New research suggests that women who initiate divorce are financially worse off than those who are left by their husbands.
The research was carried out by Dr Belinda Hewitt of the Institute for Social Research in Queensland, Australia.
She set out to discover whether initiating divorce made a difference to household finances by analysing data from the long running Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey.
She specifically studied the income of 6,424 men and women before and after divorce.
It was discovered that women’s income was lower in the first year after divorce if they had made the decision to separate from their husbands. However, there were no significant differences in the incomes of divorced men who had made the decision compared to those who had not.