A new study has revealed that women are more likely than men to initiate divorces, but women and men are just as likely to end non-marital relationships.
Author Michael Rosenfeld of the Stanford University said that breakups of non-marital heterosexual relationships in the United States were quite gender neutral and fairly egalitarian.
In the study, Rosenfeld's considered 2,262 adults, ages 19 to 94, who had opposite sex partners in 2009. By 2015, 371 of these people had broken up or gotten divorced.
Rosenfeld found that women initiated 69 percent of all divorces, compared to 31 percent for men.
However, there was not a statistically significant difference between the percentage of breakups initiated by unmarried women and men, regardless of whether they had been cohabitating with their partners.
Rosenfeld said women seemed to have a predominant role in initiating divorces in the U.S. as far back as there was data from a variety of sources, back to the 1940s, and added that women's role in initiating breakups was unique to heterosexual marriage.
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He found that women were more likely to initiate divorces because married women reported lower levels of relationship quality than married men.
Rosenfeld further concluded that his results supported the feminist assertion that some women experience heterosexual marriage as oppressive or uncomfortable.