The State of California stopped maintaining specific divorce statistics several years ago, there is still national data that can be extrapolated for the Los Angeles area – as well as considerable anecdotal reporting about divorce in Southern California’s largest metropolis.
Brendan Lyle founder and CEO of BBL Churchill Group-Divorce Finance and Huffington Post columnist reports that women rebound faster but stay in poverty longer than their male counterparts. Men take more time to recover emotionally from divorce, but women suffer a longer-lasting financial hit.
According to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.
The institute's research shows that, after a divorce, women's household incomes dropped significantly, especially in the first year after the split. Men, on the other hand, saw continued income growth.
The information, gathered by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, suggests that six years after a divorce, some women in the study had regained their pre-divorce income levels through re-partnering, working for pay and receiving government benefits.
The same study noted that women with dependent children, however, found it much more difficult to combine paid work with family obligations. The employment rate for women with no dependent children was far higher than the rate for women with children still at home.
Vital information regarding the state of divorce in the United States – and how the behavior of married and unmarried individuals is not much different now than it was thirty years ago.
Divorce statistics:
- Although it has been as a “rule of thumb” regarding divorce statistics for many years, it is no longer generally accepted that 50% of all marriages in the United States will end in divorce.
- 25% of all adults will experience one or more divorces in their lifetime.
- Despite population growth, fewer people are getting married than ever before. In 2006, there were 2,230,000 marriages - down from 2,279,000 the year before, despite a jump in the population of over 3,000,000 people.
- Divorce rates have declined in recent years, dropping to a 30 year low in 2006 of 3.6 per 1,000 people.
- In state by state reporting from regions that track divorce data, Nevada has the highest per capita divorce rate, with 6.4 divorces per 1,000 residents.
According to research executed by the authors of the best-selling Freakonomics, marriages that began in the 1990’s are less likely to end in divorce than those which began in the 1980’s. And those marriages which began in the 1980’s are less likely to end in divorce than those started in the 1970’s.
The United States still has the highest divorce rate among major countries of the world, with a national rate of 4.95 divorces per 1,000 people. Puerto Rico and Russia ranked second and third on the list respectively.
Several studies have found that the divorce rate among Christian couples is identical to that of the national average across all religious groups in the United States.
Various legal professionals state that 160,000 divorce filings are processed by the State of California each year. One of the fastest growing areas concerning divorce in the United States is occurring with same-sex marriages. More and more, couples who took advantage of the same-sex marriage laws in states such as Hawaii, California and Massachusetts are choosing to end their unions.
Lenore Weitzman in her book The Divorce Revolution, a typical woman endures a 73 percent reduction in her standard of living after a divorce. Her typical ex-husband enjoys a 42 percent increased standard of living.
Largely because raising children is expensive and time consuming, and mothers still raise children more often than fathers do poverty for divorced women and single mothers in general has not improved much in the last decade. According to a 2009 analysis by the U.S. census bureau, just 17 percent of fathers have sole custody of their minor children.
Non-custodial parents are typically ordered to pay child support, but ordering that child support and actually collecting it can be quite different things. Only 61 percent of court-ordered child support is ever paid.
According to the 2010 U.S. census, 40 percent of households headed by women live in poverty. More than half of impoverished children live with their mothers, but not their fathers. Don't look to wages to make up the gap. The 2010 U.S. census says that, on average, a woman who worked for full time all year made 77 cents for each dollar earned by a man working similar hours. If that woman is black, she made 62.3 cents for each dollar earned by a white man. If she is Hispanic, she made 54 cents for every dollar a white man earned. The National Women's Law Center's ongoing analysis of that data suggests those numbers haven't changed much over the last decade.
It is apparent one of the goals of the 21st Century must be how to employ and keep out of poverty the 40 percent of households headed by women.
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