"There is also a trend towards women starting to marry later, having built up their own earnings power and investing in property themselves."
However, Gordon warns that traditional beliefs about the woman remaining in the family home after divorce no longer hold up as much as they once did in a court of law.
Therefore it is important for advisers to help divorcing women build up financial resilience that goes beyond relying on traditional expectations, she says.
Gordon explains: "There was historically on divorce an expectation that the woman would have been the stay-at-home parent, and therefore judges tended to decide in the woman's favour to ensure that any children were safely and appropriately housed.
"Historically, this meant women would be getting the house in their sole name, but the balance has shifted recently and there is no longer an automatic assumption that the mother is the primary carer."
Also, with the rise in pre-nuptial arrangements in the UK, the family home is often simply just an asset to be split on divorce – so it is not always likely the woman will end up with the family home in her own name.
"Moreover," Gordon adds, "the judge will also have to assess whether the mother can fund the mortgage or whether the mortgage provider themselves will accept maintenance payments as income for the sake of paying back the mortgage. Not all providers are as open to this as clients might think.
"As judges will not want children to remain in a property where there could be a risk of default, quite often the family home ends up being sold and, for lower-income families, this could lead to more women in private rented accommodation."
There is also a big question mark around cohabitation – even where the couple has been together for 30 years.
"The myth of the common-law wife persists," Gordon says. This means any break-up means the woman will not be able to get a transfer of property or any assets in their name, which leads to great vulnerability.
She urges advisers with clients in this situation to coach their clients about understanding the financial risks, or at least getting the female client onto the deeds (if the house is not in the woman's name).
Older clients
However, the figures from Savills were not all bad news; the data shows that retired women tend to be more property rich, with 3.3m women over 70 owning their homes outright – approximately 40 per cent of all outright ownership in the UK.
So at the one end of the scale, younger women are struggling to get onto the property ownership ladder; at the other end, older women are sitting on properties worth significant sums.
