 Hi, I'm Dr Sharon Thompson and I'm a reader in the Law School at Cardiff University. I hope this video may be of some use or interest to use a family law student, and as you can see, I'm going to talk about meal tickets, gold diggers and financial provision on divorce. Why? Well, most of us have probably encountered a news article on the latest big-money divorce case that mentions some of these terms, whether it's the latest relationship breakdown of a celebrity or a millionaire, the details of who got what make popular stories in the press. And such cases can elicit strong opinion, London being lamented as of course the divorce capital of the world because the law in England and Wales is sometimes perceived as encouraging meal tickets, alimony drones, gold diggers, stereotypes that disproportionately apply to women, not men. So I am interested in how these stereotypes have created a backlash against efforts to implement equality in recognised care, and how this has influenced much of the discussion around reform of financial provision and prenuptial agreements. So why is this of relevance to you as a family law student? I've suggested on this slide that this video can help you to analyse the system of the redistribution of property on divorce in England and Wales, and this includes being able to think critically, using data and academic articles about some important cases you may have encountered in your reading, and about current debates around reform of this area of family law. So the ideas in this video are explored more fully in the first article noted here in the slide, an open access article titled A Mill Soon Around the Neck. And I've also included some other publications of mine and of others that cover the issues explored in this video. So to begin with men, what is a gold digger and what's a meal ticket? Well gold digger is in the Oxford English Dictionary. It's defined as a woman who forms relationships with men purely to obtain money or gifts from them. So this tells us first that material gain is the only motivation for a gold digger, and secondly that men are not gold diggers. The meal ticket phrase is generally associated with joint lives orders, which you may or may not have encountered in your reading already. Joint lives orders are whereby spousal maintenance lasts indefinitely until the court orders otherwise. The recipient rate partners are one of the parties dies, and I'll talk more about this shortly. But what's important in all of this is the effect of these terms. So she wasn't writing specifically about gold diggers or divorce or any of that, but I do think this assertion made by Sandra Fredman is relevant where she says stereotypical images of women have throughout the ages been used to justify detrimental treatment. Because women are classified as different in their relevant respects, it appears justifiable to subject them to detrimental treatment. So the stereotype of the gold digger is changing the way we think about women's economic entitlement and divorce, and arguably does justify detrimental treatment of women. And in addition to these gold digger meal ticket terms, we also have another powerful trope in society, which is that of the independent woman. So of course this trope celebrates independence, it means women can react also in quite a visceral way to the accusation of the gold digger, understandably so, but either seeking to prove that they don't need their partner's money or by vilifying women who do. So these two tropes of gold digger and independent women are sometimes pasted on to every woman and then the voices of the broad spectrum of women in between are lost. And this includes people who become economically dependent upon their partner because marriage does create interdependence, especially when there are children. And she might make decisions for the welfare of the family that might mean sacrificing her earning part and she's not Beyonce or the Mills, but as I'll try to show, she is adversely affected by these powerful tropes. So I want to try and address three questions in this video. How are meal tickets and gold digging reported in media? Why do so many people believe the law encourages gold digging, encourages meal tickets too? And how do these perceptions influence prenuptial agreements and the division of assets on divorce? Addressing question number one then, how are meal tickets and gold digging reported in media? So I want to show this by examining a collection of national press reports on the Court of Appeals stage of the financial provision case, Mills and Mills. This study helps reveal how the ideas of meal ticket and gold digger enter the public domain and it is the press reports of the Court of Appeals stage rather than at the Supreme Court stage that demonstrate this best. So if you've studied this case already, Mills and Mills, and I'll include the citations on the later slide, try and forget everything you know already about the case. Try and forget what you know about the law for financial provision and divorce and take these media reports at face value. So I want to show you the first article I read about this case way back in 2017. The headline reads, divorced men doomed to life as a cash machine. So this article presents the facts of Mills as being simply that Mr. Mills divorced his wife 15 years ago, but has had to increase his payments to her because she spent all of her divorce settlement and the face gold diggers is used in the article. Next is this one with the headline court orders man to increase payments to wife who lost bulk of divorce settlement with her financial decisions, a telegraph article. Again outlines the facts of the case where the wife apparently lost the lump sum she was awarded at the time of the divorce and successfully argued that her periodical payments, that is of course the amount of maintenance she was getting, should be increased and in this article there's some detail on Mr. Mills calls for reform of the law calling for quote changes to the law to limit spouses to five years maximum maintenance and I'll mention this five-year limitation later in the video. My next example is from the evening standard business man's fury as judge orders him to support his ex-wife for life after she blew 230k payout on homes. As this article is based on an interview with Mr. Mills have included his own words here in the slide. I don't think it's a good message to send to men or women he's saying I don't think it's right that after divorce she should be tied together forever and here's a daily male headline. I'm paying for her mistakes husband who was ordered to support his ex-wife for 15 years after they divorced calls for a time number of maintenance after she blew her 230k payout on bad investments. So what do we know so far while taking these articles at face value it really does seem as if the law doesn't encourage men and women to be financially independent after divorce because it awards lifetime awards to women that unfairly prejudiced men. Importantly the coverage isn't all one-sided so this is an example of that. An article titled truels target women after divorce payout and I wanted to include this one and the next one because I've referred to an article with Mr. Mills words in it so I wanted to try and find an example that had Ms. Mills words too. So here is what she had to say about the case. She says quote it should be noted that since the divorce 15 years ago I have never returned to the court to increase my maintenance despite my financial difficulty and bad health and low earnings. This was Mr. Mills application to the court to reduce or eliminate the maintenance despite the fact that our son is still in full-time education and still living at home. There have been a number of articles published recently in respect of this appeal which give a very one-sided version of the fact of the case said the statement. The tone and content of the reporting has caused me considerable distress and a doing it hate meal. Further this one from the daily meal um I'm not a gold digger. The ex-wife occupied as a cold-cutting chancellor after winning a huge rise in maintenance payments 15 years after her divorce blasts back and says it's only her ex's fault. So as she's saying in this article is quote I feel like I've been through your character assassination both with the hands of my ex-husband and the public. They've said I'm a gold digger. It's not true. I'm nothing of the sort. So taking all of this into account then what do we know about the Mills case now. Ms. Mills falls into financial difficulty but does not apply to court. In fact it is Mr. Mills who brings the case to court because he wants to terminate or reduce the amount of money he's paying Ms. Mills which was reportedly 1100 pounds a month. She can't meet her basic needs on this amount of money and asks the court to consider increasing her maintenance payments and ends winning the appeal so that she will get these payments. Okay so this additional context provides much more insight into how the law actually operates. As we know legislation and the judicial approach to this area does not award people with a meal ticket for life, does not reward or encourage gold diggers that instead emphasises that spouses especially after long marriages should be able to leave the marriage independently but on an equal footing economically. So there's obviously not going to be a clean break if it's going to leave one party much worse off than the other and so a clean break between the parties is as we know less achievable where there is less property and capital to divide up because there has to be enough to make the needs of the parties and I've included the definition of needs here according to the family justice council. So we do see that the reality of Mills and Mills then is quite different from that portrayed in the press reports when we look a bit more closely at the judgments. As I've said Ms Mills was awarded an increase in pericopayments to major needs an increase which was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court in 2018. So I've noted both these judgments here in the slide. The Court of Appeal importantly found that although Ms Mills had made unwise investments there had not been financial mismanagement and the court was clear that Ms Mills had not been profligate or wanton. There was nothing to suggest that Ms Mills was a gold digger and awarded her unwise investments indicating machinery intentions. Yet in the press reports in the previous slide Ms Mills is either castigated for being a gold digger or in the reports where she gives her own account she is defending herself from the gold digger accusation. Focus is on the joint lives order made when the parties first separated and not by the court in the current case and it is this joint lives order that is interpreted in the press as a meal ticket for life. So just to note the joint lives order was not affected by the Supreme Court's decision in this case the court simply restored the level of maintenance to the level it had been before the Court of Appeal decision. And so the vilification of Ms Mills for receiving this award importantly does not provide space for discussion of the potential utility of a joint lives order in some cases. So what are joint lives orders when might they be useful? I've already explained what they are but they might well actually be an appropriate response to enduring economic disadvantage following relationship breakdown if we look at the risk research of Joe Miles and Emma Hitchings because they argue that a clean break does not necessarily indicate that the economically weaker party can be fully self-supporting. She may only be able to avoid reliance on the ex-husband by relying instead on others or she may have no office adequate alternative means of support at all. So a joint lives order could arguably alleviate that but there are many cases where that is not happening. So a bit more about the research of Joe Miles and Emma Hitchings and I've included the full citation here in the slide. Their research shows that joint lives orders are actually very rare and that more broadly spousal supports generally awarded to mothers caring for minor dependent children. Overall they found that women continue to be economically disadvantaged following divorce and their research shows then that the press reports about the propensity of family courts to make spousal maintenance wards for life to make joint lives ordered are wrong. Instead actually the opposite is true because all their data indicate a clean break culture. From a data set of 399 court files joint lives orders were made in just 5.5 percent of cases and similarly Hilary Woodward's study of 369 court files only 2 percent for joint lives orders for more than a nominal amount. This indicates then that while Golddigger a male ticket for life tropes are made credible by media reporting such reports don't reflect the reality for women on divorce. So why then do so many people believe that the law encourages Golddiggering my second question in this video. Well we have the example of the media reporting from the Mills case which would suggest that we were real problem with joint lives orders aka as the press likes to call them male tickets for life and Golddiggers but this is also backed up by cultural assumptions about the way money is divided and relationship break down. One of the big assumptions is that assets are always split in half in divorce regardless of the duration of the marriage or of any other factors. And this billboard on this slide also shows that within our general public consciousness there is an idea that if you have an expensive car you want to make sure your spouse doesn't get it. Going against perhaps the idea that the person who undertakes most of the caring responsibilities in the relationship might have indirectly helped you earn the money to allow you to buy that car. Pretty persuasive though isn't it. What if this is further reinforced by the suggestion that what women want is a rich man. For example TV shows like The Bachelor involves several women competing against each other for the chance to go out with a millionaire and then we've got studies like this reported again in the daily mail that don't dissuade people of the notion that women are after men's money all the time either. But all of this aside there is one thing that really cements not only public perception of gold diggers and meal tickets but also the gold diggers is an inherently gendered term and that applies to women and not men. And it's when they see things like this. So imagine you have just seen the reports from the mill's case and seeing this focus on how unfair this was for the husband and then you see this bar in a state your family law expert who has detailed knowledge of the law in this area she's directly referring to the mill's case and saying it is wrong. And she's saying here in this telegraph article our judges are being very old fashioned I'm afraid they're overshover us the way they were in the 19th century people wonder why 15 years after a marriage has ended one person has to keep paying money to another. So she's confirming everything you suspected when you read these reports in the media and look at how persuasive this is if there's one thing that stops women getting back on their feet and being treated seriously and equally at work it's the assumption throughout the legal system that once a woman is married she is somehow disabled and incapable ever of managing on her own for the rest of her life. It is a very serious impediment to equality. On this view the law of financial provision and divorce is actually obstructing gender equality by sending out the message that women aren't as capable of independence as men are. So thinking back to the slide with Beyonce on it this then brings me to my third and final question how do these perceptions of gold digging meal tickets for life and all of that influence prenuptial agreements and the division of assets on divorce? Well it has certainly influenced this bill the Divorced Financial Provision Bill which is currently before parliament and has been introduced a number of times since 2014. This is baron estates private members bill which aims to reform the law for financial provision and divorce by doing three things. First of all it proposes equally dividing the assets acquired during the marriage but excluding assets acquired before the marriage and properly acquired through gift or inheritance and the impact of this clause would arguably be detrimental to women economically disadvantaged after divorcing cases where there's less money to go around. If there isn't very much matrimonial property to split up then getting half of not very much isn't going to get someone very far whose particular housing needs is a result of their perhaps caring obligations for children after divorce. The second thing proposed by the bill is to curb periodical payments to no longer than five years unless this would lead to serious financial hardship and this is encapsulated in the point that begins clause 5c on the slide. So this may be fine for wealthy families but again what about families that can't satisfy a level of maintenance high enough to enable someone to become economically independent after five years. In a society of welfare cuts precarious work in zero water contracts there are many scenarios where someone doing most of the childcare after divorce is going to really struggle to become economically self-sufficient straight away but if this type of struggle is common or normalized it might be difficult to prove the serious financial hardships depulated in clause 5c on the slide. Now the third thing is the bottom point in the slide to make prenuptial agreements binding subject to standard procedural safeguards like independent advice, pull-off periods, disclosure. The important point about this is that there would be no scope to set these agreements aside if their effect would be to leave one person in a position of need. Currently prenuptial agreements have decisive weight on divorce meaning they will be enforced unless one of the parties is going to be left in a situation of real need and you'll know that if you've studied Radmacher and Granitano and furthermore in the law commission's recommendations to met prenuptial agreements legally binding it was made clear that the model of binding prenupts proposed would not allow the needs of the parties to be contracted out of and this is so important even in jurisdictions like New York where prenupts are fairly ironclad there is still some albeit limited scope to set aside great agreements that will leave someone in an economically vulnerable situation on divorce. So in justifying this reform baron estate repeatedly makes reference to meal tickets for life and also has noted her concern about gold diggers and as we saw earlier she pitches her reform as being ultimately good for women but what does the research say what do we know about the impact of divorce on most women based for example on Joe Miles and Emma Hitching's study of court files how does the proposed reform set out in the divorce financial provision bill match up with what we know about the broader picture of financial revision law. I hope this video will help you form an informed view of this it's something that there are lots of articles lots of data and research out there but use that research use that research as evidence to critically assess debates around the divorce financial provision bill and all their proposals for reform. Now not only do meal tickets and gold digger stereotypes impact debates around legislative reform their impact on public perception of the law is also important since many people determine the financial consequences of divorce for themselves either by signing a prenuptial agreement or by reaching a settlement on divorce. My study of prenups in New York found that often the non-moneyed spouse signs a prenup to prove she's not marrying for money or the moneyed spouse insists on a prenup to be reassured he's not marrying a gold digger and one story stood out where the attorney I interviewed said she did not want the prenup he insisted in the last minute he capitulated and said it was all right it was almost like it was a test and because she would dirty knew okay you're not marrying me for my money so this shows us the gold digging stereotype causes the intentions of the non-moneyed not the money party to be interrogated and research suggests this attitude is harmful because it does not place the non-moneyed party's financial demands needs and choices on a par with those of the moneyed spouse the impact of all of this is that by focusing on whether someone is or isn't a gold digger or by proving to the world that you'll never be economically dependent means that there is a shift in emphasis away from valuing care and the impact of devaluing care and relationship breakdown is that structural inequalities are reinforced and that those who do make the non-financial contributions to the welfare of the family are disadvantaged and research shows how gendered this work still is and research carried out by Fisher and Lowell also shows that women take longer to recover economically and relationship breakdown at all levels of wealth and so limiting financial provision to caregiving spouses is neither a safe nor productive strategy for addressing structural inequalities between men and women but the male ticket gold digger mentality does not appreciate this reality some concluding thoughts things for you to take away from this video that will hopefully help you with the family law reading and research the first thing is that we've seen data shows concerns about male tickets and gold diggers are not representative of the bigger picture of financial provision and divorce there is a gap between what the law is and what social perceptions of the law are and so stepping into the debate with accurate information on the law and evidence of the detrimental impact of stereotypes is important much has been written about the conditions that lead to power inequalities and intimate financial agreements like prenups and conditions that lead to inequality of bargaining power are of course crucial to understanding how people make decisions in relationships but people's social perceptions are too because if someone has no money but they're worried that they might be viewed as a gold digger they will sign that prenup that gives them no claim to their partner's assets if they understand that the reason they are entitled to financial provision and divorce is not because the law rewards gold diggers but because the law recognizes the importance of value and care and money equally I would suggest their decision design would be different calls for reform however appeared to be disproportionately focused on these stereotypes so to be clear I'm not suggesting there is not a need for financial provision law to be reformed but if we are talking about reform it's important to understand what's driving these discussions and why it's therefore important to question the motivation behind for example the divorce financial revision bill where any bill seeking to reform this law as part of our assessment of whether it ought to be introduced amended or cost and if terms like meal tickets or gold diggers are used to deny property rights to individuals in divorce we need to question why it is easier to count the cost the financial cost of divorce than it is to count the non-financial one the income producing spouse can calculate the amount of earnings lost to the non-moneyed spouse but the cost of care provided by the non-moneyed spouse is really difficult to quantify stereotypes like the meal ticket for life read rough shot over these intangible costs because non-financial contributions are not visible in the way that financial contributions are and so once again we are brought back to that important question at the heart of this area of family law why, how and should the cost of care be valued appropriately in relationship breakdown thank you