GENDER EQUALITY
Divorce now makes things worse for women
Would paying less alimony contribute to economic gender equality? Only to a limited extent. Many women today are financially worse off after a divorce.
The High Court in Zurich, scene of many a divorce drama. | Image: Alessandro Della Bella/Keystone
The major revision of the Swiss divorce law 20 years ago was supposed to promote the economic equality of men and women. But a study by the Bern University of Applied Sciences suggests that it only partially achieved its goals.
The new law did away with the principle of guilt: whoever was responsible for something amiss in a marriage should no longer have to bear the financial consequences for it. Instead, the law wanted both partners to make a new start quickly. This included avoiding financial dependency after a separation. Maintenance ought only to be paid if it is truly necessary in financial terms, and should not include an element of moral redress. This, it was thought, would strengthen the economic independence of women.
But this has only partially been realised, says Dorian Kessler, a social scientist who has compared data on alimony payments from divorce settlements from 1990 to 2008 with the income situation of the couples in question (to do this, he utilised information gained from their AHV state pension numbers). He found that the economic equality of men and women did not increase to the same extent that maintenance payments decreased. In half of the cases under investigation, the decrease in support could not be explained away by the women earning more at the time of their divorce than other women in the same situation several years earlier.
“Divorced women today have a lower household income on average than was the case in the 1990s”, adds Kessler. What they lose in alimony is in many cases not compensated by higher earned income. Are women simply not prepared to work more? Such an explanation misses the point, thinks Kessler. We also have to consider problems with childcare, a lack of professional experience, and the fact that women who get divorced are generally somewhat older today, and have a lower educational level than married women.
