Abstract: The research on gender and period differences in status exchange between family background and education in marriage not only reveals the changes in social and gender inequalities from the perspective of marriage matching，but also allows us to evaluate the impact of heterogeneous marriage changes on society. Existing research has neglected gender and period differences in status exchange. This paper uses the 2018 Chinese Family Panel Study and applies log-linear models to analyze the gender and period differences in marriage across social origin and education boundaries from 1978 to 2018. The results show that persons with higher education but humble family backgrounds tend to marry those with lower education but more privileged backgrounds. This supports the status exchange theory. In addition，data from 1978 to 1991 show that it was more common that women exchange their relative educational advantage for men’s relative birth advantage. In all，the exchange tendency has intensified over time，and this increase is more reflected in the exchange of men’s educational advantage for women’s class advantage. However，the intensity of women exchanging their relative educational advantages for men’s relative birth advantages shows a trend of first decreasing and then increasing. At the same time，the gender differences in the degree of status exchange faded over time. With the decrease in the number of children overall and the increase of one-child families，China’s marriage culture has gradually shifted from patrilineal marriages to “dual lineage” marriages，which may be an important reason for the gradual convergence of the influences of male and female family backgrounds in the marriage market.

Key words: status exchange, assortative mating, gender, periods