshing change from past experience. “Certainly I found that when I was dating, a lot of men were intimidated because I am outgoing and I’m a lawyer. I think a lot of them are like, ‘Oh no, that’s too full on’.”

The couple have completely different hobbies and interests, Marlee says. “He’s very outdoorsy and loves camping and fishing … That’s not really my idea of a fun time.”

But if there’s one thing that highlights their different worlds, it might be this: “Jason went from knowing no lawyers to knowing … 50 of them,” Marlee laughs.

Just 0.45 per cent of Australia’s 21,000-or-so female solicitors are married to a motor mechanic, making solicitors three times less likely to marry a mechanic compared to the general partnered population.

It’s consistent with the ABC’s analysis, which suggests the rarest couples tend to straddle the class divide.

Take labourers, for example. A labourer is more than three times as likely to marry another labourer and 1.6 times as likely to marry a machinery operator or driver, but roughly half as likely to marry a professional or manager.

The ABS adjusts low numbers in the dataset, making it impossible to distinguish between very few couples and zero couples. However, a list of some of Australia’s least likely matches drives home the point:

• Truck driver and GP or medical resident
• Retail manager and livestock farmer
• Sales assistant and GP
• Commercial cleaner and management and organisation analyst

Experts contacted by the ABC didn’t know of any Australian research on the topic. But evidence from the US suggests “assortative mating in the upper socioeconomic classes … is actually becoming stronger,” according to Professor Hewitt.

This raises tricky questions about class mobility. If marriage has traditionally been the golden ticket to upward mobility, is greater equality within marriages coming at the expense of greater equality between classes?

A 2014 study led by University of Pennsylvania economist Jeremy Greenwood calculated that assortative mating accounted for roughly one third of the increase in income inequality in the US between 1960 and 2005.

However, Professor Schwartz says those findings aren’t backed by the broader evidence.

“Surprisingly, most of the research seems to suggest that that hasn’t been the case but I’m not sure we fully understand the reasons.”

Her own research found that job matching within US couples accounted for 5 per cent of the increase in income inequality between 1970 and 2015-17.

Nearly all the changes in job matching were explained by changes in the gender balance of occupations – most importantly, the rise of women in professional occupations. “Because of this, the contribution of occupational assortative mating to the rise in economic inequality has been small,” Schwartz and her co-authors wrote.

“There are more dual-professional couples because there are more professional women. It’s not that people are matching differently,” she told the ABC.

Love, according to an economist

This leads to one of the most important pieces of the puzzle, according to researchers: availability.

In terms of job matching, the odds that you’ll meet and marry someone in the same job are higher in today’s marriage market thanks to the increase in female workers (and that a majority of people are in opposite-sex relationships).

Availability interacts with proximity to explain why couple similarity is strongest on demographic factors, such as age, race or ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, says QUT’s Stephen Whyte.

“It’s really unlikely that you’ll see a billionaire marry a pauper,” he says.

“It’s not that poor people are choosing that they want to marry poor people and rich people are choosing to marry rich people. Most people just don’t search outside their pool.”

This also shapes desire and attraction. “The more often I’m around a particular group, the more likely I am to find those people attractive,” Dr Whyte says.

Marrying when we’re older has also increased the odds of partnering with someone similar.

“People marry later, which means … they’re not meeting people in high school, where you get lots of different classes mixing,” says economist Robert Breunig, director of Australian National University’s Tax and Transfer Policy Institute.

“They’re meeting people in jobs or at university where you’ve got more homogeneity in who you’re running into.”

In other words, as we become older, our social circles become less diverse.

But there’s more to it than availability and proximity – the nature of marriage has also shifted.

Professor Breunig explains the magic of marriage like a true economist. “Households are like economies,” he says.

“It makes sense for people to specialise and trade in the same way Australia and China produce different things and … trade with each other, and that makes both of them better off.”

For a range of reasons, including biology, women became specialised in domestic work while men brought in the money, he says. That division of labour underpinned the opposites-attract view of marriage.

“It made sense then to marry someone who was different than you. You were trying to cover different spheres of activity,” Professor Breunig says.

Cue a monumental shift in the broader forces that shaped the traditional view of marriage. Among them, birth control, the influx of women into education and work, the narrowing of the gender wage gap, and the emergence of domestic technologies such as the washing machine.

All these changes brought wives’ and husband’s spheres closer together. A modern view of marriage emerged that emphasises similarity.

“When you do something with the children, you both want to do the same thing with the kid. When you watch Netflix together, you both want to watch the same thing. When you travel, you both want to go to the same kind of places and do the same kind of activities,” Professor Bruenig says.

“We want to marry people who are similar to ourselves, not different.”

Canberra public relations professionals Peter O’Rourke and Laura Griffin are a shining beacon of that sentiment.

Pete tells me they met at the student bar. Laura corrects him: “We actually met in the line to get our IDs for the uni. I thought Pete was hot and was looking out for him all over campus. He doesn’t remember meeting me there at all.”

The pair, who have been together since they were 18, are an assortative mating researcher’s dream. They have the same age, job, religion, education and ethnicity (a mixture of Irish, English and Germanic/Austrian). They’re both creative, arty types. They’re both night owls. They’re both social. They share similar worldviews and have the same values around social justice and openness to new experiences. They achieved exactly the same university entrance score when they finished high school.

But wait, there’s more. Over the past 17 years the couple have unearthed some “really strange links”, given they didn’t go to school together and didn’t even grow up in the same part of Australia, Pete says.

“Turns out my great aunt and Laura’s great grandfather lived on the same street in Vienna, Austria,” Pete says.

“On the Irish side, our grandparents were in the same social circles in Melbourne. My grandmother used to play the cello and Laura’s grandparents attended her house for recitals.”

Their fathers went to the same school in Melbourne, only one year apart.

And last but not least, their first hotmail addresses were ‘digitalgrub’ and ‘bugeyes’.

“It kind of does have one of those things that feels like fate,” Pete says.

Maybe it is fate. Maybe it’s just creepy. Or maybe it’s demography.

“Demography is the most powerful matchmaker,” says ANU demographer Liz Allen.

There are plenty of exceptions to the rule but research shows that couples who are “socio-economically compatible” are more likely to last, she says.

“[They] experience lower levels of conflict and lower levels of power differential”, she says.

“You’re more likely to succeed in a relationship if the socio-demographics align – more so than the stars.”

This is the first in a series of data stories looking at how we choose our partners. Future stories will examine how couples match (or not) when it comes to religion, ancestry and education. If you have a story you’d like to share, please get in touch via inga.ting@abc.net.au

Credits

Data and reporting: Inga Ting
Development: Katia Shatoba and Thomas Brettell
Design, development and audience love stories: Brody Smith
Fact checking: Mark Doman

Notes about this story

• The Australian Bureau of Statistics makes small random adjustments to cell values to protect data confidentiality. These adjustments may affect some totals and percentages
• Low numbers means data for same-sex couples was not available for many jobs. The ABC has included as much data as was considered reliable
• Analysis in the story excludes job pairs with fewer than 20 couples and/or jobs with fewer than 1,000 workers in the dataset
• Percentages are calculated as a share of people who stated an occupation
• The ABS uses “Not further defined (nfd)” when enough information exists to partially code a response, but not have enough to code it to the most detailed category.
• Audience love stories have been edited for clarity and length. These were collected from responses to this ABC story.
• This story defines the generations according to the following age groups: Gen Z = 15-24 years, Millennial = 25-40 years, Gen X = 41-56 years, Boomer = 57-75 years, Silent = 76 years and older