Download Why Is It Women Who File for Divorce? An Explanatory Model and

An Explanatory Model
and Empirical Test
on French Data
Jean-François Mignot
Laboratoire de sociologie quantitative (CREST / INSEE)
Observatoire sociologique du changement (Sciences Po / CNRS)
Summary
 Observation
 In most societies and couples, it is mostly women (not
men) who file for divorce
 Question
 Women lose the most in divorce, so why do they file?
 Suggestion
 It’s the type of marital dissatisfaction women feel that
leads them (not men) to file for divorce
 Empirical test
 data from a French national sample of divorced women
between 1970-1982 (N=1,888)
It’s mostly women
who file for divorce…
 Whatever the period:
 18th century: Massachusetts (US), Cambrai (France),
Neuchâtel (Switzerland)
 19th century: Massachusetts & New Jersey (US),
France, Belgium, Germany (Baden & Saxe), Finland,
Romania
 Exceptions:
 Scotland (from 1684 to 1830, & in the 19th century)
 England and Wales from 1861 to 1920, i.e. as long as
women’s access to divorce was legally restricted
% of divorce petitions
filed by the wife
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
1830
1850
1870
1890
1910
France
1930
England-Wales
1950
1970
1990
2010
It’s mostly women
who file for divorce…
 Whatever the country in the 20th century:
 US, Australia, England-Wales, Scotland, Sweden, Finland, the
Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, West Germany,
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Greece
 Czech Republic, Poland, Soviet Union & maybe Russia
 China, Japan, Singapore (whether Christian, Hindu or
Muslim divorces)
 Brazil, Mexico
 Togo, Mali, South Africa
 Exceptions: Italy in the 1970s, Switzerland since the legal
reform of 2002
It’s mostly women
who file for divorce…
 Data: divorces in France in the 1970s, in Mexico in
2000-2005, in Poland in 2005
 Whatever the spouses’ ages or marriage duration
 Whatever the spouses’ educational levels or social class
 Whether the wife works or not
 Whatever the couple’s number of children
 Wherever they reside: big or small city, or countryside
It’s mostly women
who initiate breakups
 Women do not just file for divorce, they also initiate
breakups:
 They are less satisfied with their marriage
 They think about the possibility of filing for divorce
earlier than men
 More than men, they initiate the discussions that lead to
filing for divorce in married couples
 More than men, they initiate separation in cohabiting
couples
Women lose more in divorce
 From a financial viewpoint
 Divorce lowers women’s living standard more than
men’s
 From the viewpoint of their P(remarriage)
 Divorce lowers women’s probability of remarriage more
than men’s
Question
 Women lose more in divorce than men
 financially and for remarriage
 And still women file for divorce more often than men
 Whatever the period, the country & the type of couple
 How come? Are women irrational? And men?
An explanatory model
 The literature on divorce initiative pinpoints several
mechanisms affecting divorce filing,
 but none of these mechanisms can explain why in
general it is mostly women who file for divorce
 Need for a new model
An explanatory model II
 In marital relationships,
 men place more importance than women on sexual
gratification, i.e. frequency of sexual relations (Schmitt et al.
2001; Schmitt 2003)

When dissatisfied in their relationship, men’s best solution for
(sexual) dissatisfaction consists of complementing the relations they
have with their spouse with extracurricular relations → men don’t
initiate divorce
 women place more importance than men on emotional
gratification, i.e. intensity of emotional relationships
(Thompson & Walker 1989)

When dissatisfied in their relationship, women’s best solution for
(emotional) dissatisfaction consists of leaving their spouse in hopes
of finding one more fulfilling → women do initiate divorce
An explanatory model III
 This model fits with the literature on women and
men’s differences in preferences
 men are less satisfied than women with the sexual
dimension of their relationship (Christopher and
Sprecher 2000; Thornton and Young-Demarco 2001),
they commit adultery more often(Christopher and
Sprecher 2000), and their ideal number of sexual
partners is greater than women’s (Schmitt 2003; for a
review of this literature, see Schmitt et al. 2001)
 women are less satisfied than men with the emotional
dimension of their relationship (Rhyne 1981)
An explanatory model IV:
predictions
 When dissatisfied,
 Women initiate a break-up
 Men have extracurricular sexual relations
 When initiating the breakup, women do it for emotional
reasons
 → when there is emotional dissatisfaction in the couple, it’s
more often than average women who should initiate the
breakup
 When having extracurricular relations, men do it for sexual
reasons
 → when one’s spouse gets old (less desirable), it’s more often
than average men who should have extracurricular relations
An empirical test of this model
 Data: INED survey "Women and the Changing Family,“
with 1,888 couples who divorced in France between
1970 and 1982
 Variables of interest:
 Legal: “Who between you and your ex-husband initiated
the petition for divorce?”
 Nonlegal: “Who between you took the initiative to no
longer live together?”
An empirical test of this model:
descriptive statistics
 Divorce initiative: 2/3 of divorce petitions for divorce were initiated by
women (18.1% by men, 15.3% by both), & 69.4% of separations were initiated by
women (18.5% by men, 12.1% by both spouses)
 Extracurricular relations: at the time of separation the man "knew" another
woman in 43.3% of couples, whereas the woman only "knew" another man in
14.2% of couples
 divorce petitions filed by women are more often motivated by misconduct
(adultery) than those filed by men, & the spouse found guilty of having
committed misconduct in the marriage is more often the man than the woman
 Impact of emotional dissatisfaction: the fact that the spouses no longer get
along (before their divorce) increases the % of petitions filed by women (from
54% to 67%) and reduces the % of petitions filed by men (from 31% to 17%)
 Impact of sexual dissatisfaction: a wife's aging increases a husband's relative
chance to have extracurricular sexual relations (from 74% to 87%) more than a
husband's aging increases a wife's relative chance (22% to 25%)
An empirical test of this model:
multivariate models I
 Discrete-time event-history models of the initiation of
divorce and separation
 "all things being equal," the fact that the spouses no longer
get along (proxy for decreasing emotional gratification)
multiplies by 2.759*** the chances that the woman (not the
man) files for divorce
 "all things being equal," the fact that the couple no longer
gets along multiplies by 2.899*** the chances that the
woman (not the man) initiates the separation
 Controls: ages of the spouses, period, length of marriage,
woman working outside the home or not, man
unemployed or not
An empirical test of his model:
multivariate models II
 Logistic regression models for which spouse knows a person with
whom s/he intended to live at the time of separation (proxy for
adultery)
 Controls: ages of the spouses, period, length of marriage, woman
working outside the home or not, man unemployed or not
 "all things being equal," a spouse’s aging (proxy for decreasing
sexual desirability and activity) increases the probability that the
man rather than the woman will engage in extracurricular sexual
relations
 each additional year that a wife ages tends to multiply by 1.220***
the chances that the man (not the woman) knows at separation a
person with whom he intends to live, whereas each additional year
that a husband ages "only" tends to multiply by 1.133*** the chances
that the woman (not the man) knows at separation a person with
whom she intends to live
Conclusion
 Thesis: women (not men) file for divorce because …
 the type of marital dissatisfaction women tend to feel
(emotional) leads them to wish to replace their unsatisfying
spouse, while
 the type of marital dissatisfaction men tend to feel (sexual)
leads them to wish to add a lover to their unsatisfying spouse
 Empirical test on France, 1970-1982
 When a couple no longer gets along it is women (even more
than usually) who initiate divorce & separation → emotional
dissatisfaction indeed leads women, not men, to file
 When a couple ages it is men (even more than usually) who
have extracurricular relations → sexual dissatisfaction
indeed leads men to not file for divorce but have
extracurricular relations
Thank you
Spouse who filed for divorce, based on whether or not
the spouses still got along at the time of divorce
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
Both
50%
The husband
The wife
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
The spouses still got along
The spouses no longer got along
% of “adultery” at separation committed by the man or
the woman, by the age of their spouses at separation
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
Percentage of adultery committed by the
husband rather than by the wife, by age of
the wife at separation
50%
Percentage of adultery committed by the
wife rather than by the husband, by age of
the husband at separation
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
15-24
25-29
30-34
35-39
40-44
≥ 45
Spouses who, at the time of separation, knew "another
person with whom they intended to live"
Only the husband
40%
Only the wife
11%
Both spouses
3%
Neither spouse
46%