When Equitable Becomes Equal: Experimental Evidence on Division of Marital Assets with Same-Sex Couples

Authors

• John Roberts
• Jennifer Bennett Shinall, Vanderbilt University Law School

Abstract

Previous scholarship has suggested that legal decisionmakers may be biased against women and against nonbreadwinning spouses when dividing the marital assets of divorcing, opposite-sex couples. This Essay extends the marital asset division literature to divorcing, same-sex couples. Using experimental methods, this Essay finds that subjects divide marital assets between spouses equivalently, regardless of whether the divorcing couple is same-sex or opposite-sex. Subjects’ own sexual orientation, however, influences how they divide marital assets between divorcing spouses. Furthermore, this Essay documents a mitigation of prior experimental subject bias against women and nonbreadwinning spouses after the #MeToo movement and the COVID-19 pandemic. This new experimental evidence indicates that broad shifts in societal norms over the past decade may at last mitigate longstanding, unequal outcomes at the time of divorce, which have resulted from the dominant legal regime of equitable division across the United States.

Recommended Citation

John Roberts and Jennifer Bennett Shinall, When Equitable Becomes Equal: Experimental Evidence on Division of Marital Assets with Same-Sex Couples, 77 Fla. L. Rev. 1831 (2025).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol77/iss5/3