It’s a little bit far afield of our usual content, here, but I’m fascinated by this chart (via Instapundit) which shows that, for most of the Swedish population, as a wife earns a higher share of household income, the likelihood of divorce goes up.  The exception is for the wealthiest couples who have an even-distribution of their fortunes.

Inasmuch as the data comes from another country, I’m hesitant to extrapolate from my American experience, which is that divorces generally initiate with the wife, not the husband, with or without some bad act (like infidelity) on the husband’s part.  It seems the researchers agree:

Researchers Guiping Li and Andres Vikat bring up a possible explanation for this trend. While there’s a considerable financial risk for a stay-at-home wife to get a divorce, “a wife who enjoys higher earnings than her husband has a lower economic threshold to leave an unhappy marriage.”

This makes the astonishingly sexist assumption that only men can create “unhappy marriages.”  Otherwise, it isn’t actually women whom society saddles with a mandate to remain with bad husbands, but men whom society prevents from leaving bad wives. 

If the data were all about options, one would expect the highest frequency of divorces to be among wealthier couples with equivalent incomes, because you’d be nearing twice the number of people “with options” than at either end of the spectrum.  Instead, when women rely on the income of their husbands, the couple is more likely to stay together, whereas when it is the husband who relies on his wife’s income, the marriage is at higher risk.

I see two possibilities, here: Either insecure Swedish men can’t stand a role of financial subordinacy or Swedish women don’t feel as much obligation to men whom they support.  Of course, a combination could be the case, but the researcher’s phrasing it in terms of women’s options gives some indication of which dynamic they feel is stronger.