U of Ideas of General Interest -- March 2000
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Mark Reutter, Business & Law Editor, (217) 333-0568; [email protected]
WORK AND DIVORCE
Longer hours don't necessarily increase likelihood of divorce
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Does working long hours contribute to divorce?
Sure it does, the popular literature says. Best-selling books such as Juliet Schor's "The Overworked American" make the claim that families are under heavy stress because of demanding jobs and a shortage of family time together.
"Proposals to alleviate the possible negative effects of long work hours range from day care centers in every community to companies allowing more flexibility in scheduling," notes John H. Johnson IV, a professor of economics and of labor and industrial relations at the University of Illinois.
But the evidence that long working hours are responsible for a couple divorcing is far from conclusive, according to Johnson.
In the first detailed analysis of the possible relationship between hours worked and divorce, Johnson analyzed 13,015 married couples who were tracked and interviewed at four-month intervals by the U.S. Census Bureau between 1991 and 1995.
Johnson said he found no evidence that Americans overall are working longer hours. "The work weeks for the majority of Americans were clustered at 40. Those who work long hours are a fairly select group -- generally highly educated, high-income persons in the private sector." The legal profession topped the list with an average work week of 51.4 hours.
Adding 10 hours to a wife's work week raised the probability of divorce by about 11 percent, and for a husband working the same extra hours about 4 percent. By contrast, being previously married increased the probability of divorce by at least 30 percent for both men and women. Income levels also appeared to have a more direct influence on divorce than long working hours, especially among women with a high income level.
What is difficult to determine, the UI researcher said, is whether "work schedules impact on divorce or whether problems leading to a divorce cause husbands or wives to put in more work hours."
In fact, Johnson found quite a bit of evidence suggesting that women who plan to leave an unhappy marriage take a job to gain some income protection prior to a divorce. There was a positive correlation between a wife working at night or on weekends and the probability of divorce. It also appeared from the data that spouses in a troubled marriage work more hours to avoid their mates.
On the other hand, night and weekend work for men had no effect on the probability of a couple divorcing.
About 82 percent of the married couples in the survey had children; the average length of the marriages was 11 years. The average age in the group was 36.8 years for men and 34.5 for women. More than half of the sample had attended some college, and 12 percent were minorities. The couples were tracked over a 32- to 36-month period by interviewers at the Census Bureau.
-mr-
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