Monday, March 5, 2018

Female Success and Male Reactions

One thing Oscar-winning actresses, victorious female political candidates, and female CEOs all have in common: the divorce rates for all of them rise after their success. The divorce rate of similar men does not rise.

Presumably related: husbands earn more than their wives at a much greater rate than what would be caused just by the usual gender imbalance in wages.

I should note that nobody knows why women are more likely to divorce after a big success. Some of it could be, "now that I'm the Senator/Oscar winner/boss, the first thing I'm going to do is ditch my obnoxious husband." But people generally assume that male resentment is that the root. This seems likely to me, although I freely confess that other people's marriages are an utter mystery to me, so I would certainly not be dogmatic.

Interesting comment from Indra Nooyi, long-married chief executive of Pepsi:
From my perspective, my mom says, 'Leave the crown in the garage.' I don’t think I could have balanced all of this had I brought my crown into the house every day. And would I have liked to have brought it in? No, not at the expense of my marriage and my children.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

My general impression is that it usually takes two people to make a marriage fail, so I'm not sure that one can speak of the men as a group or the women as a group being the "cause" of these marital failures.

That said, I would think that anyone who's liable to make a great, Oscar-level success of themselves is probably pretty hard to be married to. Maybe more wives of successful men are willing to play to second fiddle to a great career, than husbands of successful women.