70% of divorces are initiated by women; that jumps to 90% for college educated women

Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University, found that women initiated 69% of all divorces, compared to 31% for men, using data from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey. Among college-educated women, that figure climbs to about 90%.

At the same time, researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics estimate that 78% of college-educated women who married for the first time between 2006 and 2010 could expect their marriages to last at least 20 years. Among women with a high school education or less, the share is only 40%, according to the Pew Research Center. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirm an inverse correlation between education and divorce: Among college graduates, 30% of marriages ended in divorce, compared with more than half among those without a high school diploma, according to a BLS analysis of longitudinal data.

https://qz.com/college-educated-women-divorce-paradox-initiation-051526

More women are becoming the primary breadwinner

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/10/06/more-women-are-becoming-breadwinners-what-does-that-mean-home/

College women are increasingly marrying economically successful non-college men

https://www.nber.org/digest/202607/evolving-gender-disparities-college-enrollment-and-marriage-patterns

A new NBER analysis found the share of marriages between college-educated women and non-college men quadrupled from 2.3% among the 1930 birth cohort to 9.6% among the 1980 cohort.

At the same time, the marriage rate for non-college women fell from 78.7% to 52.4% across those cohorts.

Married-couple households fall below half of U.S. households

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/families-and-living-arrangements.html

Only 47% of U.S. households were married-couple households in 2025, down from 66% in 1975.

At the same time, 39.7 million households were one-person households, or 29% of all households. The median first-marriage age reached 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women.

CDC updates its national divorce-rate data

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/state-stats/more-maps/divorce.html

The CDC’s updated divorce database shows the government is still tracking substantial state-level differences in divorce rates, although the national refined divorce rate has fallen substantially from its 1980 peak. Pew’s analysis of 2023 data put the refined U.S. divorce rate at 14.4 divorces per 1,000 married women, versus 22.6 in 1980.