How bread-winning women are driving alimony reform

Article here. Excerpt:

'Alimony, otherwise known as spousal support or maintenance, is an ongoing payment by the higher-earning spouse to the lower-earning one. It has changed and shifted over the 40 years since the Supreme Court ruled that it had to be applied equally to both genders.

Yet it is still heavily weighted toward men paying women. Only 3 percent of around 400,000 alimony recipients are male, according to the 2010 census, up a half a percent since 2000. Recipients claimed $9.2 million in payments in 2013 on their tax returns.
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Now that women are paying alimony more often, they are getting involved in advocating for change.

"It’s unfair for men to pay it, and unfair for women to pay it. But women are much more outraged by it," said Ken Neumann, a founder of the Academy of Professional Family Mediators.

Tanya Williams, who has been sending a check to her ex-husband for 13 years, is among those who do not understand the concept of "permanent" alimony - when one spouse pays the other indefinitely - and has joined the cause against it.

"There's no other contract where the liability continues after the contract ends," said the 52-year-old dentist who got divorced in Florida but now lives in North Carolina. "You can't leave your job and say, 'I still have a need so you have to continue to pay me.'"'