GOLD-DIGGERS have had the right idea all along. Your position in society, measured by income and status, depends mainly on who you marry, new research shows.

Social mobility — whether people remain in the same class and income bracket into which they were born — is mainly explained by marriage, the study says. When “like marries like”, people tend not to be socially mobile.

The research by John Ermisch, professor of economics at Essex University, describes the phenomenon of marriage between people with similar education and financial backgrounds as “assortative mating” or “homogamy”.

It suggests that between 40% and 50% of the explanation for close links between parents’ incomes and those of their children in later life lies with marriage.

Tom and Fiona Roberts fit the bill for “like marries like”. They met through friends and live in London.

“We both had a public school education and we both went to fairly traditional universities, I went to Durham and he went to Cambridge,” said Fiona, 29. “We both come from North Yorkshire and both had really good friends in common.

“If you married someone from a different background then you would feel judged, assessed and analysed, because you would be a novelty. People are quite sensitive and if, for example, they hadn’t had the same privileges then they would feel quite threatened.”

Tom, 31, an accountant, said: “I never really considered marrying anyone else. I lived in Russia for quite a long time and although Russian women are wonderful, I often thought how big the cultural divide was and how difficult it would be to make a relationship like that work.”

The paper outlines how marriage has been an important factor in social stratification for centuries. More than 200 years ago, Jane Austen described the emergence of a marriage market in London and Bath, widening the pool of suitable matches for upper-class parents.

A 1940s study of working-class families in London found a close correlation between marriage partners, not just in income and education but also pre-marital experience of sex.

The research suggests that the “like marries like” phenomenon survives, despite dramatic social change in recent decades.

Ermisch and his colleagues found that couples in Germany were more likely than their counterparts here to have spent the same number of years in education and to have similar education levels. They attribute this to the Germans streaming children in school on ability between the ages of 10 and 14. Most surveys suggest that Germany, despite a rigid labour market, is more socially mobile than Britain.

In both countries, however, marriage is key. “With just under half of one’s social position attributable to the process of who marries whom, assortative mating appears to be a major factor in the intergenerational transmission of economic status,” says the report, to be published in the Royal Economic Society’s Economic Journal this week.

Patricia Morgan, of the think tank Civitas, said it was natural for similar people to marry, but men and women had different objectives: “Women on the whole tend to marry up; they want a man who is wealthier, has a higher status than they do. Men tend to marry down.

The reality is that women want the man to be the primary earner.”

However, Paula Hall, a relationship psychotherapist at Relate, the counselling service,said marriages between people from different backgrounds were sometimes problematical. “It’s to do with sharing common territory,” she said.

“We know that some level of compatibility is important. So if we’re with people of a similar social status and background, it helps us to belong.”

Rodger and Caroline Ashcroft broke the “like marries like” rule. They met on holiday in Lanzarote in 1997, subsequently married and have two boys, Toby, 6, and Louis, 1.

Rodger, 56, comes from a working-class background in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, where his mother brought him up alone after his father left when he was six months old.

Caroline, 45, was raised in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. Her father was a company director and she went to private school. The couple live in Cambridgeshire, where he runs a recruitment consultancy and she heads the online dating company, Cybersuitors.

“We met on holiday so there was no way of telling what his background was, apart from the accent,” she said. “Whenever we met after the holiday, we went to nice places; I think he was trying to impress me.

“I was in London, he was in Skegness; it was quite a way in before I went to Skegness and met everyone. He was a bit nervous when he met my family — he normally swears a lot but on that occasion he didn’t.”

Rodger said: “Even though I came from a single parent background it never affected me. I’m not one of those people who carries the world on his shoulders because of it.

“We’re in the middle ground. We’re easy-going with each other and we know how to deal with people from the top of the tree to people at the bottom.”

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