Nicola J. Standish’s research while affiliated with California State University, Sacramento and other places

The relationship between women's employment and the risk of divorce is both complex and controversial. The role specialization (or interdependence) view of marriage argues that the gains to marriage for both partners decrease when both are in the labor force, and hence women's employment destabilizes marriage. In contrast, the economic opportunity hypothesis asserts that female labor force participation does not intrinsically weaken marriage, but gives women resources that they can use to leave unsatisfactory marriages. Here we use data from the two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households to conduct the first large-scale empirical test of those conflicting claims. Our results provide clear evidence that, at the individual level, women's employment does not destabilize happy marriages but increases the risk of disruption in unhappy marriages.

Marital status life tables were calculated using 1995 US rates of marriage, divorce, and mortality. Compared to figures for 1988, the proportion of persons surviving to age 15 who ever marry remained fairly steady at about five-sixths of all men and seven-eighths of all women. The average age at first marriage rose substantially: to 28.6 years for men and 26.6 years for women. The probability of a marriage ending in divorce changed little and was .437 for men and .425 for women. It is likely that no US period or cohort will ever have half of all marriages end in legal divorce, though the highest cohort may reach 47 percent. Patterns of marriage and divorce observed since 1970 show the effect that cohabitation continues to have on the American family, where it is delaying, but not replacing, marriage. Copyright 2001 by The Population Council, Inc..