{"id":257282,"date":"2025-06-17T07:57:33","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T07:57:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dominiclevent.com\/blog\/?p=257282"},"modified":"2025-06-17T07:57:33","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T07:57:33","slug":"can-womens-career-success-be-a-recipe-for-divorce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dominiclevent.com\/blog\/can-womens-career-success-be-a-recipe-for-divorce\/","title":{"rendered":"Can women\u2019s career success be a recipe for divorce?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When K went back to work after four years away from the office, she was excited \u2014 like she \u201chad a piece of herself back\u201d. But her husband? He never \u201creally got\u201d the importance she put on her career.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuddenly the house wasn\u2019t spotless, dinner wasn\u2019t always ready, and I couldn\u2019t drop everything the second something came up,\u201d says K, a member of online platform Ivee, which supports women returning to work after career breaks. \u201cIt became this quiet tension \u2014 like my ambition was an inconvenience,\u201d says K, responding to an anonymous questionnaire on the site.<\/p>\n

K\u2019s response was to ask for a divorce. And, according to a small but striking body of research, her experience of career success prompting relationship breakdown is far from unusual.<\/p>\n

In a frequently cited paper<\/a>, Swedish academics Johanna Rickne and Olle Folke compared the relationship trajectories of people who were candidates for public office, or promoted to chief executive. Married women, they found, were more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to have got a divorce in the three years after becoming chief executive. And only three-quarters of married women in public office positions were still married after eight years in post, compared with 85 per cent of men.<\/p>\n

The finding chimes with earlier research<\/a>, which found that increases in women\u2019s, but not men\u2019s, earnings were correlated with divorce, and that in speed-dating experiments<\/a> men shied away from women they thought were more ambitious or successful than they were.<\/p>\n

What is going on? When it comes to separation after success, \u201cthere\u2019s usually an inequality within the couple formation\u201d, Rickne says. Many couples in her study got together when the husband was older, further ahead in his career and used to being the breadwinner. When that changed, it put pressure on the relationship.<\/p>\n

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More on Women in Business<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Emma Heptonstall, a divorce coach, says she often meets clients whose career advancement has exposed fissures in a relationship. In many cases this is tied up with women taking on more domestic work than their male partners \u2014 a \u201cdouble burden\u201d that becomes more obvious when women begin putting more time into work.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey just feel really put upon \u2014 they\u2019re doing literally everything,\u201d Heptonstall says. \u201cThey come home from work and they also have to manage the shopping and the cleaning \u2014 they\u2019re emotionally exhausted from work, exhausted physically, and resentment builds.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Heptonstall has observed among clients may not come as a surprise to many readers, especially women. It has also been well documented in country-level studies.<\/p>\n

According to Pew<\/a>, a US think-tank, in American heterosexual marriages where both partners earn roughly the same, women spend about 11.5 hours on caring responsibilities and housework, compared with about seven for men. Where women are the primary earner, the distribution narrows a little. It is only when women are the sole breadwinner that they are not landed with significantly more domestic work than men \u2014 and even then both partners spend about the same time on housework, with men ending up with more leisure time.<\/p>\n

Amelia Miller is co-founder of Ivee. She says couples often fail to discuss this imbalance of domestic and care work in advance. \u201cGendered norms and expectations\u201d then leave the female partner as the primary caregiver when, say, a baby is born. Tensions that arise from that become worse when she returns to work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen that dial starts to turn back and the woman then wants to reclaim her career, that\u2019s when you see the tension arise,\u201d Miller says. \u201cYou often see the male partner not wanting to make any compromises for his own career. At that point the cracks show, and later down the line that can end in conflict and often divorce.\u201d<\/p>\n

That does not mean a return to work caused the cracks, however. Heptonstall says career success is often not the root of problems but the economic boost that means women can leave. \u201cIf they have access to wealth it\u2019s somewhat easier from a financial view to make the decision to end the relationship,\u201d she says<\/p>\n