The Relationship Between a Working Woman and Divorce

Women's relationship with work and marriage are often connected, because women are the foundation of their household and ensuring the stability of both financial and personal positions impacts their decisions long-term, but is their professional life a direct consequence to the rise of the divorce rate? According to Kerby Anderson in his Theological dissertation, "Economic opportunities also seem to be a significant factor in divorce. The rise in divorce closely parallels the increase in the number of women working. Women with a paycheck were less likely to stay in a marriage that wasn't fulfilling to them." Working women are more independent than housewives without employment and the incentive for staying in an unhappy marriage is no longer there. After determining these factors, we have to look at the benchmark results of women's participation in the work force and the divorce rate statistics as shown on the graph below. The two graphs are independent of each other to show separate actual trends.

squitano.googlepages.com/chart1.pdf
Table 1: Data source taken from the U.S. Census Bureau

squitano.googlepages.com/chart2.pdf
Table 2: Data source taken from the U.S. Census Bureau

The divorce rate spiked in 2003 and started a steady climb showing a 29% increase from 1995, but looking at the gradual increase of employed women versus the number of unemployed women over a ten-year span, we can say that the percentage of employed women only increased about 13% in 2005 from 1995 and the number of unemployed women increased about 10%. Based on these statistics, it seems as the married woman in the work force is a strong factor in divorces, but after further evaluation of both issues in Table 3, the growth difference of divorced employed women is about less than 10% between 1995 and 2005.

squitano.googlepages.com/chart3.pdf
Table 3: Data source taken from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics