The World Bank recently released its 2026 Women, Business and the Law report, which measures how laws, regulations and policies shape women’s economic opportunities and private sector development across 190 economies. Among the 10 topics used to measure women's economic empowerment are workplace, marriage, parenthood and entrepreneurship. One of the highest scorers in the world is Sweden.

Across the board, women spend more time on housework and carry more of the responsibility for children, which affects their pay and well-being. Sweden offers 480 days of paid parental leave, with 90 days reserved for each parent. These policies help mothers of young children return to work faster. Similarly, when it comes to laws on marriage, mobility and women's pay, Sweden gets a perfect score.

But equality rankings don’t tell the whole story. Getting ahead at work comes at a price – even in Sweden.

Success comes at a cost

Economists Olle Folke (Uppsala University) and Johanna Rickne (Stockholm University) investigated how career success affects marriages. They compared divorce rates among candidates who ran in Swedish municipal elections – those who won and those who narrowly lost. For women, winning an election increased the risk of divorce. For men, the result of the election had no effect on their marriages.

Must women choose between their career and their relationship, then? Or are politicians an exception? To explore this further, Folke and Rickne examined CEO appointments across Sweden over a decade. The pattern was the same as in politics: women promoted to top executive positions were twice as likely to get divorced as men who received equivalent promotions.

The curse of success isn’t limited to politics and business. In Hollywood, it’s common knowledge that winning an Academy Award is great for your career, but bad for your love life. That is, if you’re a woman.

H. Colleen Stuart (John Hopkins University), Sue Moon (New York University) and Tiziana Casciaro (University of Toronto) tracked all the Best Actor and Best Actress nominees from 1936 to 2010. They found that Best Actress winners were more likely to get divorced than actresses who were nominated but didn’t take home the golden statuette. The Best Actor winners, on the other hand, didn’t suffer from the so-called “Oscar curse”.

But a separate study suggests male winners aren’t entirely unaffected. When Michael Jensen (University of Michigan) and Heeyon Kim (Cornell) compared winners and nominees against elite actors who were never nominated, they found that the men’s marriages suffered, too. The researchers attributed this to the influx of professional and romantic attention that follows a major public win.

Does this mean winning a Swedish municipal election might generate a flood of romantic proposals for female politicians, and that higher divorce rates are just a reflection of their love lives picking up? Most likely not. 

Folke and Rickne found no evidence of a "temptation effect" in which women's (but not men's) promotions increase their chances of finding a new partner. In fact, women who were divorced and promoted remarried at a slower rate than divorced women without promotions.

The explanation lies elsewhere: in deeply rooted assumptions about whose success is acceptable within a relationship. Folke and Rickne found that the couples who weathered a woman's election win with the least damage were those in which income differences remained small after the promotion. The problem wasn’t success itself, but the status disruption it created.

The persistence of gender norms

Researchers Alyson Byrne and Julian Barling have given this mechanism a name: status leakage. Studying over 200 hundred women in high-status positions, they found that the strain in these marriages was driven by feelings of embarrassment and resentment, on the part of the man, about a partner's career trajectory rather than income differences. Another factor was a sense that the man’s own hard-earned status was diminished by association. These feelings predicted lower relationship satisfaction and higher marital instability. In other words, what matters isn’t just money, but status and prestige as well. 

Their research also points to what can protect a relationship. Byrne and Barling tested whether a partner's support could lessen these effects and found an interesting result. Offering emotional support in the form of encouragement, understanding and expressions of pride made no difference to a couple remaining together. But giving instrumental support, such as taking on childcare responsibilities, emptying the dishwasher and staying on top of dentist appointments, essentially eliminated the negative effect on marital stability. 

When partners provided tangible support, the link between a woman's higher status and relationship strain disappeared. What’s important isn’t the chores themselves, but what doing them signals: that both careers belong to both partners. It’s a shift from "your success" to "our success".

My INSEAD colleague Jennifer Petriglieri, who has spent years studying how dual-career couples can thrive in love and work, puts it well: The conventional framing of two careers as a zero-sum game is exactly the trap that breaks couples apart. Couples who navigate these tensions successfully are those who communicate openly about their values, boundaries and fears, and treat each transition as something to work through together.

The curse of success isn’t inevitable. It lifts when both partners decide, explicitly, that they are on the same team