Marriage | Statistics

Highly Educated Women Are More Likely To Ask for Divorce and Other Myths That Need To Die

A message from a reader led to a deep dive on divorce.

Discussing love, marriage, and divorce touches on a lot of emotional strings. It makes sense that people argue so passionately. Love is supposed to be effortless, marriage is supposed to last forever, and divorce is always somebody else’s fault.

How we think about love, marriage, and divorce reflects not only our worldview but our personal experiences. Divorce is painful even when it’s ultimately for the better, and processing what happened isn’t always a straight path. It can lead even the most clear-headed to hold on to biases and distorted views, to misinterpret data, and to repeat fallacies because it makes them feel righteous.

I recently received a private message from a reader with a few arguments on marriage and divorce that made me stop and think. I’m used to receiving replies to my stories, but when a reader takes the time to email me, or in this case, track me down on social media to leave a direct message, it hits differently. There are always echoes of an emotional connection in a message like this.

I replied to this reader in private, but the most important points he held on to deserve further scrutiny, and a public discussion. To get as clear a view of society as we can get, however, we need to put passion aside, look at the data, and bust some myths.

Divorce hurts men more than women

I get this comment a lot: men fear getting married because they stand to lose more from divorce. They lose money as marital assets are divided, and have to pay alimony and child support for children they hardly ever get to see. And as men lose, women win. They win the children, the family house, and a fat paycheck to go along with it. Women get to dictate the rules, and men get to foot the bill, or so the argument goes.

If you’re looking for a TL;DR to this data-driven piece, this is it: divorce hurts both men and women but in different ways. Women tend to suffer greater financial disadvantage. For starters, recently divorced women are more likely than recently divorced men to be in poverty, at a rate of 20% against 11%.

Men suffer in the parenting department since they are less likely to receive full custody of their children, but as we’ll see in a moment, that has more to do with private agreements between the parties than court bias.

Divorced men suffer a higher risk of early death than divorced women, and also suffer from the expectation that they should be providers and don’t need alimony, or that they’ll always land on their feet no matter what. It’s a lot of pressure to take, and it can lead to resentment.

The bottom line: divorce is an ugly business. However, a few myths just have to be busted if we ever expect to see a clear picture.

Highly educated women are more likely to ask for divorce

Women initiate 90% of all college-educated divorces. You must have heard that number before, it’s everywhere. Here, and here, and here.

This piece of data is often distorted to suggest that college-educated women make for bad wives, or that marrying a college-educated woman leads to a 90% chance of divorce, which is simply not true, as multiple sources confirm.

This is a matter of understanding percentages. According to a report by the United States Census Bureau, college graduates have a divorce rate of about 29.7%. To say that out of those 29.7% of marriages that end in divorce 90% are initiated by women is a far cry from saying that marrying a college-educated woman gives you a 90% chance of getting divorced.

The fact is that college-educated couples are the least likely of all to get divorced. Ever. The same report by the USCB found that the divorce rate for first marriages is nearly 20 percentage points lower for people with a bachelor’s degree compared to high school graduates.

A 2021 study found that college-educated couples were 70% less likely to dissolve their marriages compared to couples without a high school degree (for a cohort married between 2010–2014).

Looking at a 2021 report from the USCB, 33.7% of divorced women had a high school degree or less, while 66.3% of divorced women had at least some college education up to a graduate degree. Out of the married women, 28.6% had a high school diploma or less, and 71.3% had at least some college education up to a graduate degree.

According to the Pew Research Center (2015), college-educated women had an 8 in 10 chance of seeing their marriages last for at least 20 years. So, contrary to what the Red Pills try to tell you, the more educated your wife is, the higher the chances that your marriage will last.

In short, as multiple studies show, higher education and marriage do go hand-in-hand.

The courts are biased against fathers

The implication is that the judicial system is biased against men in favor of women, who get to keep the kids and receive a supposed fortune in alimony and child support, but when you look at the data, mothers are often awarded custody by mutual agreement between the parties, reflecting a larger cultural trend of seeing women as the “natural” primary parent.

Concern about gender bias in court rulings isn’t new. As early as the 1980s (and possibly even earlier) there have been studies on gender bias in the court system. In the state of Massachusetts, a 1986 study by the Gender Bias Study Committee found that the vast majority of cases are decided by mutual agreement, giving primary custody to the mother. However, the fathers who did go to court for custody received joint or full custody 70% of the time, and “the courts hold higher standards for mothers than fathers in custody determinations.” Every mother who has ever been asked who will watch the children knows what that feels like.

Additionally, divorcing mothers are less likely to be able to afford legal representation and more likely to accept an unfavorable agreement on alimony and asset division to avoid a long, dragging process, either because they can’t afford it, or because they’re trying to get away from an abusive husband as quickly as possible.

If you think 1986 feels like an eternity ago, let’s take a look at recent data. In 2018, the proportion of custodial parents who were fathers raised to 1 in 5, from about 1 in 6 in 1994. In recent years, only about 4% of all custody cases went to trial, the remaining are still decided by mutual agreement, of which only 11% required mediation.

Awarding custody to the mother seems to reflect a cultural trend where mothers are perceived as the default primary parent from the moment the child is born. In her book Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (2007), Pamela Stone details the many factors that influence highly educated, high-earning women to quit their jobs to become stay-at-home mothers. Among these factors, there’s what she describes as a “default deference” to the husband’s career as the most important one, even though the wives make just as much money or about the same amount and enjoy their work just as much as their husbands do.

Even more telling is the tendency these couples have to deduct the cost of childcare from the wife’s paycheck. According to Stone, these women find it hard to justify working when childcare consumes 90% of their paycheck. The fact that they’re not calculating how much childcare costs out of the pool of family earnings reflects how childcare is still perceived as a mother’s problem to solve.

If it “just makes sense” that a mother will stop working instead of spending 90% of her paycheck on childcare, it also “just makes sense” that the children continue under their mother’s care after a divorce. It’s likely that this mindset, combined with the perception that family courts are biased against fathers, discourages men from asking for joint custody.

Fortunately, fathers have been spending more time with their children both during the marriage and after the divorce. Joint custody is becoming the preferred arrangement for divorced parents, reaching 34% nationwide in America in the 2010s. However, it’s not clear if these agreements are rising due to the pressure from mothers for their ex-husbands’ to take up an equal share in parenting, or if divorced men have started to ask for more time with their children — and they’re getting it.

Women benefit financially from divorce

No, they don’t.

While men’s income after divorce rises on average about 30%, women who worked prior, during, and after the marriage experience an income decline of about 20%. Additionally, the poverty rate for divorced women is about 27%, nearly triple that of men.

Yet, the myth that getting married, having children, and then getting a divorce is akin to a smart business move for women persists. Let’s look into that.

According to the Pew Research Center, in 2023 the the median earnings for wives were $35,000 while husbands earned a median of $65,000. However, in about 29% of marriages, both spouses earn about the same, 55% have the husband as the primary or sole breadwinner and 16% have a breadwinner wife.

According to the same research, in marriages where both spouses earn about the same, that amount tends to hoover around $60,000 — $62,000 a year each. In marriages where the husband outearns the wife there tends to be a bigger discrepancy, with husbands earning a median yearly income of $96,000 and the wife $30,000. In marriages where the wife is the primary earner, she earns a median yearly income of $88,000 against her husband’s $35,000.

While alimony and child support may increase a woman’s take-home pay, now she has to take care of what used to be shared expenses all on her own. Taking care of what used to be a combined $120,000-a-year household with anything from $30,000 to $60,000 a year is certainly a difficult task.

She may be awarded the house while her ex has to move to a one-bedroom rental apartment, but with the bigger house comes higher expenses, as well as everything that being the custodial parent entails (and that child support doesn’t always cover).

It’s not uncommon for divorced women to be forced to sell the family home and move out after a couple of years on their own. If she was a stay-at-home mother at any point in time, then good luck getting employers to overlook the 2, 5, 10-year gap on her resume.

According to the United States Census Bureau, in 2017, only 69.8% of custodial parents who were supposed to receive child support received either full or partial payments, and the percentage of custodial parents who should have received child support but received none reached 30%.

You read it right. Women tend to be the majority of custodial parents (about 80%), but the lucrative paycheck they supposedly receive every month is just not coming their way. Besides, according to the same report by the USCB, the mean amount of child support received by the custodial parents who did receive at least some of it was $4,912 a year, or 12% of their mean personal income. That’s $409 a month. Ca-tching. Jackpot.

In 2021 I interviewed five women whose financial situation worsened after they got divorced. One had lost $500,000 because her husband borrowed money without her knowledge, and another was on welfare due to her ex-husband failing to pay child support. All five told me they didn’t consider for a second if they would benefit financially from the divorce. They knew they wouldn’t. All they wanted was to get out of a bad situation and start rebuilding their lives.

It makes sense that men tend to see an increase in income after a divorce, especially when they’re not the custodial parent. With the ex-wife continuing to provide most of the childcare, these men have more time and energy to rise in their careers. Yes, it’s sad that this higher earning potential comes at the cost of spending less time with their children, but at this point, it’s worth remembering that men who ask for joint custody tend to get it.

Divorced men are also more likely than divorced women to remarry, which allows them to once again combine efforts with another earning adult, and/or benefit from the unpaid work performed by a woman.

One area where the courts do seem to have a bias against men is when the wife is the highest earner and the husband asks for alimony. The law states that alimony is gender-neutral, meaning that it’s calculated based on who earns more, not on what gender they are. Nevertheless, judges often scrutinize men more harshly than women when they ask for spousal support, all on account of the gender expectation that men should be the breadwinners.

Divorce is brutal, but sometimes necessary

Most people who get married don’t think they’ll ever get divorced. On your wedding day, all you think about is living happily ever after.

Divorce hurts men, women, and children, but sometimes it’s necessary. When all a couple can do is make each other miserable, or when one partner is abusive, divorce becomes the only option. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It can be beneficial from the perspective of rebuilding one’s mental health, but that doesn't mean there aren’t other consequences to account for.

Fortunately, both marriage and divorce rates have declined, which implies that couples are thinking more seriously than ever before committing to one another for life, and even more before bringing children into the world.

Let’s hope that the future brings about happier couples and better-structured families.