Divorce and Occupation

I remember for a school project long ago I had to interview a bunch of people in nursing homes. Many of them had been in marriages that spanned several decades so I asked them how they made it work.<p>Shockingly everyone said basically the same thing: agreeableness. Supposedly, having low or nonexistent levels of disagreement, whether financial, moral or otherwise is the key.<p>So with this said, I&#x27;d be curious to know how your profession affects your agreeableness (especially in respect to power dynamics). I wish I asked if they <i>choose</i> to agree, e.g compromise, or if they and their partner were naturally agreeable.

Do they correct for age? How? It seems like they&#x27;re just considering the raw divorce rate per year, but obviously software developers have a different age distribution than some of the established industry jobs, so the comparison doesn&#x27;t seem fair.<p>The same folks show divorce rate by age: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flowingdata.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;divorce-rates-for-different-groups&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flowingdata.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;divorce-rates-for-differe...</a>

&gt; If someone who is already a physician, quits and takes a job as a bartender or telemarketer, it doesn’t mean their chances of divorce changes.<p>Uh, I&#x27;d say it almost certainly does significantly change their chance of divorce. If you go from having a steady, high income to variable work with high uncertainty around your next paycheck of course it will put more stress on the marriage and substantially increase the risk of divorce.

Armchair hypothesis: these careers are highly correlated to extro- and introversion. Introverts are content in their relationships and&#x2F;or less frequently get themselves into situations that lead to divorce. Call it the nerd coefficient.

I find it amusing that the correlation vs causation point has morphed into arguing correlation is anti-causal (which is worse). I think if someone goes from being a doctor to being a bartender their divorce rate might be affected. I saw another data source that said the number one cause of divorce was financial so the correlation may actually be somewhat causal. Financial stress is brutal because it leads to conversations like cutting down on recreation and leisure and reducing spend on hobbies and downtime. This creates a kind of feedback loop where life adds stress and the resources to remove it are taken away because you no longer get to spend $X&#x2F;month on your recreation because you needed to pay $Z on something else.

Can someone explain to me what the x-axis means in the &quot;Divorce Rate By Occupation&quot; chart? It seems to be just a random distribution from -1 to 1, because the author wanted to use dots to represent each title. I suppose that&#x27;s a very space-efficient way of representing the data, but it&#x27;s also pretty tedious to have to mouse over everything, and it doesn&#x27;t work well on a small screen.<p>Might have been better just to put this in a list.

As a software engineer who&#x27;s girlfriend is a doctor, I don&#x27;t think either of us would have time to be chasing anyone else around. I wonder if that accounts for any of it.

&gt; <i>If someone who is already a physician, quits and takes a job as a bartender or telemarketer, it doesn’t mean their chances of divorce changes.</i><p>Of course it does. Just try it.

I&#x27;m a little surprised the military divorce rate is so low. With the long periods of separation, I&#x27;d expect it to be higher.

My brief interpretation of the data: The more opportunities to switch and to cheat the higher the divorce rate (eg bartender, stewardess, dancer). And the lower the salary the higher the divorce rate (guess the financial pressure creates extra tension).

So what happens if a physician marries a bartender? Does that increase their chance of divorce or decrease it? (Maybe a silly question but it would be interesting to dig into this shallow report with a much more critical eye.)

It&#x27;s all good and dandy until they start fighting about spaces vs tabs, or OOP vs FP ;)

You are missing an axis. It is auto-regressive in time. If you include age of the marriage as well as employment, it should split out substantially better.

The same site has another page on divorce rate by age, and allows you to look at it by employment status, race and education level[1].<p>It&#x27;s mostly as you&#x27;d expect, but the bit that I thought was most interesting was the &quot;Not in Labor Force&quot; breakdown. In that, women and men have almost identical rates until the age of 60 (retirement?) at which point the male divorce rate increases much more quickly than women.<p>At 60, both are 13%, at 70 it is 24% vs 28% and by 80 it is 31% vs 38%.<p>The causal analysis of this is difficult: male participation in the workforce is higher until retirement, so there it is hard to judge how much of it is <i>because</i> of retirement and how much is couples who would have divorced anyway and just happen to have employment status change.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flowingdata.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;divorce-rates-for-different-groups&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flowingdata.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;divorce-rates-for-differe...</a>

The author didn&#x27;t considered some obvious correlations, maybe because it would be more difficult to get some data about it.<p>It looks like that occupations that promote more social interactions are more prone to divorce. I also spotted that occupations with weird or irregular work hours also have higher divorce rates.<p>I didn&#x27;t understand what the x-axis means.

WTH is a Gaming Manager?

I&#x27;d love to see the %divorced per level of education normalised for age at marriage.<p>I am mankind a wild ass assumption that people marry less while in school, hence this could be due to late marriage as much as education per se.

Wonder if dating is also tougher for these less outward-facing professions, so they&#x27;d rather stick together than be thrown into the meat market again?

The bifurcation in the legal category is fascinating (4 data points).<p>I&#x27;m guessing that the higher two are &quot;lawyers&quot; and the lower two are the roles with better work life balance that attract lower ego, more balanced personalities like paralegals.

Need to account for both age, location, and salary as variables in the model, then see what&#x27;s left over for occupation. We know that occupation is correlated with salary which is correlated with divorce rates. Need to account for this!

I don&#x27;t know what it was about this particular presentation of data but I found it much easier to read than other stuff I see on here, so kudos to the author for that.

Interesting that a massage therapist has among the highest divorce rate, but a physical therapist has among the lowest. Those jobs don&#x27;t seem that different.

Does anyone know how to extrach the raw data list from the site? There are quite a few numbers there that I&#x27;d like to know...

I would love to see Police officers and Firefighters... anecdotally, I would expect a very high divorce rate.

because we are always fucking working. I know, I was half of a computer engineering couple.

TIL : Phlebotmists

That&#x27;s because financial problems are the main reason for divorce. Dual engineering incomes should not have those problems.<p>Happily married to another engineer for 15 years. Now engineers also like to argue, so put two of them in the same household and see what happens. We do argue about finances, but it&#x27;s me not wanting to spend money.

It doesn&#x27;t give any information about the spouse&#x27;s occupation or the combination of occupations in the former union.<p>A single earning bartender with an unemployed spouse should have like a 99% divorce rate, according to this chart.<p>Anecdotally..... I could see that.

I wonder if there&#x27;s an inflection point as income increases. A divorced colleague once joked: why is divorce so expensive -- because it&#x27;s worth it.<p>Similarly, I&#x27;m sure there are many poor people longing for divorce, but they can&#x27;t afford it.

Women initiated nearly 70% of all divorces. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-new-resilience&#x2F;201508&#x2F;women-initiate-divorce-much-more-men-heres-why" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-new-resilience&#x2F;2015...</a><p>Unemployment Can Spell Divorce for Men, But Not Women <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.livescience.com&#x2F;14705-husbands-employment-threatens-marriage.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.livescience.com&#x2F;14705-husbands-employment-threat...</a><p>One might say that women who get high status men (high salary) choose to keep them and those who get low status choose to find new new opportunities.

Nice visualization but I would like to see some follow up studies - since I&#x27;m already aware of this data. Track more things like cultural background, how many family members they grew up with etc...

This data disproves an urban legend that university professors are most likely to get a divorce. Reasoning for that being that their job involves a lot of contact with young and attractive people :)