Patterns of divorce risk in the 1970s and 1980s for Swedish women with gymnasium education

This paper investigates the first-marriage divorce patterns of Swedish women with a gymnasium education. We have used a hazard regression model to investigate the impact of a number of variables on divorce risks. Our general findings are consistent with previous studies: divorce risks have a strong negative relationship with age at marriage and with parity, and those who have premarital children or are pregnant at marriage have higher divorce risks than those who do not. The divorce risk increased over the cohorts bom between 1948 and 1963. Important new findings are (i) that the risk of divorce varies with educational orientation, (ii) that within educational groups, women from an academic gymnasium have a lower divorce risk than those from a vocational gymnasium, (iii) that in each educational group, the risk varies inversely with the proportion of women employed.