Studies that have examined women’s finances have looked at householdsrather than individual women, since traditionally women spent most of their lives married andthus traditionally made financial decisions jointly with aspouse.

But that’s no longer the case, according to a brief from the Center for Retirement Researchat Boston College, which finds that as time has passed, women spendless of their lives married—and that changes the dynamic.

It also changes—drastically—the way women need to plan and save forretirement, since the financial needs of a woman alone aresubstantially greater—and different—than the needs of a woman whois part of a couple.

Researchers sought to determine whether women are still spendingmost of their lives married, and to that end they studied fourcohorts of women, calculating the percentage of years that they aremarried based on data in the Health and Retirement Study, which hasinterviewed people over age 50 every two years since 1992, askingdetailed questions about both current and past marital status.

The analysis focuses on the change in marriage patterns overfour birth cohorts: the original HRS cohort (born 1931–1941); theWar Babies (1942–1947); the Early Boomers (1948–1953); and the MidBoomers (1954–1959).

It sought to discover what percentage of women’s adultyears—ages 20 and older—is spent as part of a married couple.

Allowing for the fact that the youngest group in the study hasnot lived as long, and thus has not amassed as many married (orsingle) years as the oldest, researchers calculated the number ofyears (“total woman years”) for the women in each group and arrivedat the percentage of years each group was married.

For the earliest cohort, those born in 1931–1941,” the briefsays, “72 percent of women’s years between age 20 and the lastinterview were spent married. By the Mid Boomer cohort, those bornin 1954–1959, the share had dropped to 54 percent. According tothis measure, women have gone from spending most of their lives aspart of a married couple to spending just 54 percent of their livesmarried.”

One final calculation, to account for the younger cohorts whohave not yet reached the age of the women in the older cohorts,“show that if the Mid Boomers were interviewed at ages 73–83, thenwomen in this cohort would have spent just about half of their lifeas part of a couple. It may well be that, once the whole lifespanof Mid Boomers has elapsed, women in that cohort will have spentless than half their adult years married.”

Why the drastic change?

The study finds three reasons: an increase in the age of firstmarriage; a drop in the percentage of women who marry; and, forthose who do marry, an increase in divorce.

But the trend is not equal across all demographics.

The report finds that while women in the aggregate are spendingless and less time in marriage, “black women have always spent asmaller percentage of years married than white women … [and] thedecline in the percentage of years married is greater for blackwomen than white women.”

But while there was substantial variation by race, the samewasn’t true by education.

The report says that regardless of whether women had somecollege or just a high school degree or less, “the percentage ofyears spent married declined from about 70 percent to about 50percent between the HRS and Mid Boomer cohorts. The increase in thepercentage of years not married or divorced was consistent acrosseducational group.”

The report concludes that since “women as a group are going tospend less than half of their adult years as part of a couple,” thechange “has significant implications for financial planning.”