Gender and Trajectories of Marital Breakdown: Accounts of Chinese Immigrant Women in Canada

The relatively sparse literature has documented various challenges international migration poses to martial stability, yet we know little about immigrant women's experiences with marital breakdown. Drawing data from a qualitative study of Chinese economic immigrants to Canada, this article explores women's experiences of navigating the processes of this life circumstance, and of how gender—including their senses of changing gender roles in post-immigration and postmarital contexts—plays out in these trajectories. The results of this exploratory study illustrate the value of transcending dichotomous conceptions of the relationship between gender and migration, and of opening spaces in which to better understand immigrant women's increasingly diversified life trajectories and the range of barriers they encounter along the way. The study also reveals multiple opportunities for social work contributions: tackling systematic barriers to settlement, facilitating social support in the community, and recognizing individuals’ diverse trajectory potentials (including the potential for this typically unwelcome event to be integrated as personal growth and transition).

Marriage

Marriage can be viewed in economic terms as an investment, an outlay of capital by the man’s family before and at the time of the wedding which yields returns over the subsequent period. Returns take a variety of forms, depending on the rights and obligations associated with marriage in a given society. Bambara society in Kala is patriarchal, and lineage-based, in which bride-wealth is paid by the man’s family to that of the woman’s family. Control over childbearing is one of several rights which pass on marriage, along with a woman’s labour power, in the millet-field and in domestic arenas. A woman’s income and resources, and the links of support between her and her natal households, are also valuable elements which come with marriage. Being married is seen as a fundamental and necessary state, very few women remain unmarried for long, polygamy and widow inheritance are practiced, and rates of remarriage are very high. The chapter compares the costs of and returns from marriage. These costs and returns have been changing over time and do patterns of marriage. Marriage also faces certain risks, from mortality, illness, sterility, and marital breakdown.

Pensions on divorce in Ireland: law, practice and a way forward?

The importance of pensions as a source of family wealth has attracted increased attention during the first decades of the twenty-first century. In particular, ever-greater focus is now being placed in many jurisdictions on how the wealth held in pensions is factored into financial remedies on marital breakdown. Notwithstanding that pension entitlements may also be some of the most valuable assets available for distribution on separation or divorce in Ireland, the Irish approach to pensions and pension adjustment orders on marital breakdown has attracted minimal comment or analysis. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature. It pulls together for the first time findings from various studies to investigate the prevalence of pension adjustment orders, specifically, in Irish divorce practice. Reflecting on these findings and the Supreme Court’s recent 2019 judgment in F v M, it analyses the regime and considers a multifaceted approach to reform.

Reversed accounting: legal professionals, families and the gender wealth gap in France

This article describes how legal professionals and families contribute to the widening, legitimation and concealment of the gender wealth gap. It is based on ethnographic observation, study of legal files and statistical data on gender wealth inequality in France. Despite formally equal law, family wealth arrangements in moments of estate planning and marital breakdown tend to reproduce gender inequality. The main legal professionals involved are lawyers and notaries. In their interactions with family members, they carry out reversed accounting, a logic of practice in which the result comes first and computation comes after. As families and legal professionals strive to preserve real estate and businesses, or to minimize taxes, they produce inventories, estimations and distributions of assets which disadvantage women, even though shares appear to be formally equal. Female legal professionals, as well as female clients, may endorse this concern, and thus, also unwittingly contribute to the gender wealth gap.