The working world is unfair to many women, yet even when they succeed, they must confront another series of challenges. Their hard-won successes are taxed in ways that men’s are not.

The taxes I’m talking about aren’t paid in dollars and cents or imposed by the government. They take the form of annoyance and misery and are levied by individuals, very often by loved ones. I call these impositions taxes because they take away some of what an individual earns, diminishing the joys of success.

A recent Swedish study of gender differences in the implications of victory for political candidates calls attention to this unfairness. While winning is the ultimate professional milestone for candidates, a source of elation and pride, for women it is often spoiled, according to the study, by Olle Folke, a political scientist at Uppsala University, and Johanna Rickne, an economist at Stockholm University.

Winning an election increases subsequent divorce rates for female candidates but not for men (This paper, like most of the social science literature, focuses on female-male partners.) These divorces are not the exclusive result of hard-fought campaigns. The study examined elections with very narrow margins of victories, in which winning was largely a matter of luck. These “lucky” winners also experienced higher divorce rates.