Divorce Leaves Women Significantly Worse Off Financially Than Men

A new study has found that after divorce, women are considerably worse off money-wise as compared to men.

The study of more than 4,000 people has found that while a man's earnings increases, on average, by 11 per cent after he divorces his wife, a woman loses about 17 per cent of her income.

Sociologists, who kept a track of the incomes of divorcees over seven years, revealed that divorced women would be wealthier marrying again than trying to go back to work.

The study also showed that, on the whole, mothers of young children fared poorly after divorce, as they found it hard to cope with work and raise a family.

The study, which has used data from the European Community Household Panel, was pulled together over seven years by Mieke Jansen and two colleagues from the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

"We noticed a large gender gap. It's difficult for some women because they have to care for the children, find a job as well as deal with the emotional trauma of divorce," the Telegraph quoted Jansen, as saying.

"We found that many women don't work at all after their marriage breaks down or have to work only part-time because they can't afford the cost of child care," she added.

The study revealed that despite recent multi-million dollar settlements, divorce is seldom a fixed path to amass wealth.

Alan Kaufman, the head of family law at the firm Finers Stephens Innocent, said that in most of the cases, both men and women suffered financially after divorce.

"There's been lots of coverage of the big cases where women have been given massive divorce settlements," Kaufman said.

"But these are very rare cases. In run-of-the-mill cases, where couples earn between 20,000 pounds and 30,000 pounds, both men and women are normally worse off. They have to sell the family home, their standard of living goes down, men often have to pay maintenance and women have to work to supplement their incomes," he said.

Source-ANI
LIN/M