Women often experience greater material losses after divorce than men, as many studies have shown. This gap can be explained to some extent by traditional gender roles - such as women taking on more caregiving responsibilities - as well as ongoing gender pay inequalities. Divorce can also increase housing insecurity for women, particularly when it prevents them from keeping ownership of the family home.
But does it make a difference whether the woman in question was married to a man or a woman? A new study by Elina Einiö and Maria Ponkilainen (University of Helsinki) examines whether divorce affects women’s housing situations differently depending if they divorce a man or a woman. By including both different-sex couples and female same-sex couples, this innovative approach provides new insights into the gendered housing consequences of divorce.
Concretely, the study used data of both different-sex and female same-sex couples in Finland. The researchers examined changes in homeownership and changes in residence in the marital home over a seven-year period—three years before and three years after the year of divorce—between 2002 and 2021.
Results show that women who divorce men experience a greater risk of losing homeownership and are more likely to lose their marital home than women who divorce women. However, it must be mentioned that women in same-sex couples are less likely to own their marital homes before divorce. This suggests that they generally have fewer housing assets to lose compared with women in different-sex couples.
The study also shows that none of the divorced groups—women divorcing men, women divorcing women, or men divorcing women—manage to fully recover their housing situation within three years of divorce. However, individuals who earned more than their former partner had less risk of losing overall. This suggests that non-traditional gender roles may protect women from the most negative housing consequences of divorce.
“Divorce can be challenging for women—especially for those with traditional gender roles who have a lot to lose when it comes to housing,” said Elina Einiö, the lead author of the study published in Genus.