 actually improve and stabilise marriage.
In both the United States and Britain, women with college degrees or good jobs are now more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than women with lower education and earnings. As a whole, employed women still divorce at a slightly higher rate than full-time homemakers, not because working hurts their marriage but because they have more resources to leave a marriage that goes bad.
But a recent study in the US has found that today, unlike in the past, marriages tend to become more rather than less stable when wives enter the workforce. And the divorce rate of American college-educated couples, most of whom have dual-earner marriages, is half that of couples with a poorer education (a high school degree or less).
However, the "independence effect" still prevails in societies where women have made less progress in equality. In Italy and Japan, the higher a woman's level of education, the more likely she is to forgo marriage.
And it's not just the educated and high-earning women who are spurning marriage. |
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| Unlike in the past, marriages tend to become more rather than less stable when wives enter the workforce |
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Overall marriage rates are lower in Spain, South Korea and Japan, where men are less willing to share housework and childrearing, than they are in the US and Britain.
When women in countries with low levels of equality do marry, they are much more likely than American or British women to express dissatisfaction with marriage.
The women's movement in the West has helped to make marriage a matter of choice. It has also made marriage more satisfying when men can be persuaded to abandon their traditional roles. In fact, men with egalitarian ideas are less likely to end up divorced than traditionally-minded men. Those in egalitarian marriages also report higher marital quality.
Finally, researchers report that the move toward more egalitarian marriages has yet another benefit, one that might help convince even some traditionalist husbands to rethink their ways. Wives whose husbands share housework and childcare say that they more often feel "in the mood" for sex. Sounds like more equality is a win-win situation for both genders. 
FIRST POSTED DECEMBER 22, 2006
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