Unemployment Linked to Divorce Rates and Gender

In a new investigation, experts wanted to test the connections between unemployment, gender and divorce rates. After completing the research, the team was surprised to learn that women who had a better job than their men were more likely to initiate divorce.

In other words, women who had a lower socioeconomic status than their men tended to remain in the marriage, while the males were the most likely to initiate divorce. This ratio apparently changes with the salaries each of the two make.

The person with the largest paycheck – regardless if it's the man or the woman – is the most likely to initiate divorce if it comes down to it. Researchers say that the work highlights the role shifts that take place in today's families.

A similar change is being observed at the workplace as well, with more and more women starting to be paid better than men. These social changes are also influencing divorce rates, researchers at the Ohio State University (OSU) discovered.

Even so, men are still expected to be the main contributors to a household's budget, regardless of the fact that women demand equality in all regards. When these expectations are not met, and the women in these relationships make more than their men, the probability of a divorce occurring spikes.

At the same time, the work showed that unemployed women were a lot less likely to push forward with the necessary papers than employed ones. Interestingly, the same was not true for men. Their likelihood of leaving a marriage remained constant despite their partners' employment status.

The datasets, assembled between 1987 and 2002, followed some 3,600 couples, who were all a part of the national Survey of Families and Households. OSU investigators Liana Sayer, PhD, designed and led the investigation, PsychCentral reports.

“These effects probably emanate from the greater change in women’s than men’s roles,” the OSU team writes in a paper to be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Sociology.

“Women’s employment has increased and is accepted, men’s nonemployment is unacceptable to many, and there is a cultural ambivalence and lack of institutional support for men taking on ‘feminized’ roles such as household work and emotional support,” the team concludes.