In 1970, 31.5 million American women were employed in the civilian labor force, comprising a 43.3 percent participation rate.  As of 1999, the number of woman had increased to 64.9 million and a 60 percent participation rate.  The Census Bureau projects that by 2008, 73.4 million women will be working, or a 61.9 percent participation rate.

(Source: U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings, monthly, January issues; Monthly Labor Review, November 1999; and unpublished data; in the U. S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2000 [120th edition] Washington, DC, 1999, p. 403.)

"The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman's aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects."

(Source: Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift, ch. 16 [1989] in Andrews, Robert; Biggs, Mary; and Seidel, Michael, et al, eds., The Columbia World of Quotations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. www.bartleby.com/66/ [27 September 2001].) 

Were the activists who pushed so hard in recent years to get employed women out of the "pink ghetto" of sex-segregated jobs all divorce lawyers looking to drum up business?  One might well wonder after reading a study of divorce recently published in the Journal of Marriage and Family by a team of researchers from the State University of New York at Albany. 

Parsing marital history data obtained from national survey and census data, the SUNY team uncovered clear indications that getting women into traditionally male fields of employment means turning more and more of them into clients for the divorce lawyer.  "Couples in which the wife works with many men and few women," the researchers write, "are more likely to divorce than couples in which the wife works with few women and few men."  For example, a wife who works as a physician (with a sex ratio of 387) is more than a third (38%) more likely to get a divorce than a wife who works as a secretary (with a sex ratio of 2).  Similarly, couples in which the wife works as a carpenter (with a sex ratio of 5,912) face a divorce risk "about two thirds greater" than that faced by couples in which the wife works as a secretary.    Further statistical tests demonstrate that the "destabilizing effects" of wives working with large numbers of men are persistently "strong among couples with many and few other risk factors for divorce."  In contrast, however, the researchers could find "no evidence that couples are more apt to divorce when husbands work with a larger than average number of women." 

With convincing proof that "couples are more likely to divorce when the wife works in an occupation having a disproportionate number of men relative to women," the SUNY scholars are driven to the conclusion that "declines in occupational sex segregation may have played a causal role in the rise of divorce." 

(Source: Scott J. South, Katherine Trent, and Yang Shen, "Changing Partners: Toward a Macrostructural-Opportunity Theory of Marital Dissolution," Journal of Marriage and the Family 63[2001]: 743-754, emphasis added.)