ANN ARBOR—The marriages of older women who have their own pensions are more than twice as likely to end as the marriages of older women without pensions, according to researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR). But the reason may not be as mercenary as it seems.

“It’s not that older women are leaving their marriages because having their own money for retirement gives them economic independence,” says Hiromi Ono, an assistant research scientist at the ISR.

“What seems more consistent with the evidence is that they’re likely to have pensions because they’re committed to their jobs or careers, and that commitment may conflict with their marriages.”

Ono, a sociologist, is the author of a paper titled “‘Til Death Do Us Part or I Get My Pension,” with U-M economist Frank Stafford. The study is one of the first to examine the effect a wife’s pension, rather than her income, has on the probability her marriage will end.

Ono will present results of the study March 25 at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in New York City.

In the paper, she calculates the probability that working wives with and without pensions will experience a marital separation over a two-year period, using a sample of 4,219 couples from the U-M Panel Study of Income Dynamics, conducted at the ISR every year since 1968. The sample used in the analysis has a higher percentage of low-income and Black couples than the U.S. population of married couples, but in other respects, is nationally representative.

For the analysis, Ono divided the wives into three age categories: 34 and below, 35-44 and 45-64. She found that 41 percent of the youngest group of working wives, 58 percent of the 35-to-44-year-olds, and 51 percent of working wives age 45 and older had pensions of their own.

“Compared to couples in which the working wife does not have a pension, couples in which the working wife does have a pension are more likely to separate in younger as well as older age groups,” Ono notes.

But this finding confounds two causal forces, she emphasizes. First, women with pensions are more likely to experience separation, probably because they’re more committed to their jobs than women who don’t have pensions. And second, women whose marriages are ending are less likely than women in stable marriages to have jobs that carry pensions.

“Some of the women whose marriages end have poor prospects in the labor market,” she explains. “And some may not be able to commit to a job because they are the primary care-givers and custodial parents of young children, and may not be able to make appropriate child-care arrangements.”

Ono also found that the relationship between a wife’s income and the probability of marital dissolution was U-shaped. “Lack of money is a big stressor in a marriage,” says Ono. “When there’s not enough, the probability of divorce increases. But when there’s plenty, the probability of divorce also increases, probably for entirely different reasons. At the low end of the income scale, some women are thrown into poverty because of divorce. But at the high end, they may divorce because they gain economic independence.”

In sum, says Ono, “in industrialized societies where married women continue to be pulled into the labor market and where post-work life expectancy is rising rapidly, the impact of wives’ pension holding on the stability of marriages deserves further investigation.”

The study was supported by funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life at the U-M and by Citicorp Credit Services.

Population Association of AmericaPanel Study of Income Dynamics