Women, Divorce And Misleading Statistics

Feminists like to point to statistics that supposedly show that divorced women experience a fall in their standard of living as proof that wives are reluctantly initiating divorces to get out of marriages to ill-behaving husbands. There are two problems with this highly misleading statistic (assuming the stat is true in the sense it is being used):

1. The presumption that women are thinking through the long-term and less tangible financial consequences of divorce when the short-term and more tangible incentives are all in the woman’s favor.

A woman who knows she will get half, the house, and custody with child support thinks she will hit the jackpot in the event of divorce, because those rewards are immediate and tangible. She won’t be as likely to think through the prospect of diminished career potential or sexual market value. Incentives matter in human behavior, and front-loaded incentives matter more than downstream disincentives.

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