What do Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts, Charlize Theron, Gwyneth Paltrow, Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Helen Hunt, Kate Winslet and Reese Witherspoon have in common?
They all received at least one Oscar. And they all divorced or separated subsequently.
These anecdotes fuel the superstition that female Oscar wins and nominations lead to divorce. However, if you look at a broader sample, it may look like male Oscar winners and nominees increase their divorce risk while women don’t. – In truth, the jury is still out, because establishing a causal effect is tricky here: Oscars are not random, and then who exactly is the comparison group formed by non-nominee screen actors? It must be large indeed.
There is a true root in the superstition
The suspicion behind the anecdotes has a true core unfortunately. Professional success can cause women much pain. Good evidence, from otherwise quite equal Sweden of all places, and cited here, shows that some promotions nearly double the divorce rate of women, but not men.
For example, winning a local or parliamentary election, or becoming CEO can call the curse. In the US, a wife earning more than the husband is associated with a higher divorce probability.
This is not the case however, when couples agreed or expected from the beginning that earnings would be equal or in favor of the wife. It is the change, within the same couple, from a traditional gender norm to its opposite, that spells fragility.
Women know and try to preempt the ‘curse’
Women change their behavior in anticipation of what might happen. Within marriage, if the woman starts doing well in her job and at some point, reaches her man’s salary level or even exceeds it, she adopts traditional attributes. She tries to compensate the violation of the (gender) norm by putting in more housework, and sometimes, withdrawing from wage work altogether. The literature says, the woman is ‘doing gender’. Before marriage, women significantly downplay their ambitions in terms of career and salary when they believe to be watched by men.
A remedy has been found…
But this does not happen everywhere. The above has been documented with US and West German data for example. But it does not show up in East German data. No matter what angle you look from, and what factors you control for: the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall mark the boundary for the male breadwinner norm. Eastern German couples have no problem with women working and earning more than their husbands. And the more women earn, the less housework they put in. Which is kind of logical. And marriages are similarly stable independent of who the breadwinner is.
In other words: the male breadwinner norm, and with it, the ‘Oscar Curse’, are entirely cultural. They can be undone by institutions that actively promote another norm.