80 Percent of Women Don’t Initiate Divorces — It’s A Lot More Complex Than That
The devil is in the detail, and this detail tells a very important story
A popular statistic that gets thrown around is that 80 percent of divorces are initiated by the woman. The figure appears to have come from Michael Rosenfeld’s study — Who wants the Breakup? Gender and Breakup in Heterosexual Couples — which the majority of those who use the figure link to as their source.
However, it should be noted that the study — which looks at a few thousand divorces in the US — actually found that in 69 percent of cases the woman was the one who did the petitioning for it, so it doesn’t actually show 80 percent.
In terms of where the 80 percent figure came from, my assumption is that perhaps people mistakenly took the 90 percent figure for college-educated women included in the study, and the 69 percent overall figure, and came to 80 percent, which would be wrong if they did; or perhaps they are just linking to the wrong study.
Who knows, but it does seem to be incorrect as it appears when it comes to the US, the research more consistently shows the numbers to be more 60 to 70 percent, with closer to 60 percent being the most consistent figure.
So, when it comes to divorce, it is more likely that in approximately 60 percent of the cases it is the woman who initiates it, not 80 percent.
Given further credence to 60 percent being the most likely true figure is the fact that the ONS in the UK consistently shows that when it comes to petitioning for divorce, it is 60 percent women who do the petitioning versus 40 percent men.
Whatever figure you go with, one thing is clear, women are more likely to petition for divorce than men. The question is why, especially if you consider that outside of marriage, men and women are equally as likely to initiate a breakup.
It’s not because women are less likely to be happy in marriage than men
It’s really popular to try to say that the reason women are more likely to initiate a divorce is because marriage benefits men more than women, and so women are more likely to want to get out. I’m not going to lie, when I first heard this figure years back, my first assumption was this.
However, there is no real evidence anywhere to say that this is actually true. The majority of the evidence overall shows that there is little difference when it comes to likely satisfaction or not in marriage between men and women. At least not to the point that it would lead to women being more likely to file for divorce than men. Yes, there are ways where marriage favours men, but there are also ways where marriage equally favours women.
With this in mind, it begs the question why are women more likely to file for divorce? To find the answer, I spoke to a friend of mine who works as a divorce lawyer, and asked her why women were more likely to file for divorce, and she schooled me that it was inequality, but not in the way that I had thought.
Divorce favours women
There are two trains of thought, marriage was initially built to make a man stick around and provide for a woman and any children they should have, and marriage was built to ensure a woman gave a man sexual loyalty i.e. so he would know any children they had were his. The truth is it was actually most likely constructed for both purposes.
What this means is marriage in itself has always benefited men and women equally but always in different ways. Even before there was marriage, unions between men and women existed, these unions were basically an early form of marriage and many believe these unions have existed potentially for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. Again, they benefited men and women equally but in different ways.
However, one area that has always been to the benefit of men is that if they wanted to leave, it was easier for them to survive than for a woman. This is why in cultures like Egypt and Rome along with the majority of other ancient societies, even though divorce was legal, it was always much more costly for a man to initiate one than for a woman.
Divorce for men was not the end, but for many women, it could be. Many argue that this is why divorce was gotten rid of, because if a man divorced a woman, it was much more difficult for her to survive. So, a popular train of thought is that the reason that Christianity along with the Muslim faith and others decided that couples could no longer divorce, was actually to stop men abandoning women rather than the other way around.
Regardless of the reasoning, the fact is whether you go back to ancient societies where divorce was allowed, or whether you come to modern societies where divorce is again allowed, one thing is clear, since the dawn of marriage, societies have always made it cost more for a man to get a divorce than for a woman.
How modern society makes divorce more costly for men than women
When explaining why women were more likely to file for divorce than men, to express her point, my friend asked me a question. She said:
“If you earned more than your partner and you knew that divorce would cost you a large amount of that money, would that influence whether you chose to get divorced or not?”
In the majority of relationships, there is a financial imbalance, and it is on the male side. They typically earn more than their partners, so if they get divorced it typically costs them more financially.
It should be noted that being with a partner that earns more money than you can make it more difficult to leave them i.e. if you become dependent on those earnings, but if you are not dependent i.e. you could survive on your own, divorce will cost you less financially than your partner.
That means financially speaking, divorce normally costs a man more than it does a woman, which inevitably makes men less likely overall to initiate a divorce than women. And it is more than just that.
My friend explained it to me like this, she said over her career she has dealt with many men who had left their wives, but never filed for divorce. My friend told me that this happens because they hope that by delaying the divorce, they will have to give up less money.
That means many men leave their wives but do not file for divorce, the women do it, my friend said most often in absolute exasperation at their partner’s failure to do so. This reality distorts the divorce figures when it comes to men versus women initiating them, making it seem like women initiate more divorces than they actually do.
And it is not just finances that distort the figures, there is another reason.
The child factor
My friend put it to me like this:
“If you knew that divorce could cost you full custody of your children, would you be as likely to want a divorce than if you knew you would get full custody, or at worst that you would be named primary carer in a joint custody deal?”
It’s virtually a guarantee in every country on the planet that in the case of divorce, the woman will get named the primary carer and the man will get secondary visitation rights. Even when custody is shared, more often the woman ends up the primary carer — after all, kids cannot keep bouncing between houses forever.
This is not because the fathers do not want to be involved. For example, in the UK 10 percent of children do not live with both of their parents, and the vast majority live with their mothers, and the vast majority of their fathers in these cases want to see their kids more but are unable to.
These factors matter when it comes to who is more likely to end a marriage. To explain, one of the big reasons men are more reluctant to divorce than women when children are involved, is simply because they know that a woman will get the kids, and as such probably the house. This of course does happen in the majority of cases, in all countries.
After all, if you have kids, when you divorce you want to keep normality as much as possible, so allowing the kids to stay in their home with the mother simply makes sense.
This makes men — when there are dependent children involved — less likely to pursue a divorce — even if they want one. Also, it again makes men less likely to petition for one even if they have ended the marriage. My friend put it to me like this:
“Often men, if they have children and they have left their wife, do not petition for divorce. This is because as long as they remain married, they retain full custody of the children so can just turn up whenever they want to see the children. But the moment the divorce goes through, in most cases they become secondary carers and so from then on will need permission from the mother.”
Final words
The reason women are filing for divorce more than men is that divorce is highly unequal and favours women. My friend best put it to me like this:
“Imagine if overnight the law was changed and men got to be primary carers of children in the case of divorce, would women still be the most likely to initiate divorce then?”
That’s why women are more likely to divorce a man than the other way around. Until we change the system around divorce, and especially provide more equality when it comes to children’s rights, marriage is likely going to favour women more than men, because men are on average going to be more trapped in marriage than women — especially if there are kids involved.
That’s wrong and needs to change, and as a lifelong believer in equality, and feminism, if there is to be equality between the sexes, it has to change.
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