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How divorce is boosting gender equality in Sweden – new study

Almost half of children in Sweden with separated parents now split their time equally between the two households.

Opposite-sex couples in Sweden, and more broadly across the world, tend to fall into a manager-helper dynamics, in which the mother takes on the full administrative and mental workload and only delegates specific tasks for the father to fulfil. Because it is no longer possible to take on these heavily gendered roles – the mother cannot plan her ex’s household and the father cannot wait for it to happen — 50:50 living arrangements seem to show the way to a more gender-equal division of labour in general. And this is good news, not only for women who suddenly proclaim that “for the first time ever … ex-husbands are doing their fair share” but also for men who no longer have to deal with the pain associated with the feeling of losing their children after a separation.

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