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When K went back to work after four years away from the office, she was excited — like she “had a piece of herself back”. But her husband? He never “really got” the importance she put on her career.
“Suddenly the house wasn’t spotless, dinner wasn’t always ready, and I couldn’t drop everything the second something came up,” says K, a member of online platform Ivee, which supports women returning to work after career breaks. “It became this quiet tension — like my ambition was an inconvenience,” says K, responding to an anonymous questionnaire on the site.
K’s 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.
In a frequently cited paper, 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.
The finding chimes with earlier research, which found that increases in women’s, but not men’s, earnings were correlated with divorce, and that in speed-dating experiments men shied away from women they thought were more ambitious or successful than they were.
What is going on? When it comes to separation after success, “there’s usually an inequality within the couple formation”, 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.
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 — a “double burden” that becomes more obvious when women begin putting more time into work.
“They just feel really put upon — they’re doing literally everything,” Heptonstall says. “They come home from work and they also have to manage the shopping and the cleaning — they’re emotionally exhausted from work, exhausted physically, and resentment builds.”
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.
According to Pew, 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 — and even then both partners spend about the same time on housework, with men ending up with more leisure time.
Amelia Miller is co-founder of Ivee. She says couples often fail to discuss this imbalance of domestic and care work in advance. “Gendered norms and expectations” 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.
“When that dial starts to turn back and the woman then wants to reclaim her career, that’s when you see the tension arise,” Miller says. “You 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.”
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. “If they have access to wealth it’s somewhat easier from a financial view to make the decision to end the relationship,” she says
Rickne points out, too, that the cause of friction is not always about family. Most of the couples she studied were in their fifties or sixties — an age when children have often flown the nest. Instead, it reflects a deeper cultural expectation about male and female roles.
“If you go into a relationship and you’re the person on top, [you] have a kind of contract,” she says. “Then you find yourself in a different situation.”
She recalls presenting her research and being approached by women — and men — who saw themselves in it. “Something that surprised me was how many men spoke to us — saying, ‘it’s shameful to admit but I would be really uncomfortable if my wife became super successful’.”
So how to avoid the fate of a marriage upended by women’s success? Rickne says the higher likelihood of divorce in her study did not occur across all marriages. Those that began with an imbalance between men and women were more likely than others to divorce. But marriages with an expectation of equality from the outset generally survived after the woman was promoted.
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