Texas readers may have heard the results of a new study which showed that when husbands are not able to be the primary earner of the family unit, there’s a greater chance they will get divorced. The study on this facet of divorce was performed by Harvard sociologist Alexandra Killewald. Surprisingly, the men were more likely to get divorced even if the family was not suffering financially.
The study was recently published in the American Sociological Review and analyzed both marriage and divorce data. The data was composed of 6,300 couples from 1968 to 2013. The researcher’s goal was to learn about some of the main predictors of divorce, which included wives’ income, husbands’ income, the amount that the spouses shared in the distribution of household labor, as well as overall finances. She also sought to see how these predictors may have changed over the course of time.
She learned that prior to 1975, whether a husband was employed full time did not necessarily predict his chance of divorce and that divorce risk was connected to how much the wife shared in doing housework. If women only did 50 percent, they were more likely to get a divorce than women who did, say, 75 percent. An easy conclusion to draw is a sociological one — women at this time were expected to be homemakers, taking care of children and home and, when they did not fulfil that societal expectation, marriages suffered because of it. She also learned that in marriages after 1975, when the husbands were unemployed or had only part-time employment, they experienced greater chances of going through a divorce than men employed full time.
When a couple decides to move forward with getting a divorce, often times immense conflict and emotional trauma may ensue — especially when children are involved. For this reason, it is prudent that any person considering divorce speak with a skilled Texas divorce attorney. A dedicated family law attorney can inform the person of their legal options, provide helpful guidance and protect the person’s rights.
Source: fusion.net, “How unemployment affects men’s chances of divorce“, Taryn Hillin Via, Aug. 1, 2016