US Divorce Rates by Occupation and Gender

The table below shows the percentage of men and women in the top 50 occupations who got divorced in the previous year, according to the 2021 American Community Survey. At the top of the list, for example, 3% of women personal care aides and 2% of men cooks reported getting divorced in 2021. (The numbers are adjusted for age and years married.) At the bottom, just 0.9% of women lawyers and 0.7% of male engineers got divorced. The big story, consistent with more detailed trend analysis, is that more privileged people — by occupation, education, income, race and ethnicity — have lower divorce rates. Marriage is unequally distributed.

This is better than the various popular lists that attempt to show divorce rates by occupation. All the ones I’ve seen (not linking here) have used as the “divorce rate” the percentage of workers in each occupation that have a divorced current marital status. It takes a little more microdata manipulation to actually calculate a divorce incidence rate, which is much more meaningful than a divorce prevalence rate, which reflects divorces occurring at any time in the past, and is affected by remarriage rates, mortality, and so on. So, this list is better.

Note these occupations represent 58% of ever-married adults. They all have a large sample size (>1000 at least).

The Stata code to read in the ACS file from IPUMS and produce this table, and the Excel sheet with the table, are available here: https://osf.io/r9ktc/.

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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