How Your Workplace's Sex Ratio Affects Your Chances of Divorce
More temptation, higher divorce rates
Just a quick one today, as I’m heading to Taiwan for a holiday. A few weeks ago, I came across a fascinating 2018 paper which argued that the more the sex ratio of your workplace is skewed toward the other sex, the higher your chances of divorce. This is presumably due to the greater availability of potential alternative partners. As you might expect, the effect is stronger for men than for women, albeit only slightly. The graph below shows the relevant data.
The paper is by Caroline Uggla and Gunnar Andersson, and was published in the journal Biology Letters. Here’s the abstract:
Work from social and biological sciences has shown that adult sex ratios are associated with relationship behaviours. When partners are abundant, opportunities for mate switching may increase and relationship stability decrease. To date, most of the human literature has used regional areas at various levels of aggregation to define partner markets. But, in developed countries, many individuals of reproductive age spend a considerable amount of time outside their residential areas, and other measures may better capture the opportunities to meet a (new) partner. Here, we use Danish register data to test whether the sex ratio of the occupational sector is linked to divorce. Our data cover individuals in Denmark who married during 1981–2002 and we control for age at and duration of marriage, education and parity. Results support the prediction that a higher proportion of opposite-sex individuals in one’s occupational sector is associated with higher divorce risk. This holds for both men and women, but associations are somewhat stronger for men and vary by education. Our results highlight the need to study demographic behaviours of men and women simultaneously, and to consider partner markets beyond geographical areas so that differing strategies for males and females may be examined.
You can read the whole paper here for free.
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