Divorce’s Gender Gap

Women initiate two-thirds of divorces and far more of the separations, according to a nationally representative study by the American Association of Retired People. This study is based on surveys of more than 1,000 divorced men and women, aged 40 to 79.

The most common reason the women gave for divorce was verbal, emotional and physical neglect. Many of their husbands had no idea what hit them.

“Men more often than women were caught off-guard by their divorce,” reports the AARP study. More than a quarter of the men compared to just 14 percent of the women say “they never saw it coming.”

I saw an awful case of this bewilderment with a male colleague. He was shocked when he was looking through his desk drawer and found that his wife not only was filing for divorce but had also been consulting lawyers about a divorce for over seven years.

Read more: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner – Divorce’s gender gap