The Fantastic Assertion that Prenuptial Agreements Cause the "Feminisation of Poverty"

The rather incredible assertion in the links below that prenuptial agreements cause the feminisation of poverty seems implausible.  (Note that my expertise is in the theory of fair games and unbiased results. The default marriage entitlements are both biased and unfair in a mathematical sense.)


Who Gets a Better Deal? Women and Prenuptial Agreements in Australia and the USA

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228146192_Who_Gets_a_Better_Deal_Women_and_Prenuptial_Agreements_in_Australia_and_the_USA

http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/UWSLawRw/2003/6.html#Heading84

Prenuptial agreements have the potential to 'further entrench' the ‘feminisation of poverty’ upon divorce.[86]

 Perhaps it is different in Australia, but in the USA financially successful men want prenuptial contracts because men perceive  the default marriage entitlements as outrageously unfair. Consider:

A woman marrying a much more financially successful man has essentially no legally enforceable marital obligations and no financial obligations upon divorce.  The man often has huge financial obligations to supply the woman her "entitlements."  So, it is obvious that she is getting entitlements, but what is he getting? She has no obligation to supply children, sex, or even companionship.  He gets nothing remotely commensurate with his obligations.  

Three things are common about prenuptial contracts in the USA

1. Prenuptial contracts are almost always used to level the marriage playing field.  As noted above,  the woman has no obligations to the man.  A prenuptial agreement usually limits the obligations that the man has to the woman to achieve a better balancing of the obligations.  (For instance,  the prenuptial agreement may protect premarital assets.) 
2. A woman  marrying a much more financially successful man with a prenuptial contract almost invariably does better financially, both in marriage and in divorce, than if she marries a man at her own financial status without a prenuptial contract.  Is this really in question? 
3.  A woman marrying a much more financially successful man with a prenuptial contract will not do as well as if she were able to marry him without a prenuptial contract. This does not indicate that the prenuptial agreement is "unfair" to her.  

What fraction (FP) of women divorcing under a prenuptial contract end up in poverty? What fraction (FN) of women divorcing without a prenuptial contract end up in poverty? Unless FP > FN, how can prenuptial agreements be blamed for the ‘feminisation of poverty’ upon divorce?  My guess is that very few women divorcing under a prenuptial contract will be below the poverty line whereas substantial numbers of women divorcing without a prenuptial contract will be below the poverty line.  I am open to evidence, but at the moment, blaming prenuptial contracts for poverty seems to be based on some questionable reasoning.  

Family law provides a perverse set of incentives/disincentives for successful men. See 

• Marriage Entitlement Ideology - No Good Deed Goes Unpunished https://smolyhokes.blogspot.com/2018/01/marriage--no-good-deed-goes-unpunished.html
• Beggar Psychology and Family Law Psychology https://smolyhokes.blogspot.com/2018/01/beggar-psychology-and-family-law.html

Here are my best guesses, absent evidence to the contrary:

• The more courts interfere with binding prenuptial contracts,  the less likely financially successful men are to get married.  If men do marry, they are more likely to marry a woman with similar financial prospects.  (Indeed, this was my case, though some women hated my solution.  "My Chinese Wife and Marriage Entitlement Ideologues" https://smolyhokes.blogspot.com/2018/05/my-chinese-wife-and-marriage.html) This leads to stratification in the marriage market with financially successful men marrying financially successful women.  Even with a prenuptial agreement, these successful women are very unlikely to fall into poverty.  
• When less financially successful women marry similarly less financially successful men (without a prenuptial agreement), those women are more likely to be in poverty after divorce. 
• When less financially successful women have children and do not marry, these women and their children are the most vulnerable to fall into poverty.
• Unless evidence is supplied that women marrying with a prenuptial contract are more likely to fall into poverty than women marrying without a prenuptial contract, one can only speculate that the paper's assertion is probably false as it is very counter-intuitive.  My best guess is that the paper and/or its cited references do not have any evidence that (as defined above FP > FN) women divorcing under a prenuptial agreement are at higher risk of falling into poverty.  My best guess is that a simplistic abuse of statistics leads to the paper's improbable conclusion. It might be simple faulty reasoning that because women divorcing under a prenuptial contract get less than they would have gotten by default,  women are poorer than they would have been; therefore,  poverty increases.  But, one cannot conclude that because women got less in the divorce they fall below the poverty line.  For example, if PL is the poverty line, then it might well be that without the prenup the woman would be at 10*PL and with the prenup she would be at 5*PL.