14 ms·
Men Without Full-Time Jobs Are 33% More Likely to Divorce
- realjhol 4y agoIt's very weird watching believers in the blank slate hypothesis, collide with reality again and again. In general women are hard wired to being attracted to healthy, high status intelligent men, with access to resources, and good personal hygiene. Fortunately for men, these are all things guys can do a lot to cultivate and build through concerted effort. It's really no different to the things most men find attractive in a women. We can tell whether a women is "hot" instantly. This notion of challenging the expectations of society, or redefining gender roles is largely nonsense. You can't redefine the things men are going to find attractive in women, no more than you can redefine the things women are going to find attractive in men. It's a little odd that anyone is even surprised by this outcome. That's liberalism- I guess
- amanaplanacanal 4y agoIt's really hard to tease out differences caused by culture from differences caused by genetics. This has nothing to do with "liberalism", science is just hard when it comes to human behavior.
- realjhol 4y agoI agree the science is hard to do, but most people who have ever encountered women don't need a scientific studies to discover things that are blatantly obvious. Generally speaking, Women are attracted to men who are above, or at least across from them in status hierachies. Men who are unfortunate enough to lose status become less attractive to many women, increasing the risk of divorce among women who are unscrupulous. Liberalism makes a virtue of ignoring things that are obvious (challenging stereotypes, breaking down stigma etc.), by pretending that they don't exist. This leads to surprises when mundane reality reasserts itself.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nedt 4y agoSo in the past I've worked 33h/w instead of 38.5h/w. Soon I'll go 35h/w to get an afternoon with the kids or some time for a workout. That will make me more likely to divorce? I think the opposite is the case.
- netrap 4y agoThe definition of full time is also changing slowly, right?
- t-3 4y agoAny of the hours OP listed are legally full time. Part time is less than 32/week.
- nedt 4y agoHere the full-time is defined by the collective bargaining agreement, which in my case is 38.5h/w (and you must take one 30 minutes break). Anything less is part-time.
- TheHappyOddish 4y agoThat highly depends on where in the world they are.
- red-iron-pine 4y agoWhat are you getting paid per hour? I'm sure my wife won't complain if I'm working only 20 hours a week at $250/hr. But if you're only pulling $25/hr cutting out 10 hours a week is a significant dent in total earnings. Plus you have kids, and workout -- both uses of your time that I'm sure your spouse probably approves of. You're not working 30 hours a week and then playing competitive Yu-gi-oh for another 30, non?
- nedt 4y agoSurely not 250/hr. But then US wages and what you get in Europe can't be compared just by numbers. Had always been earning to go along easily. Which is also the reason why reducing weekly hours a bit is possible. But also the article says it's not about the earnings at all. But then also talks about widening the husband and father role, which is not done by getting more man into full-time, quite the opposite.
- yieldcrv 4y ago> Two thirds of divorces are initiated by women, even though their chances of remarrying are slimmer than their ex-spouses’. The framing here is flawed, it suggests that being in a state of marriage is a goal. That only holds up in the earlier mentioned "government incentive to have intact families" perspective, but it is devoid of acknowledging the individual motives.
- joemazerino 4y agoI guess the overton window has shifted enough that a major publication simply writing about Men's issues makes me content.
- wkjagt 4y agoI quit my full time job a year and a half ago, so my wife could pursue her dream career, I could spend more time with the family, take care of the house, be there for the kids when they get home from school, do some hobby projects for myself, have dinner ready when my wife comes home from work etc etc. Everyone is happier. If anything, I feel we're _less_ likely to divorce thanks to this change.
- DeadMouseFive 4y agoThis is the way. House husband is a great role in society and we need to let men do it more without shaming them.
- bradlys 4y agoIs all the financial responsibility on your wife then or did you quit your job because you had ample savings/FIRE?
- cableshaft 4y agoYou may enjoy "The Way of the Househusband" on Netflix. It's a comedic slice of life show about a former Yakuza member who takes the intensity of his former life into domestic life and scares and confuses people he runs into because they assume he's still in the Yakuza. There's an anime and live action versions, although I prefer the anime myself. I'm not really a Househusband, I still have a fulltime job, but I do most of the cooking and cleaning and errands, so I related to it a lot. https://www.netflix.com/title/81261669 https://www.netflix.com/title/81261669
- theGnuMe 4y ago[flagged]
- deafpolygon 4y ago33%! > These days guys who have jobs have a predicted divorce probability in the next year of 2.5%, whereas the same guys who do not have a probability of 3.3%. That’s a third higher. I feel that's a bit misleading, isn't it? In the grand scheme, it's 1 extra divorce per 100 (25 per 1,000 or 33 per 1000).
- rk06 4y agoSo, I would be less likely to divorce if I sell my billion dollar business and start a full time job at local McDonald? These kind of bullshit statistics presented as news must be stopped. Yes, I read the full article. And it was full of guesses and theory but not much substance
- GalenErso 4y agoDoes this control for wealth? Plenty of successful but "jobless" entrepreneurs living off passive income.
- klyrs 4y agoYou say "plenty" but I doubt that such folk are statistically significant in the population.
- htag 4y ago> One thing is clear. It’s not because under-employed guys make less money; the figures didn’t change no matter how much they made. “When I show that husbands’ lack of full-time employment is associated with risk of divorce, that’s adjusted for income,” says Killewald. “It’s not how high earning he is.” Maybe you missed this in the article.
- bsder 4y agoI wonder if this is conflating very different groups. You have Group A men with not enough money and financial stess. And Group B men with "plenty" of money and extra time. A "Group B" man is the kind of man who is likely to have lots of resources for cheating which is likely to lead to divorce.
- deafpolygon 4y agoThis is so wasted on these men. If I had plenty of resources, I wouldn't waste my time on cheating, or marriage.
- czbond 4y agoEvery successful founder I've known cannot stay away from starting another business or following a new passion creation.
- Overtonwindow 4y ago"But Killewald’s study, which will be out in the August issue of the American Sociological Review, disputes that suggestion: “My results suggest that, in general, financial factors do not determine whether couples stay together or separate,” she says." I am curious, does the myth that rich men will marry poor women, but rich women will not marry poor men, apply here?
- ip26 4y agoMyth? The research over the last decade has born it out.
- epicureanideal 4y agoIs that a myth? Staying together is different than forming a couple in the first place. If they don’t ever become a couple they wouldn’t break up.
- paxys 4y agoI'd be interested in reading this study, because for a long time it has been conventional wisdom in this country that problems with a family's financial situation is the top cause for divorce.
- unixhero 4y agoConfounding factor? They are not submissed into wage slavery, to fight for a marriage which is not working.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoMy thoughts exactly. If working part-time is my conscious choice, I might as well have a similarly conscious attitude as to who I want to be with.
- htag 4y ago> One new study of 6,300 heterosexual couples Why are major sociology studies done with such small samples? I understand that if everything is done correctly a relatively small sample can strongly reflect a population. However wither someone has a full time job or not (1099 or W2) is reported to the IRS, and marriage/divorce records are public. Why are government departments not collaborating with academic institutions publish these types of insights?
- sidlls 4y agoAssuming proper control for biases in the population, a sample size of 6300 is not tiny. The estimated error for such a population is going to be around 1% (give or take).
- htag 4y agoIt's just that 1. Sampling and self reporting introduces many concerns to the validity of the study. Let's not downplay the negative effect these can have. 2. It's expensive to collect consent and data. 3. Federal grants often fund these studies. Tax payers are essentially paying to collect the same data twice.
- projektfu 4y agoThat's true assuming the sample is not biased. I'd be interested to see a kaplan-meyer curve for the two groups.
- ellisv 4y agoMost government departments don’t have research in their mandate and are underfunded/staffed.
- htag 4y agoThis type of record collecting and academic collaboration might be a good responsibility for The Library of Congress.
- 4y ago
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoUnder employed and unemployed men are less likely to be the primary breadwinner of the household. Pretty much all the formulas and tables that divorce courts use to determine how hard of a financial fucking a man gets deliver much less of a fucking if the man is being out earned by their spouse so there's less incentive for under-employed men to "fix things". While state laws different and some states are pretty equitable about divorce enough aren't that it should show up in statistics.
- notch898a 4y agoProbably a lot of this to it. When I got married the amount the state expected for any kid went from a pretty standard computed amount of 20% (30% post tax) to more like the ~10% post-tax it actually costs me to take care of the kid without mandated support (which still affords them quite a generous lifestyle). There's no rational reason why the kid is always gonna need 3x the money if you're not married, yet the courts say it's so dire a need to spend 3x the money for unmarried couples if you don't pay it you go to jail.
- tomrod 4y agoThis shows up as greyed out for me -- I think the means downvoted? If so, that's a shame, as this really comment really intuits and susses out a reasonable hypothesis based on incentives.
- darth_avocado 4y agoIs it surprising though? Regardless of how far we’ve come in terms of viewing gender roles, the society still expects men to provide. Most women don’t prefer marrying down, while men are okay with it and that is a fact. And when married men do not have stable jobs, most women get additional pressure from people around them, friends, family, etc.
- nobodyandproud 4y ago> Most women don’t prefer marrying down, while men are okay with it and that is a fact I’ve seen this once: Trophy husband (college buddy) to a high earning wife. They are still happily married though I don’t keep in touch. More common: I’ve met Ivy League women (or similar, very smart) who’ve underachieved in their career, who wouldn’t marry down. They asked me if I knew anyone but thin pickings in the 40s: I know guy, but he’s in the milita…nope.”
- senttoschool 4y agoThe more successful a women is in her career, the fewer dating options she has. The opposite is true for men. Another issue is that college educated women do not prefer to marry non college educated men. This is a problem because there are way more women in college than men. The best place to be for successful women to find a mate is Silicon Valley where the gender ratio is so messed up. There is a joke that women in the Bay Area have a “49er attitude”. A 4 who thinks she is a 9 because of the abundance of successful and intelligent men.
- antisthenes 4y ago> The more successful a women is in her career, the fewer dating options she has. This is a result of their own sky-high standards and unwillingness to date/marry down. The same is not true for a man. > There is a joke that women in the Bay Area have a “49er attitude”. A 4 who thinks she is a 9 because of the abundance of successful and intelligent men. Isn't this also true nationwide due to dating apps, skewing the perception of successful and attractive men on the apps as the new "average" ?
- user249 4y agoNow do men who work at home
- red-iron-pine 4y agoa lot smaller of a demo, plus a fluctuating one at that, as we are slowly going back to offices i'd imagine they do better tho, since they're more often white collar jobs, full-time jobs, and generally more lucrative than some on-site ones. hubby hides out in the basement for 7.5 hours Mon-Fri but still brings home six-figures... easy-peasy. And speaking from experience, it means I can be cooking her dinner while on a workbreak a la slowcookers, etc.
- jarjoura 4y ago#m seems_legit So.... 1/3 of men are non-committal in all aspects of their life.
- t344344 4y ago[flagged]
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoGlad I am permanently disabled. Now I just need to find a woman. Any nerdy ladies here want to marry a handsome, brilliant, creative, well managed bipolar male in his mid 50's who lives in a minivan? :)
- joemazerino 4y agoYou live near the river, too? Neighbours!
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoHa! Why are people down voting this? It is all true! I guess the joke flew over everyone's head.
- pram 4y agoAnecdote but I’ve noticed there’s a big difference in the activities men and women do when they’re “idle.” In 2009 a friend got laid off and began to play World of Warcraft for like 14 hours a day. His girlfriend started to think he was intolerable in this state. It’s something like pathological depression. I get the feeling that males not engaged in something perceptibly “productive” are judged very harshly.
- somedude895 4y agoIf my girlfriend was laid off and started watching Netflix and browsing Instagram for 14 hours a day I'd find that intolerable as well.
- dvngnt_ 4y agodepends on the show
- joemazerino 4y agoSelf-judged harshly. Your friend is playing WoW not just to escape but to feel accomplished in a group. He can't escape his biological need to fit in, compete with and succeed with his boys.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- woodruffw 4y agoWith no disrespect intended towards your friend: I think there's broad social agreement that anybody who plays video games for 14 hours a day is probably intolerable in anything except a completely lopsided relationship. Put another way: that leaves 10 hours a day for eating, sleeping, and the actual things that make relationships work (quality time, sharing responsibilities, etc.). Unless your friend didn't sleep, he probably wasn't being a very attentive partner.
- throwawaysleep 4y agoShe would have put up with him were he an investment banker though.
- whiddershins 4y agoPeople (including men) without full time jobs are more likely to have an illness. People (including men) without full time jobs are more likely to have a mental health issue (including addiction and depression). People (including men) without full time jobs … And so forth.
- Jensson 4y agoThen why don't we see this when women don't work fulltime? The divorce risk factors are very different for the genders.
- whiddershins 4y agoTo clarify my comment I am not asserting the effect of unemployment is the same across the sexes. But merely that unemployment correlates with other negative things, and it is unclear whether any study about this is adjusting for those confounders.
- naasking 4y agoMen's sense of identity is much more strongly tied to their job. Losing your identity and sense of purpose is a challenging hurdle to overcome.
- 988747 4y ago[flagged]
- dang 4y ago> Women are like rats, basically Yikes, that's awful. We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and ignoring our request to stop (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404079). You can't abuse HN like this. Moreover it looks like you've primarily been using HN for political/ideological battle, which is also not allowed, regardless of your politics/ideology. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dlkf 4y ago> One new study of 6,300 heterosexual couples found that all other factors being equal, men who were not working full time were 33% more likely to divorce in the following 12 months than husbands who did have full time jobs. You cannot control for ”all” other factors in an observational study. You can control for ”how people choose to answer your survey questions,” which is two steps removed from the truth.
- Qem 4y agoWonder if that's correlation, not causation, due to tactic behaviour regarding relationship ending. For example, divorcing a unemployed partner may entail a worse deal in terms of alimony or child support. Divorcing a partner that is fully employed probably makes harder for the defendant to claim plain lack of money.
- dlkf 4y agoIt’s simpler than that: typically there is an underlying factor that causes both the unemployment and the divorce. It could be depression, sustance abuse, poor impulse control, anxiety disorders, any number of things. You can’t control for all of these. Some are hard to measure, some will yeild inaccurate measurements because the men in the study lie (or don’t even realize they have this problem) etc.
- htag 4y agoThis is called the third variable problem. It occurs when unobserved variables account for a correlation in studied variables. Virtually every correlation study can be criticized through this method. Modern correlation studies 'account for' or 'control for' all observed variables in an attempt to prevent criticism along this line. This type of correlation study exists essentially to say "this correlation is interesting", and spark investigation as to why they are correlated. Sociology is primarily correlation studies because of the logistical and ethical challenges around experimentation. For example, if we could force a randomly selected group of males to be unemployed we could avoid the third variable problem and establish causation. However no ethics review board would consider "I'm curious if your marriage will survive" a valid reason to fire someone.
- siva7 4y agoWhat an awful website experience on mobile. I couldn't get to the article through all these layers of upselling and ads.
- petodo 4y agocould it be they have more spare time to find new partner while the wife is away from home whole day?
- lo_zamoyski 4y agoIt's a grave mistake to ignore sex differences and dangerous when this ignorance is institutionalized. While people can be wrong about what those differences are exactly or may exaggerate certain differences in some respects or even go so far as to take a chauvinistic view, it is also possible to go to the other extreme and downplay or deny them altogether. Ideological framing and anti-intellectual misrepresentation can enable dismissive attitudes about these differences (which, frankly, are essentially beautiful and complementary and the basis for much of human dynamism). I think our understanding of men and women has suffered greatly under this infantile ideological pressure and the result is misery and disorientation. How is this relevant? It is relevant because these sex differences influence what each sex contributes in this complementary relation. I mean this in a general sense as the particulars will be affected by circumstance. These differences affect what each sex seeks to provide and what each sex is drawn to. One does not desire what one already has. In this respect, it will not be surprising to find that unemployment or part-time employment will affect men differently than women. Men relate differently to people than women do. Women have a strong tendency to love regardless of merit while men tend to have a strong need to earn respect. A man without a job is, in most cases, going to be synonymous with a man who is aimless and has feelings of worthlessness. (This is why rich kids often become profligate, deranged, and depressed. Aimlessness, indolence, softness, helplessness, and self-absorption. Selfishness is the loneliest of states; only in living selflessly for the good of others in concrete ways and through self-sacrifice, forgetting about ourselves, are we liberated from the prison of selfishness.) This is going to affect his relationships, including his martial relationship. These sorts of men are more likely to wallow in self-pity, scapegoating (therapy is often a great way to obsessively blame one's parents, for everything), and self-destructive and hedonistic pursuits which further damage their ability to relate properly to women as human beings and in healthy ways to people in general. They are also dangerous because these alienated men are more likely to find appeal in ideologies of hatred, violence, and scapegoating. Incidentally, this is one reason why UBI would be a terrible idea. Jobs are supposed to be ways in which both a family is served and the community is served. That's how we find purpose. For men, taking away their jobs is a way of ensuring their alienation from community, their sense of meaninglessness, and their aimlessness. It would deny them the ability to be who they are: men. There is a reason why so many retirees, especially men, have shorter lifespans than those that continue to work in some capacity.
- armatav 4y agoIt’s probably more of a confusion in the measurement - if you are not working full time, that’s a whole lot more time to spend around someone who may have only been tolerable to you in smaller intervals.
- red-iron-pine 4y agoI've heard a non-trivial number of divorces in Japan happen after the husband retires. Long hours, those guys work, and now they're home all the time. Small annoyances are easy to deal with when they're gone most of the time, but now he's home 24/7.
- vitehozonage 4y ago>For years sociologists have argued over why couples split up and what policies should be put in place to try to coax couples into getting married or keeping them married. (This is not just meddling; an intact family is widely considered to be a sound unit on which to build a society, so governments have an incentive to try and keep them together.) Um, this paragraph was jaw-dropping to me. People think it is ok for the state to manipulate the personal lives of citizens like that? People think that incentives/punishments that keep people pushed to stay in unhappy/unhealthy marriages is a good thing? Even the statistical conclusion seems absurd. People who only stay in marriages because of incentives will not have the same effect as "a sound unit on which to build a society"; I would actually suspect the opposite
- Joker_vD 4y ago> People think it is ok for the state to manipulate the personal lives of citizens like that? Yes? Otherwise, the whole body of marriage-related laws would have disappeared long ago. Or are you surprised that the governments are trying to shape the societies they preside upon? That's kinda their whole deal.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yellowpencil 4y agoIf there are “externalities” brought upon the state due to separations, ie strain on public services (crime, welfare programs, school, healthcare, etc) doesn’t the state have an incentive to do so? Playing devils advocate here.
- 28304283409234 4y agoIt could mean the partner is not financially independent and therefor has to stay in the marriage.
- angmarsbane 4y agoAnecdotal, but there is a large overlap between the breadwinning woman’s group and the divorce groups at my office. I myself fall into that Venn diagram.
- 2-718-281-828 4y agomore time together get home also means more time for conflict. most relationships - i would say - are highly depending on not spending too much time together.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoStatistics do not create a causal hivemind, and vice-versa. We must stipulatively define what "unemployment" we're discussing. It is especially true in lower- and middle-incomes where women decide to become single mothers much more readily and demand employed men. For wealthier people, I intuitively doubt this holds because there are other fulfillment activities that supplant clawing at jobs for survival. Freedom from meeting survival needs can be counterintuitively freeing and depressingly boring or allow stopping to smell the proverbial roses, depending on individual outlook. There are millions of existentially depressed wealthy housewives who feel they don't have a greater purpose in the world, enough excitement, or anything new to look forward to... hence cheating, therapy, and post menstrual adventures breaking free from family. I hypothesize from intuition that coupling, marriage, and families are more likely to start and continue when there is necessary and sufficient wealth captured. OTOH, crimes and diseases of despair (heroin and mass shootings) happen when there is not.. because happy and comfortable people generally don't throw themselves away. I'm wondering about the future of many countries, including China, where there are idle, surplus men without income... this is very dangerous.
- eBombzor 4y agoOnly 33%?
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoDisposable males, no longer useful, are disposed.