A lot of people were slamming a meme:
"Dear Men, take your 21 days leave from work.
Go home and tell your woman that you lost your Job.
Explain further that there was some loss and you had to use your savings to settle.
Spend the next 14 days observing how you are treated at home and discover who you married."
I pointed out that a man losing his job significantly affects his chances of getting divorced since:
While marital strain also increases when a woman loses her job, divorces are more common when the man loses his job. A study of heterosexual couples showed that men who were unemployed or working just part time were 33% more likely to divorce within the year than husbands who worked full-time jobs
There's also tons of research with the same findings.
Naturally, the cope was strong, with evidence-free claims that this is because many/most such men let "their hurt ego from losing their job wreck the marriage", or that the men don't "contribute financially or domestically" and that such a man "sits on his ass moping and doing nothing".
Another cope was that men leave their wives when they get cancer / a miscarriage. As evidence for the former, I was presented with a Guardian and with an NBC article (I never got any source for the latter claim, which is even more unbelievable than the former).
The Guardian article had some anecdotes, but referenced two studies. Meanwhile the NBC article only referenced the earlier study.
I decided to look into the articles.
First of all, if one accepted the claims of the women who claimed that men leave their wives if they have cancer, one could say that they do this because their spouses are emotional, irrational and violent.
We know that women are more neurotic, easily offended and suffer more side effects from cancer, so this is entirely plausible.
That aside, the research does not support the claim.
While the 2015 paper, In Sickness and in Health? Physical Illness as a Risk Factor for Marital Dissolution in Later Life, did find that men were more likely to leave their wives than vice versa - but only in one condition: when they had heart problems:
In our analysis examining the onset of any of four serious illnesses (cancer, heart problems, lung disease, and/or stroke), we find that only wife’s illness onset is associated with elevated risk of divorce, while either husband or wife’s illness onset is associated with elevated risk of widowhood. However, we fail to reject the null hypothesis of equality of coefficients by gender in these pooled models, which suggests that there is no difference in divorce risk depending on which spouse experiences onset of any of these conditions. When we turn to specific illnesses, we find some evidence that the relationship between ill- ness onset and divorce varies by specific illness. Wife’s (lagged) heart problems onset and stroke onset are both statistically significant positive pre- dictors of divorce, while none of the measures of husband’s illness onset are associated with divorce. In addition, we reject the null hypothesis of equality of coefficients for husband’s heart problems onset and wife’s heart problems onset (p < .05). These hypothesis tests are critical in the formal evaluation of gender differences and provide evidence that the association between heart problems and divorce depends on the gender of the spouse who becomes ill. Taking pooled and disease-specific results together, these findings suggest that the relationship between disease and divorce risk varies by gender in the case of one specific health condition—heart problems
Translating the coefficient of the multinomial logistic regression into an odds ratio suggests that if a wife has heart problems, the husband is 2.6 times more likely to leave her than if she hadn't had them. Meanwhile this is not the case for other illnesses. While the p score for the gender difference for heart problems is under 0.05, the fact that for the other 3 diseases (as well as taking all 4 diseases together), there is no gender difference is telling (i.e. it may be a statistical artefact or, as the authors theorise, reflect something unique to heart problems).
Furthermore, the authors note that "there is considerable attrition over the 18 years of the study—35% of marriages attrit before the end of the study period— more than are lost via widowhood and divorce combined"
Given the large attrition rate, we could be losing enough data to alter the conclusions. As an aside, the Guardian article misrepresents the conclusions of the study (big surprise - but liberals won't be in any hurry to condemn them).
Perhaps one might then lean on the 2009 paper, Gender disparity in the rate of partner abandonment in patients with serious medical illness, which has results that more closely match the feminist claim.
However, that paper is not as methodologically rigorous, with a sample size of 515 vs 2,701 in the 2015 paper (notably, the researchers in the latter started with a baseline sample of 4,674, which they whittled down by controlling for factors such as pre-existing disease). The 2015 paper also collected information on a lot more variables that could affect the results and the followup period was much longer (16 years vs 4-5 years for the 2009 paper).
So in summary, women are more likely to leave their husbands when the latter lose their jobs than men are to leave their wives when they get seriously sick.
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