tion: alimony payments and the need to find another dwelling (usually the conjugal house is assigned to the woman, especially if there are children) may alter the lifestyle of divorced men for the worse. It may therefore seem hard to believe that men are better-off after mari- tal dissolution. Te key problem underlying this debate is the defi- nition and measurement of the rather vague concept of “economic wellbeing”. If economic wellbeing is defined in terms of income or poverty status (a binary construct of income), the gender gap remains stark. But the financial aspect is not the only relevant consideration when as- sessing how individuals suffer from marital breakdown. Moreover, poverty status as a measure of wellbeing can be criticised because it divides the population into a simple poor/non-poor dichotomy, based on certain, sometimes arbitrarily chosen, thresholds. Income as a measure is problematic because it is difficult to assess to what extent an income loss brings about a real drop in living standards, especially in a comparative perspec- tive. Another drawback is that poverty status and in- come depend on the choice of equivalence scale, which is essentially an adjustment for household composition, acknowledging that within a household there are econo- mies of scale in expenditure—if a couple split, they may then need two cars, two houses, two sets of household heating and utility bills and two sets of local taxes to be paid. Given that a marital breakdown inevitably modi- Women suffer far more financially after divorce. Is this true everywhere? And what of men? Marital disruption and economic wellbeing A particular feature of modern family patterns is the sig- nificant increase in marital breakdowns. As a result the number of children living in single-parent households, most of which are female headed, has increased sharply. One important issue of marital disruption concerns the rather stark gender difference in terms of financial out- comes following divorce. Most studies show that women experiencing a divorce tend to suffer a substantial loss of income, whereas men’s economic circumstances seem rather unaffected or even, in some cases, slightly improved. Te reasons are many: women tend to have lower labour market attachment and therefore face low- er earnings; children tend to stay with the mother fol- lowing a divorce, in many cases imposing a major strain on the female-headed single-parent household. An equally consistent finding is strong differences between countries in the economic penalty associ- ated with divorce. Divorced women in Scandinavian countries, for example, tend to be much better off than divorced women in the UK. Te Social Democratic countries provide strong support in the form of an ex- tensive childcare infrastructure, which enables mothers to work full-time following a marital split. In the UK and other European countries, single mothers have to spend more of their time caring for children. But it has also been argued that the gender bias is overestimated. Indeed, there are many reasons to believe that men also experience economic problems following separa- Divorce is always traumatic; but where are the divorced least badly off? Arnstein Aassve, Gianni Betti , Stefano Mazzuco and Letizia Mencarini look across Europe to see who suffers most. 108 september2008