How can we explain a negative female educational gradient of divorce? In this paper, we continue research from Boertien and Härkönen (2014, 2018) for the UK and Raymo, et al. (2013) for Japan on the mechanisms explaining such a gradient. We formulate hypotheses based on Levinger’s (1965, 1976) social exchange theory on ‘attractions’ and ‘barriers’ and assess whether there are mediating effects of affectional rewards (relationship satisfaction), economic rewards (family income, durables possession, his unemployment), symbolic rewards (age and educational similarity between the spouses, his education, his social status, and communication or conflict resolution skills), affectional barriers (having young children), material barriers (her social status, her unemployment, and being a home owner), and symbolic costs (being committed to marriage, having broken up before or having parents that broke up, being religious, going to church frequently, and living in a rural area).

We analyse the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) [2004-2013] for two waves for Bulgaria, Russia, France, Austria, and Czech Republic. Using the khb-approach with lagged independent variables (from wave 1), we examine the probability that women broke up between the two consecutive waves and perform a mediation analyses to explain the female educational gradient of union dissolution.

Indeed, we find a negative female educational gradient for the pooled country fixed effects model. Instead of.being explained by ‘attractions’, ‘barriers’ were explaining the negative educational gradient of union dissolution in the five countries we studied. We found suppressor effects of ‘attractions’.