Financial stress and fights over money can eat away at a marriage. But do they cause divorce? That’s a more complicated matter. A Harvard University study suggests that neither financial strains nor women's increased ability to get out of an unhappy marriage, starting in the 1970s, is typically the main reason for a split. The big factor, Harvard sociology professor Alexandra Killewald found, is the husband's employment status. For the past four decades, she discovered, husbands who aren’t employed full time have a 3.3 percent chance of getting divorced in any given year, compared with 2.5 percent for husbands employed full time. In other words, their marriages are one-third more likely to break up. Examining 46 years of data on more than 6,300 married couples in the U.S., Killewald found a big shift in the risk of divorce in the mid-1970s. Couples married before 1975 were likelier to split up if women and men divided the housework equally, perhaps because the husband saw a threat to his traditional role in the household. Since 1975, housework hasn’t been much of a factor. The guy's job has. The study, published in the American Sociological Review, didn't include same-sex couples. Nor did it address men who choose to stay home with the kids. The vast majority of men without a full-time job in the sample were involuntarily unemployed. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...vorce-on-money-ask-did-the-husband-have-a-job Study: http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/aug16asrfeature.pdf
