Divorce in later life – or grey divorce – is on the rise in New Zealand. Divorces among people over 50 sits just shy of 40 percent at last count, up 7 percent in the last decade. This echoes the upwards trending rates around the globe. Most commonly, they are initiated by women.
Jocelyn Crowley, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University in the US has researched and written Gray Divorce, She joins Jim to discuss.
“Women are basically the social directors of family life still in 2025, and when that goes away men become like islands in the sea,” says Crowley.
“When I spoke to the women, they pinpointed three areas where they thought their divorces benefited them,” she reveals. “The first was independence—freedom to make their own decisions—while the next biggest positive was their ability to get away from their ex’s toxic behaviors.” The third key benefit is something we can all take inspiration from: feeling happier with life overall.
“Every year you’re out of the workforce, that gets entered into the complex Social Security formula for benefits as a zero — that you basically did nothing that year, even though you were raising your children,” Crowley says. “As you might imagine, when women emerge from a gray divorce, they are hammered in comparison to men.”
According to a study conducted by Jocelyn Crowley of Rutgers University, participants identified positive aspects of their lives post-gray divorce, including higher levels of overall happiness, liberation from their ex-spouses, and enhanced independence and freedom.
The “party life,” or informal types of social networking, increases the risk of sexual harassment for women in an industry dominated by powerful men, according to a Rutgers study
Regarding the implications of her research, Crowley said that individuals must be aware that sexual harassment can happen in places other than on the actual job site. Networking is a significant part of working in the fashion industry, which means that there must be awareness of what happens outside of actual job sites.
Dr. Crowley’s study uses qualitative content analysis to map out how the party life leads to incidents of sexual harassment with both personal and professional consequences for fashion models using 20 distinct narratives.
New Jersey colleges and universities have seen an average of 40,000 more women than men as undergraduates over just a five-year span ending last fall. Years of enrollment data show that NJ has been part of a nationwide, decades-long trend of notably more female...
Dr. Crowley’s analysis revealed that while some bystander victim–alliance behavior occurred in the forms of verbal objections and a strong physical presence to thwart perpetrators, bystander facilitation of perpetrator abuse was much more common.