Here are some important questions that popped in my mind while reading the article:

>What were the relative ages of the men and women involved?

>What were the incomes of the divorcing spouses PRIOR to their marriage? How does this compare with their incomes AFTER their divorce?

>What were the rates of various custodial possibilities when children were involved (i.e. father sole custody, joint custody, mother sole custody, etc.)?

>What, exactly, is meant by the term “available income” which divorcing men purportedly have so much more of? Is this calculated differently from what people normally think of as “income”? In other words, are living costs subtracted from “available income”? Alimony and child support? What exactly was the source of the increased “available income”: an actual increase in income, a lowering of living costs, or some mix?

>There is an implied contradiction between “Regardless of whether she has children, the average woman’s income falls by more than a fifth and remains low for many years,” and a subsequent quote in the article:

“But this is not so much a gender thing as a parent thing. The key differences are not between men and women, but between fathers and mothers.”

(It’s conceivable there is no actual statistical contradiction between the two statements, but absent the actual figures involved, it’s difficult to say for sure.)

I think the key issue in all of this is question of what the relative incomes of the divorcing spouses were prior to the marriage. There is a significant ‘sample bias’ involved in the whole process of marrying … I suspect it remains far more common for wives to be younger and less well-to-do than their husbands than it is for the reverse to be true, and I can’t help but wonder to what extent the phenomenon outlined in the article is connected to divorcing spouses returning to their ‘income class of origin’ to some extent.

Making it unlawful for a custodial parent to move more than 250 miles away from the non-custodial parent without the prior consent of all involved might be a big step in the direction of fairness.

Do you know how impossible that law would be? Say, for instances, that I live and work in Grand Forks, ND, and my husband flies for Mesaba out of Minneapolis/ St. Paul. We have kids, and with commuting, this works out just fine. (We don’t have kids, but everything else is true). We decide to divorce, and Mesaba tells husband he has to move to…Memphis. If this law was in place, he would have to lose his job, or give up any kind of custody.

There’s a billion examples of that. People have to move for jobs nowadays.

Silly me, ahunt, I forgot about grandma. But the principle is the same…

Why would you automatically think a divorce means wronging the man? That’s a bit biased, isn’t it?

Seriously? Since the divorce rates for second marriages are higher than those of first marriages…I imagine we would be seeing workplace changes toot sweet.

Ah…to dream.