Scientific evidence that women should stay in lower jobs as a job promotion doubles the baseline probability of divorce for women, but not for men.

This is the rather sad result of a study from Sweden. Not entirely unexpected if you are a man. Oops.

All the Single Ladies: Job Promotions and the Durability of Marriage

This paper contributes to understanding women’s absence from top jobs by investigating the effect of job promotions on divorce. We add to previous work about the friction between marital stability and women’s career success. It has been documented that an unexpected increase in the wife’s – but not the husband’s – earnings is correlated with divorce (Becker et al. 1977; Weiss and Willis 1997). Divorce and self-reported marital problems are also more common in couples where the wife earns more money than her husband (Bertrand, Pan and Kamenicka 2015). Experiments have shown that men are reluctant to date successful women and that women are aware of this sentiment (Fisman et al. 2009, Burtzyn et al., forthcoming). An interlocking piece of evidence is that high-ability women are much less likely than high-ability men to enter into marriages that specialize around their own career. These women are more commonly found in marriages where she is the primary caregiver and there is either a dual career focus or a focus on the career of the husband (e.g. Ely, Stone, and Ammerman 2014; Kleven, Landais and Sogaard 2018). 

We contribute the first causal evidence on how promotions impact marriage durability across genders and – in the second half of the paper – across more or less gender-equal couple formations. We document that a promotion leads to a large increase in the probability of divorce among women, but not among men. This causal claim is based on 30 years of detailed Swedish register data and a differences-in-differences (DID) design that follows job candidates before and after promotions. Most of the analysis concerns two jobs at the pinnacle of power in the public sector – local mayors and national parliamentarians.1 We can identify and follow both winning and losing candidates for these positions over time, before and after the promotion. This lets us document the absence of pre-trends in divorce and in other observables between the promoted and non-promoted candidates (see e.g. Greene and Quester 1982; Johnson and Skinner 1986).

The results show that after the promotion, women divorce at twice the rate of women who did not get the promotion. After three years on the new job, 7 percentage points fewer of the female mayors and parliamentarians remained married to their spouse compared to women who ran for office but lost. This result is corroborated in a sub-sample of close elections in which promotions are quasirandomly assigned between job candidates. 

Our data also allows a descriptive analysis of all CEO promotions in private firms over a 12-year period. Comparing men and women promoted to the CEO level, we document a strikingly similar pattern of a widening gender gap in divorce rates after promotion.

Could there be a "temptation effect" to yearn for a younger, sexier stud? Let's see.

We also explore a potential “temptation effect” – that women divorce because the promotion exposes them to new potential partners (McKinnish 2004). This investigation reveals no correlation between the proportion of men in the promoted women’s pre-promotion workplaces and the probability to divorce. Divorced and promoted women also remarry at a slower rate than other groups. Finally, no correlation is found between divorce and the woman’s age at marriage.

OK, that is a relief of sorts. Let us now invstigate the

Promotion and divorce among CEOs

Traditional couple formation, progressive at work: A recipe for divorce When couples meet, they form a union that is more or less gender equal. 

Economic theory speaks to the possible impacts on marriage stability from the wife’s promotion in a union that initially prioritized the husband’s career. Labor market events that change the performance of spouses in relation to what was expected at the time of couple formation may shift the balance of utility away from the marriage to being single (e.g. Becker, Landes, and Michael 1977; Weiss and Willis 1997). In a couple that is specialized in the husband’s career, the wife's promotion to a top job is more likely to challenge initial expectations, while the husband’s promotion would confirm them. This gives the expectation that divorces for women should be concentrated in couples with more gender-based specialization in the husband’s career.

Note here that we remain agnostic about which spouse initiates the divorce. In economic theory, a promotion of the wife in a male-specialized household shifts the cost–benefit analysis of being married vs. single for both spouses. Either spouse could initiate a divorce to realize their relatively improved outside options. An alternative view is that promoted women initiate divorce when they find themselves in male-specialized marriages that offer the least flexibility and career support (in the spirit of Newman and Olivetti 2017). This alternative interpretation is further discussed below.

Conclusions

We study the consequences for men’s and women’s relationships of being promoted to top jobs. The main result is that such promotions destabilize women's marriages but not men’s. This finding can contribute to understanding why few women are in top jobs. In our data, married women and men who obtained top jobs had both been married for 20 years on average – quite a significant time investment. At promotion, women were substantially more likely to give up the potential support system of a loving spouse than men. Giving up the relationship may very well be the woman’s choice, and may be a positive outcome for her. But the results still highlight a large gender inequality in access to the first-best option for most: a loving relationship and a successful career.18 It is also reasonable to expect that the candidate pool for top jobs would be skewed by a condition for women, but not for men, to willingly leave their relationship behind. 

Our descriptive analysis of common features of women who divorce indicated a link between couple formation and the destabilizing role of the top promotion. Couples that formed in a more gender-egalitarian manner did not experience an increased divorce rate after promotion. The divorces were instead concentrated among women in couples that focused on the husband’s career in their early stages of the relationship. This result indicates a link between the marriage market and the labor market. As long as the marriage market produces mainly couples that specialize around the man’s career, this pattern of couple formation may hinder gender equality in top jobs. Prioritization of the husband’s career remains common around the world, even in progressive countries like Sweden (Boschini et al. 2011) and even for women in the top of the ability distribution. As long as there is little specialization in the opposite direction – households in which the wife is the dominant earner and the husband takes primary responsibility for childcare – the average woman will face greater stress in her family life when trying to obtain a highly demanding top job.

Pdf here

One may call this the 'The Hidden Taxes on Women'. That's the title of an NYT article that covers also other studies.

The working world is unfair to many women, yet even when they succeed, they must confront another series of challenges. Their hard-won successes are taxed in ways that men’s are not.