Alimony and child support do apply to women as well as men in the US, though it's obviously not equally distributed today. Even if we assume that's not because of a flawed system, I can think of several reasons it might be the case. For example, any or all of the following could cause that in a fair system:
* wage earners are still disproportionately men
* women tend to be much more likely to retain (and desire) custody of children
* women tend to be less likely to work outside the home
While I do believe the system is biased against men, I don't think it's nearly as bad as it may seem depending on your own view of things. There are plenty of stories out there of men who have been unfairly saddled with alimony and child support, and those stories get a lot of play. I think it's fair to say that the trope of "a woman left penniless, with no marketable skills, to care for a family after the man left to shirk his responsibilities" is a trope for a reason - because it is and always has been a common ocurrance.
Men pay ~95% of the dollars given/taken for child support in this country. It applies to women but only in a very very marginal way. Men going from >99% to 95% of child support costs isn't really a noteworthy change and doesn't align with a prediction that it would be meaningfully different.
I don't think he did. My mother paid child support to my father after the divorce. I think in most instances, it's simply more convenient for the mother to take the children in a divorce, or the kids are too young to choose, so it ends that way by default. There is no rule for it though.
The default way still being women that get the children doesn't really change that the dynamic that gender versus child support is not meaningfully any different than the 1920s. Women's share of child support has gone from, I assume, ~0% in 1922 (I didn't look it up but I imagine it was less than 1%) to around 5% in 2022 in terms of dollars paid. Men going from 99% to 95% of child support costs isn't really a noteworthy change and doesn't align with a prediction that it would be meaningfully different.
