Study: Women CEOs are twice as likely as men to divorce

Picture a woman CEO in the corner office with the great view. She’s wearing a perfectly tailored suit indicating that she’s a boss, in all meanings of the word. Now think of her home life. Is she married? Does she have kids? In all likelihood, you’re thinking she’s single—that to get to the top, she had to be entirely focused on her career. But let’s say she is married. Apparently, she’s not expected to stay married very long, explains one CEO.

“The joke is, ‘The better you do at work, the more likely you are going to get a divorce,’” Charlotte Ljung, 39, a CEO of a luxury bed and furniture group in Sweden, told BBC. She also runs an online advice group for people getting divorced.

While Ljung may sound like she’s just passing along an inside joke, a new study out this month in the American Economic Journal says the sentiment is based in fact: Married women who reach the corporate pinnacle are twice as likely to be divorced three years after their promotion to CEO as compared to their male counterparts. 

The study looked at the records of heterosexual men and women at private companies with 100 or more employees in Sweden, which, bizarrely enough, comes in first in the EU’s Gender Equality Index. Women in the public sector—whether mayors, parliamentarians, doctors, police officers, or clergy—doubled their divorce rate if they were promoted after being elected. Only 75 percent of the female politicians remained married after eight years, vs. 85 percent of women who did not get a promotion. Men experienced no greater chance of divorce when promoted to CEO in these fields.

So what is going on here? The author of the study, Johanna Rickne, a professor at Stockholm University, theorized that the husbands of women who got promoted to top positions found the situation “harder to deal with than wives who were married to high-performing men,” BBC reported. The “marriage market has not kept up with the labor market when it comes to gender equality, since it is ‘still seen as quite unusual for men to be the main supportive spouse in someone else’s career.’”

“I think this norm changing is pretty far off,” Rickne added.

Another issue is age. Rickne found that divorce was most common when a wife was much younger than her husband. And older men may be stuck in “traditional” roles of how families look. The study explains that couples experience “stress and friction” when their social and economic roles shift within the marriage, and that this effect is magnified when it’s the woman who moves up the ladder “because it creates more of a mismatch of expectations.”

“It is also the power perception—who wears the pants, who brings in more money,” Rickne told BBC. “Men today often find it intriguing in the beginning and want to be seen to support you and root for you—and I think that is a very positive thing—but I think a few steps down the line, when reality kicks in, it can be more difficult for men to deal with.”

On a positive note, dinosaurs all die out eventually.