Journal of Marriage and Family 68 (December 2006): 1165–1177. Who Decides? The Social Characteristics of Who Initiates Marital Separation BELINDA HEWITT 1 , MARK WESTERN 2 and JANEEN BAXTER 1 1 The University of Queensland 2 The University of Queensland Social Research Centre Abstract This study investigates gender differences in the associations between social characteristics and men’s and women’s reports of which spouse initiated marital separation. Using retrospective data on 9,147 first marriages from the Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey (2001), we find that some social characteristics differentiated between separations initiated by wives compared to husbands, but few differences were statistically significant. The main gender difference is that wives are more inclined than husbands to initiate separation on the basis of their husbands’ as well as their own social characteristics. Our findings indicate that taking account of which spouse initiates separation is important for improving our understanding of gender differences in the processes of marriage breakdown, but more research is required. Keywords: event history analysis, gender, marital separation. One of the main influences of feminist perspectives on family research has been to highlight differences in men’s and women’s experiences of marriage and family life (Ferree, 1990; Thompson & Walker, 1995). Researchers have found gender differences in the divisions of paid and unpaid labor and child care (Baxter, Hewitt, & Western, 2005; Bittman, England, Folbre, Sayer, & Matheson, 2003), in the importance of intimacy and emotional qualities of relationships (Steil, 1997), and in some aspects of the divorce process (Heaton & Blake, 1999). Many studies find that wives are more likely to end their marriage than husbands (Amato & Previti, 2003; Braver, Whitely, & Ng, 1993) and that men are more likely to indicate they ‘‘don’t know’’ why their marriage ended (Amato & Previti, 2003). These gender differences in marriage dissolution further suggest that the processes associated with marital separations initiated by wives are different from those initiated by husbands, but little research has examined the factors that predict who initiates a separation (Rogers, 2004). Most research on who initiates a marital breakup examines people’s perceptions and attitudes toward their previous marital relationship after they have already separated or divorced (Black, Eastwood, Sprenkle, & Smith, 1991; Kincaid & Caldwell, 1995; Pettit & Bloom, 1984). From these retrospective reports, we know that compared to non-initiators, the spouse who initiated the breakup has more positive attitudes to divorce, perceives more alternatives to the marriage (Black et al., 1991), and gives more reasons for why their marriage ended (Kincaid & Caldwell, 1995). The only reported gender difference is that wives who initiate separation cite more reasons for their marriage breakdown than do husbands who initiate separation (Pettit & Bloom, 1984). Yet husbands and wives also bring different resources to marriage and anticipate different financial and custodial experiences after divorce (Poortman & Seltzer, 2005). Consequently, men and women experience different constraints when leaving marital relationships, constraints shaped by their sociostructural characteristics (Breen & Cooke, 2005). In this article, we develop and test several hypotheses about the conditions whereby women’s and men’s socio- structural characteristics may be differentially associated with their reports of who initiated separation. BACKGROUND Social characteristics associated with marriage breakdown include temporal influences, family background characteristics, relationship and fertility histories, socioeconomic characteristics, beliefs, and attitudes (Bumpass, Martin, & Sweet, 1991; Hewitt, Baxter, & Western, 2005). Overall, these factors can either increase or decrease the likelihood of marital disruption through normative and cultural mechanisms concerning the durability of