Last updated on April 8, 2021
The president-elect of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML), Alton Abramowitz, calls it a “sea change” when he refers to one solidly emerging trend in family law.
Namely, that is the growing number of women following a divorce who are required to make child support payments and pay alimony to their ex-spouses.
“It shows that women have really moved up financially and that in many instances they are the major bread winners in a lot of families,” he says.
Traditionally and over decades, that has not been the case, of course, with more women in the home caring for children while their male spouses had careers and were the sole breadwinners.
But that was yesteryear, with the sea change mentioned by Abramowitz yielding such changes as these: About half of all medical degrees awarded in recent years have been to women, with the same holding true for law school graduates.
“The glass ceiling has been pierced,” notes Abramowitz, with the result that more women than ever are centrally involved with family finances — both bringing in the money and handling the debts.
The AAML keeps track of divorce-related statistics, which now indicate that well more than half of all divorce attorneys across the country have noted an uptick in mothers paying child support over the past three years. Nearly half of attorneys polled for information also state that more women are also being tasked to pay alimony to their former spouses.
Source: Reuters, “Divorce courts mirror society as more women pay alimony,” Patricia Reaney, May 10, 2012
