Chart of the Day: Career Women Are Good for Marrying

If you were anywhere near a computer in August 2006, then you'll probably remember Forbes editor Michael Noer's argument that career women are the worst kind to get married to:

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced

But here are a couple of charts that suggest otherwise from a new working paper by Zvika Neeman, Andrew Newman, and Claudia Olivetti of Boston University. The first shows the divorce rate per 1,000 people (red) and the female labor force participation rate in the U.S. (blue) between 1960 and 2000. As the participation rose from 50 to 60 percent between 1980-2000, the divorce rate fell:

The next chart plots the divorce and participation rates across 49 states in 2000. There's a strong downward trend for divorce rates as the participation rates goes up. A 10 percent participation rate advantage across states is accompanied by a 20 percent lower divorce rate:

These charts show correlation, not causation, but what explains the relationship? The researchers theorize that:

...relative to their non-career counterparts, career women display greater selectivity in the search for marriage partners and greater flexibility in sharing the benefits of a marriage with their partners. Greater selectivity implies that career women will be older when they first marry and that their marriages will be of higher average "quality," possibly making them less prone to breakup.

But when you control for age, the negative relationship between participation and divorce rates remains, suggesting there is something going else on as well:

Greater flexibility implies that it is easier for two-earner families to re-adjust the intrahousehold allocation to compensate for changes in outside opportunities, making marriages more resistant to "shocks." Our evidence shows that both effects may be playing a role in generating the trends the trends.

In other words, if a married woman gets a better "offer" from someone else, the marriage can still survive because the husband has the ability to transfer some of his earnings to his wife. This doesn't happen literally with the man giving his wife $20 enticements. But the ability to purchase the sorts of services that housewives used to perform (e.g. housekeeper for cleaning or a nanny for taking care of a baby) makes it easier for working couples to stay together.