Men’s Rights Activists are eager to make the case that divorce and family custody laws in Britain and the USA discriminate against men. The Guardian reports today otherwise:
Divorce makes men - and particularly fathers - significantly richer. When a father separates from the mother of his children, according to new research, his available income increases by around one third. Women, in contrast, suffer severe financial penalties. Regardless of whether she has children, the average woman’s income falls by more than a fifth and remains low for many years.
The research was carried out by Professor Stephen Jenkins, a director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and chair of the Council of the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth.
His survey, Marital Splits and Income Changes over the Longer Term, is the first to track the changing wealth levels in Britain associated with a marriage breakdown.
You don’t say?!?!?! I always find the view that women “take men to the cleaners” very confusing.
It’s not just about the money . . . I think many men are more concerned about being able to actually see their children. Making it unlawful for a custodial parent to move more than 250 miles away from the non-custodial parent without the prior consent of all involved might be a big step in the direction of fairness.
This is why I’m very much in favor of men having primary physical custody after divorce. Only a certain number of them will be able to quickly find a new GF or wife to dump all the childrearing work on, and men will then start demanding more family-friendly policies in the workplace and their communities.
Myth, you forget…Grandma…if proximity allows. 8-*
Seriously? Since the divorce rates for second marriages are higher than those of first marriages…I imagine we would be seeing workplace changes toot sweet.
Ah…to dream.
I think the argument has much more to do with feeling robbed than with monetary loss. It’s not that you’re poorer - it’s that your wife, your kids, perhaps your prestige, have been taken away and you’re being expected to pay (in the form of child support) for the privilege of being wronged.
Assumptions much, Froth?
Why would you automatically think a divorce means wronging the man? That’s a bit biased, isn’t it?
Bonnie, froth didn’t say that the man is wrong, only that many men feel wronged.
Silly me, ahunt, I forgot about grandma. But the principle is the same…
Do you know how impossible that law would be? Say, for instances, that I live and work in Grand Forks, ND, and my husband flies for Mesaba out of Minneapolis/ St. Paul. We have kids, and with commuting, this works out just fine. (We don’t have kids, but everything else is true). We decide to divorce, and Mesaba tells husband he has to move to…Memphis. If this law was in place, he would have to lose his job, or give up any kind of custody.
There’s a billion examples of that. People have to move for jobs nowadays.
Sadly, the article is all too typical of the way statistical information is (mis)handled in journalism. The author omits key elements of the data context from which she is fisking her bullet points; it’s virtually impossible to draw any definitive conclusions from the tidbits we’re supplied.
Here are some important questions that popped in my mind while reading the article:
>What were the relative ages of the men and women involved?
>What were the incomes of the divorcing spouses PRIOR to their marriage? How does this compare with their incomes AFTER their divorce?
>What were the rates of various custodial possibilities when children were involved (i.e. father sole custody, joint custody, mother sole custody, etc.)?
>What, exactly, is meant by the term “available income” which divorcing men purportedly have so much more of? Is this calculated differently from what people normally think of as “income”? In other words, are living costs subtracted from “available income”? Alimony and child support? What exactly was the source of the increased “available income”: an actual increase in income, a lowering of living costs, or some mix?
>There is an implied contradiction between “Regardless of whether she has children, the average woman’s income falls by more than a fifth and remains low for many years,” and a subsequent quote in the article:
(It’s conceivable there is no actual statistical contradiction between the two statements, but absent the actual figures involved, it’s difficult to say for sure.)
I think the key issue in all of this is question of what the relative incomes of the divorcing spouses were prior to the marriage. There is a significant ’sample bias’ involved in the whole process of marrying … I suspect it remains far more common for wives to be younger and less well-to-do than their husbands than it is for the reverse to be true, and I can’t help but wonder to what extent the phenomenon outlined in the article is connected to divorcing spouses returning to their ‘income class of origin’ to some extent.
I think joint custody should be the norm. If the father foists the kids on other family members or on a new girlfriend/wife, the kids will recognize it and resent it. Weekend parenting lets kids think dad is just great while mom’s the annoying nag who makes them clean their rooms. MRAs are really asking for trouble by demanding equal, or sole, custody, but maybe they’ll figure out a way to continue to blame their ex-wives for their own lousy relationships with their children.