Highly Educated Wives not Associated with High Divorce Risk Any Longer: Study

Couples, in which wives are more educated than their husbands, are not at an increased risk of divorce, a new study has found.

Research conducted in the 1950s had found an association between woman's education levels and risk of divorce. Specifically, couples, in which women were more educated than their husbands, faced higher divorce risk.

The study called "The Reversal of the Gender Gap in Education and Trends in Martial Dissolution," is published in the August issue of the American Sociological Review and was based on data from heterosexual U.S. marriages formed from 1950-2009.

According to the study, more than 60 percent of the couples who married between 2005 and 2009 had a wife who was more educated than her husband.

The study shows that the idea that a woman's education affects marriage stability isn't true anymore.

"We also found that couples in which both individuals have equal levels of education are now less likely to divorce than those in which husbands have more education than their wives," said Christine R. Schwartz, lead author of the study and an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to a news release. "These trends are consistent with a shift away from a breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage toward a more egalitarian model of marriage in which women's status is less threatening to men's gender identity."

Researchers found that among couples, married in between 2000 and 2004, the risk of divorce was 30 percent lower if both wife and husband had the same level of education than those in which the husband was more educated. For comparison, in 1950s, couples with same education qualification had the same divorce risk as couples where the husband was more educated.