Educational Differentials in the Risk of Divorce and Their Trends across Marriage Cohorts of Korean Women

Little research in Korea has systematically examined trends in the risk of marital dissolution, especially trends in educational differentials in divorce. Using individual-level data from the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Family (KLoWF), we investigate how the association between education and divorce has changed across three marriage cohorts of women who married in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, after taking into account various individual controls. The result from the Cox proportional hazard models of the divorce risk shows that the association between educational attainment and divorce has become more negative for younger marriage cohorts. In other words, divorce is increasingly concentrated among women with lower educational attainment than among their counterpart with higher education. We discuss implications of the growing concentration of divorce among low-educated women for socioeconomic differentials in children’s education and well-being.