WS More or Less: Why are Lesbians More Likely to Divorce than Gay Men?
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2018
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
New figures reveal that same-sex divorce rates are much higher among women than among men. The pattern is the same in Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK. Everywhere where there are statistics on same-sex divorce it is the same sex doing the bulk of the divorcing. Tim Harford discusses why this may be with Marina Ashdade, economist at Canada’s Vancouver School of Economics and author of “Dirty Money”, a book which applies economic ideas to the study of sex and love.
Producer: Ruth Alexander
Image: Same-sex wedding cake toppers Credit: Lucas Schifres/Getty Images
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:41.0 | We're your weekly guide to the numerical news all around us and I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:47.0 | Night and |
| 0:55.0 | marriage between same-sex couples is very much a 21st century phenomenon. |
| 1:01.0 | The first country, at least in recent history, to legalize same-sex marriage, |
| 1:05.3 | was the Netherlands. That was in 2001. A steady stream of other countries or sub-national regions have followed |
| 1:11.9 | suit, and it's now legal in more than two dozen countries, |
| 1:15.2 | including the United States, most of Western Europe and some other large countries such as |
| 1:20.4 | Brazil and Mexico. But where there's marriage, there's divorce. A few days ago, the UK's |
| 1:28.2 | Office for National Statistics published its summary of the data for all divorces in England and Wales in 2017 and one section |
| 1:37.8 | caught our attention, divorces of same-sex couples. So here's a question. Which same-sex marriages are more |
| 1:46.6 | likely to end in divorce, those between men or those between women? And this isn't |
| 1:52.4 | just the UK, the same pattern shown in Belgium, the Netherlands, |
| 1:56.1 | Norway and Sweden. Everywhere, whether there are statistics on same-sex divorce, it's the same-sex |
| 2:01.9 | doing the bulk of the divorcing. This made us wonder what was going on. |
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