Divorce Risk in Norwegian Same-Sex Marriages 1993 to 2010

Kenneth Aarskaug Wiik, Statistics Norway
Turid Noack, Statistics Norway
Ane Seierstad, Statistics Norway

In Norway, registered partnerships were introduced in 1993 and in 2009 a gender-neutral marriage legislation was adopted. 3,428 same-sex couples (52% male) formalized their unions between 1993 and 2010, which is less than 1% of all marriages contracted in the same period. Using Norwegian longitudinal register data, we first present updated descriptive statistics on the total population of registered same-sex partnerships entered 1993 – 2008 (N = 2,877). Second, we reconsider the divorce risk of these partnerships. We expected to find that the changing composition of same-sex partnerships have lowered the higher divorce risk previously found for female couples, partly because an increasing share of female couples have children. Results show that female couples still have a higher likelihood of divorce compared with male couples. We found no evidence that this gender gap in divorce has narrowed over time. Among female couples, however, common chil(ren) significantly reduced the divorce risk.