Status and Divorce

The girl-bosses are calling the shots

Alice Evans

wrote about status and gender inequality and how they relate to hetero relationships. She presented data from several countries in support of a few assertions one of which is: “If men’s self-esteem and social respectability is contingent on them dominating their wives, they may purposefully keep them economically dependent or else beat them into submission.” For instance, she presents data from Abigail Weitzman which shows that “Indian women who have more education or higher earnings than their husbands have the highest likelihood of frequent and severe violence”.

However, she also cites divorce data from the US which shows that “when the wife earns more than the husband, these couples are more dissatisfied and more likely to get divorced.” While she doesn’t misrepresent anything about those results, I think it’s important to note how not symmetric this observation is with the data on Indian marriages mentioned above (or much of the other information she presents). As I asked in my earlier post on Feminism and Status “Is it the men being uncomfortable with their wives having high status or the women feeling that they can do better? Without doing the requisite research I’d guess probably both.” Well, I’ve now done the requisite research.

In that post, I mentioned that divorces are typically initiated by women, citing Michael Rosenfeld’s research¹ which found nearly 70% of breakups of hetero marriages were initiated by the wife. I suspected that if you looked at breakups of marriages where the woman has higher socioeconomic status (in terms of education and recent earnings) that, if anything, you’d see an even higher chance that the woman was the one who initiated.

The data in the study I linked to comes from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together (HCMST) surveys. The original data set came from five waves of surveys conducted between 2009 and 2015. There’s now a new survey, HCMST 2017, which has conducted 3 waves (so far) between 2017 and 2022. I was able to analyze both data sets to look at the percentage of breakups of hetero marriages initiated by the woman in general vs. when she has various markers of absolute and relative status. All of the data files used (as downloaded as well as converted to csv), my python scripts to organize the original and latest survey data, and the excel files containing the summaries are available here.

To simplify the data organization task I only looked at breakups of marriages that were ongoing during the first wave of data collection (e.g. I wouldn’t count a marriage from the original HCMST data that started in 2011 and ended in 2014), so I missed a few of the breakups relative to what Michael presented - I counted 86 breakups of hetero marriages from the original HCMST data vs. 92 in his paper.

Note that even though this seems to be the largest US data set with breakup initiation information, and in particular my combined analysis is based on a larger sample than anything else I could find, the absolute number of breakups is still quite small. Also note that the prob. of breakup is not normalized for the number of years since marriage or the length of the study - so if you look at the table for just the 2009-2015 data in the footnotes below you’ll see a higher probability of breakup because the study covered a longer period. The below table summarizes my results.

Table shows combined analysis from the HCMST data from the 2009-2015² (5 waves) and 2017-2022³ surveys (3 waves). Note that lower relationship quality scores mean better relationship quality.

As I expected, in relationships where the wife has high absolute or relative status she is even more likely to be the one who initiates the breakup. It’s certainly possible that relatively high status women leave in part due to feelings of resentment from their husband over their success. But it’s also possible that they themselves feel resentment towards their husband for not being higher status himself and/or feel more comfortable leaving the relationship because their high status affords them better than average prospects for a new relationship. I’d bet there’s some of both going on but I’d probably put more weight on the latter.

While norms are changing and women are contributing a much larger percentage of family household incomes now vs. decades ago, both men and women still view the burden of supporting a family financially to be an important requirement for a man being a good husband/partner.

Parker, Kim, and Renee Stepler. "Americans see men as the financial providers, even as women’s contributions grow." (2017).

So, while I think the idea that men react negatively to a partner having high status can be true in America, and is certainly true in obviously misogynistic and patriarchal societies globally, in contexts where women have equal rights and economic opportunities it’s not likely to be so one sided. There are sex differences between men and women that will impact relationship dynamics for hetero couples, and one of those, which arises from differential mating strategies and costs, is a greater relative expectation for the male partner to provide.

Of course in our modern, gender equal environment this isn’t always a relevant requirement, and I think men can fulfill the “provide and protect” role in non-financial ways (e.g. I know hetero couples where the woman makes more but the man is very handy or otherwise able to “take care of things” in ways that compensate for the financial difference). But I think it’s important to recognize that it’s not just men who want the husband to be higher status than the wife, women on average also want to be with men that have higher status than them.

1. Rosenfeld, Michael J. "Who wants the breakup? Gender and breakup in heterosexual couples." Social networks and the life course: Integrating the development of human lives and social relational networks. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018. 221-243.

2. Rosenfeld, Michael J., Reuben J. Thomas, and Maja Falcon. 2018. How Couples Meet and Stay Together, Waves 1, 2, and 3: Public version 3.04, plus wave 4 supplement version 1.02 and wave 5 supplement version 1.0 and wave 6 supplement ver 1.0 [Computer files]. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Libraries.

Table with only the 2009-2015 data (note that there is a higher prob. of breakup relative to the 2017-2022 data because the earlier dataset covers a longer period):

3. Rosenfeld, Michael J., Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen. 2023. How Couples Meet and Stay Together 2017-2020-2022 combined dataset. [Computer files]. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Libraries.

Table with only the 2017-2022 data: