Female breadwinners represent just 16% of all households, but account for 42% of divorces

Good morning! Columbia gives in to Trump's demands to recover federal funding, women's college basketball could still be undervalued, and Fortune reporter Beth Greenfield examines what happens when women are the breadwinners.

- Money problems. Women earn just 84 cents to every dollar earned by a man. And yet, despite that disadvantage, the share of married women who were earning at least as much as their husbands had more than tripled by 2023 over five decades, found Pew Research.

Seems like good news, right? 

More like a mixed blessing, according to new data compiled by Divorce.com, as I reported this week in Fortune. It showed straight married couples with a female main breadwinner to be associated with a divorce rate that is almost three times higher (31 per 1,000 vs. 11 per 1,000) than in marriages with a man who earns more. 

The overall divorce rate is even worse in single-income families in which women bring home the bacon, and the rate in those cases is well over twice as high as in male-earner families (54 per 1,000 vs. 20 per 1,000). 

While female breadwinners represent just 16% of all households, they account for 42% of divorces, “highlighting a significant imbalance,” noted the data report, based on responses to the Census’s American Community Survey from between 2012 and 2023.

So what gives? Is this happening because men can’t handle being out-earned? That depends who you ask.

University of Chicago professor of economics Marianne Bertrand wrote about the topic more than a decade ago, when similar data showed female earners accounting for 41% of divorcing households while only making up 17% of all U.S. households. She saw the divorce-rate gap as a grim, sexist reality, believing that a woman out-earning her husband was found to cause unhappiness in a relationship and even “doom” the marriage. 

Divorce.com CEO and founder Liz Pharo, on the other hand, told me she believes that such a divorce gap could be evidence of empowerment. “Women are no longer financially dependent on their partners,” she said, “which means they’re more willing to leave unsatisfied marriages instead of staying out of necessity.” 

Read the full story here. 

Beth Greenfield
beth.greenfield@fortune.com

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com