Living Arrangements
9 in 10 lone parents are women
Living arrangements, April 2001, UK
Around six out of ten men and women in the UK live in a couple. Five in ten men and women are married and one in ten are cohabiting.
Men are more likely than women to be single (never married), while women are more likely than men to be divorced or widowed. There are over three times as many widows as widowers in the population as women tend to live longer than men.
The pattern of partnership formation has changed over the last 30 years. The proportion of married people has fallen, while the proportions of single and divorced people have increased. The average age at marriage in England and Wales increased by seven years from 1971 to 2001 for both men and women, to nearly 35 years of age for men and 32 years for women.
People cohabiting within each marital status, 2000-02
Cohabitation has increased over the past twenty five years as marriage has declined. Single women are more likely than single men to be cohabiting. However, separated and widowed men are around twice as likely to cohabit than women of the same marital status. A slightly greater proportion of divorced men cohabit than divorced women.
As with marriage, women tend to cohabit at younger ages than men. Women aged between 16 and 24 are over twice as likely as men to cohabit, while men over 25 years are more likely than women of the same age to cohabit.
With the long-term rise in divorce, the numbers of divorced people in England and Wales has also increased. There were 1.5 million divorced men and 2.0 million divorced women in 2001, compared with 187,000 and 296,000 divorced men and women, respectively, in 1971.
Almost 70 per cent of divorces in England and Wales in 2001 were granted to the wife. Women were most likely to be granted a divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour, whereas for men, the most likely reason was two years separation with consent.
There has been a doubling in the proportion of households headed by a lone parent with dependent children in the UK since the early 1970s, to 6 per cent in 2002. Up to the mid-1980s a large part of the rise was due to divorce. More recently, the number of single, lone mothers has grown at a faster rate, because of the rise in the proportion of births outside marriage. Lone mothers headed the majority of lone parent families in spring 2002, with just one in ten headed by a lone father.
The majority of stepfamilies consist of a couple with one or more children from the previous relationship of the woman only. This reflects the tendency for children to stay with their mother following the break up of a partnership. In just under one in ten stepfamilies in Great Britain the children came from the father’s previous relationship in 2001.
Sources: Census, April 2001, Office for National Statistics; Census, April 2001, General Register Office for Scotland; Census, April 2001, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency; Labour Force Survey spring 2002, Office for National Statistics; General Household Survey 2000/01 to 2001/02, Office for National Statistics
Notes: The data relate to all people aged 16 and over unless otherwise stated.
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