Australian Same-Sex Marriage Trends: Females Lead the Way

Females are marrying at a much higher rate than men after six years of same-sex marriage in Australia following the release of statistics by the Australian Bureau of Statistics(ABS).

Across the six years of data collated since Marriage Equality became law in late 2017, 15,800 same-sex marriages have been females while men have had 10,700 nuptials.

The 59% to 40% marriage rate has largely remained the same throughout the six years except for the first year when the male rate was at 42%.

The 1% miscalculation comes when you include marriages where at least one person was of non-binary gender. These marriages have only been counted separately since 2022 by the ABS when official documents were changed.

All marriages dropped off in Australia during 2021 and 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic but the percentage of same-sex marriages out of the total of marriages has roughly remained around the 4% mark across the six years, the overall figure is 4.2%.

James Eynstone-Hinkins, ABS head of marriages data, said marriage numbers have dropped 6.9 per cent from the record high of 127,161 in 2022.

In New South Wales and Victoria, marriage numbers went down by 13.2 and 10.3 per cent respectively, while Western Australia and South Australia saw their numbers go up 16.8 and 7.1 per cent.

“It’s clear many couples needed to postpone their plans to get married during the pandemic, and this is seen not only in numbers but in higher median ages at marriage,” Mr Eynstone-Hinkins said.

“Median ages have historically been very stable, but when compared with 2019, they were up 0.6 years to 32.9 for men, and 0.7 years to 31.2 for women.

“The most popular day to marry in 2023 was once again in spring. The day to ‘remember’ was 11 November, with 1,799 couples marrying on this date.”

The first year of 2018 was an anomaly with many couples, who had been waiting years for a change in the law, rushing to tie the knot. That year 5.5% of all marriages were same-sex couples.

Compared to Australia’s closest neighbour New Zealand, the rate is much higher with the Kiwi same-sex marriages only rating 2.3% of overall marriages across the same six-year period. Marriage Equality became law in New Zealand in 2013 so you would expect those figures to have levelled out well ahead of Australia given they are four years ahead.

Australian same-sex divorce rates are dramatically lower than those of opposite-sex divorces. These figures have only been collected by the ABS since 2022 but in that time 1,700 same-sex couples have divorced compared with 154,000 opposite-sex couples. Just a 1.1% rate of the total divorces.

This could probably be expected given most of those who have been married in the first six years have wanted it for a long time and are therefore less likely to divorce so quickly.

It is also interesting that in 2023 the average number of years before a divorce is 13 so you could clearly expect seven more years before we start to see some true divorce figures from same-sex couples.

Last Updated on Sep 4, 2024