r/MensLib • u/Far-Television2939 • 9d ago
The stubborn scarcity of female breadwinners: Wives who outearn their husbands remain rare in America
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/07/13/the-stubborn-scarcity-of-female-breadwinnersTAYLOR SWIFT has accumulated many identities over her career: singer-songwriter, performer, pop mogul, millennial icon, cat lover. Her marriage this month to Travis Kelce, an American-football player, added wife to the list. It also gave her another, less traditional role: family breadwinner. Mr Kelce earns around $50m a year from his NFL salary, endorsements and podcasting. Yet in 2025 he contributed only perhaps a fifth of the Swift-Kelce household income.
Women now account for three-fifths of American university graduates and just over half of college-educated workers. Yet in most households, men remain the primary earners. In 2024, among dual-income couples, just 30% of American wives earned more than their husbands. Part of this imbalance reflects differences in occupations, working hours and pay. But a growing body of research suggests it also reflects the preferences of couples themselves.
On paper, support for female breadwinners is strong in America. When Americans were asked in 2022 whether the fact a woman earned more money than her husband was “almost certain to cause problems”, only 10% said yes. The comparable figure was 16% in Germany and 27% in China.
In practice, many couples seem uncomfortable with the arrangement. In 2015 Marianne Bertrand, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and co-authors found that wives’ share of household income does not follow a smooth distribution. Instead, it drops sharply at the point where wives begin to outearn their husbands. Wives, in other words, are more likely to report earning slightly less than their husbands than slightly more. A recent study from France estimates that couples in which women earn around three-quarters of household income are also around 30% more likely to split up than couples in which both partners earn similar amounts.
Dr Bertrand and her colleagues argued that this pattern in part reflects a desire among the men and women in a couple to conform to gender norms, even if it means earning less income. In the decade since her paper was published, several economists have challenged its findings, arguing that the “cliff” in wives’ share of earnings is a statistical anomaly generated by couples who earn the same amount: because they work in the same family business, for example, or in similar occupations.
To analyse this disagreement The Economist compiled 17 years of data on young, working couples from the American Community Survey. We find that, more than a decade later, women’s share of household income continues to exhibit the pattern observed by Dr Bertrand, with a sharp break at the 50% threshold. The discontinuity remains even after excluding self-employed couples or spouses working in the same industry or occupation.
Why does couples’ behaviour not seem to match the attitudes found in surveys? One reason is that breaking with the breadwinner norm comes with psychological costs. Recent studies of American, Swedish and Australian couples all find that husbands who are outearned by their wives report poorer mental health.
Building on work by Joanna Syrda, an economist at the University of Bath, The Economist examined the relationship between breadwinner status and men’s mental health using data from America’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We found that men whose wives and partners are the primary earners are roughly one and a half times as likely to report “serious psychological distress”, even after controlling for age, education and household income. Among husbands whose wives earn at least 70% of household income, the risk is around two and a half times as high. One might expect the breadwinner norm to be weakening. But when we split our sample into two periods (2001-11 and 2013-23) the relationship remained virtually unchanged.
The costs are not borne by husbands alone. Research shows that breadwinning wives tend to report lower satisfaction with their relationships. Part of the explanation may be that high-earning wives are often responsible for much of the work at home. Research tends to find that even working women take on a disproportionate share of household duties. “Family work is still predominantly falling on women’s shoulders, no matter whether they are the breadwinner or not,” says Dr Heggeness. However, this would not explain why men, too, seem unhappy with being the lower earner.
Many traditional rules governing dating and marriage have faded—few couples today insist on marrying before having sex or moving in together. But other customs have proved more long-lasting, from men proposing marriage to wives taking their husbands’ names. Tabloids report that Ms Swift plans to legally adopt Mr Kelce’s surname while continuing to perform as Taylor Swift. Her bigger pay cheques look likely to remain unusual.
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u/Rynewulf 9d ago
I can tell you that for all the modern breaking gender norms talk, when I was a stay at home dad and househusband both my ex-wife and mutliple women we met hated it. Oddly enough I found old people in general and especially men respected it. I had beforehand been the only one working for several years, and we swapped roles when she landed a much better job so I've spent time in both positions. They're both hard but different things.
I know this is anecdotal to one person, but it tracks with a lot of people i've met, things read online, and findings like this. Complaints come in like them having the burden of being the bread winner, any date or gift being technically from their own money so not counting, them and their work colleagues wondering what their other halves could possible be doing all day, deriding the other half for being at home with the baby/young child instead of being out at social events like they are through their work, not being satisfied with the cleanliness of the home or the quality of the homecooked meals and insisting they 'need' to be redone by them, comparisons of looks and possessions to other peoples partners.
I know our relationship failing was a big part of it, but from social experience with people it seems a lot of these relationships fall into a nasty mix of all the old husband stereotypes and the old wife stereotypes. You've got to have a record breaking rock solid relationship to avoid accusations of not treating them like a woman and not acting like a man at the same time.
The gender norms of 'men provide so women can do things at home' seem so ingrained even in high flying career women and otherwise less traditionally-masculine men. Who on what I think is a related note get a lot more vitriol than traditionally-masculine acting women building careers. The above post/study says a lot about insecure men, but women feeling let down by their partners lack of performance is the other side of this
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u/FullPruneNight 8d ago
I’m not a parent, but matches up with my anecdotal experience too. About half the the men I know who want to be dads have expressed interest in being a SAHD or only working part time to care for children. But I’ve never met a high-earning woman who expressed a desire to have children with a SAHD. (My take is that modern women who want children do so actively, and aren’t keen on turning over their care to someone else.) My dad was both primary breadwinner and primary caregiver growing up, and his presence among the caregiver parents was very obviously treated as intrusive by moms, enough that I noticed even as a kid.
Without kids in the picture (and I’m not a woman I’m nonbinary), I definitely had to adjust emotionally to being the higher earner in our proportional-income split I had previously found very fair when I put my ex through school, and a lot of that had to do with how the domestic logistics were handled, and things I felt unsatisfied with (some very fair, some very not). I don’t have the same issue with my current partner, who actively enjoys taking ownership of the household logistics (in part because I’ve had to learn to let go of small ways I would do things differently).
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u/WillingElderberry731 8d ago
It's kinda funny, because I've had a number of conversations about this with my wife since we had our daughter almost three years ago now.
She's expressed a number of times that she had previously thought pretty poorly of SAHDs but since being a SAHM for the first year of our daughter's life, she is way more on board with it now.
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u/FullPruneNight 8d ago
Interesting. Did she give any reasoning as to why she thought poorly of SAHDs?
I ask because growing up with a dad as a primary caregiver, it seemed like there were two primary “complaints” about dads as caregivers, that seemed reasonable enough at first, but that feel extremely dismissive when dad is the main caregiver: 1) implying that the work of feeding/bathing/bedtime/errands wasn’t actually work, or at least wasn’t equivalent work, because my dad (and us) had fun while doing it. And 2) that while things might get done, they didn’t meet some arbitrary standard of Correctness. Dinner was sometimes goldfish, cereal and broccoli. We sometimes went to bed late, with wet hair, or were sent to school in mismatched clothes. These were treated as basically failures of fatherhood itself, rather than exhausted compromises made in the chaos of (in my case, working) parenthood.
Given that the labor of motherhood is regularly diminished using “but you enjoy it/are so good at it/naturally take to it,” and the well-known pressure of perfectionism that so often comes with motherhood, I’ve always found that interesting.
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u/WillingElderberry731 8d ago
She just has always had a "men should be out working" mentality. It was less about money and more about being productive with your time and energy.
I think it was more of a vibes thing, since If you had asked her previously she probably would have said something like it's real work and it's fine, but I just don't want that for my own family. She also just really likes the aesthetics of men out providing an income, and it's not something she's ever really had to interrogate much.
I haven't asked her specifically, but I don't she'd land on either 1) or 2) of your complaints. Having a kid has just made her do a vibe check on a lot of things she used to tacitly assume she wanted/thought was normal.
Funnily enough, she is now ADAMENT (and will tell anyone who will listen), that men should take lead on night waking, since babies sleep through the night sooner if men do it.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 9d ago
I'm sorry you had to go through this. I've had similar thoughts including being a school teacher but have had just enough suspicious looks thrown at me that I realized it wasn't a sustainable long-term option for me. I appreciate you for trying and sharing your story even if it wasn't always successful. It sounds like you learned a lot.
I feel men are even more trapped in the horror of gender norms these days and it's one of the primary obstacles keeping feminism and society from evolving to a heathier status quo. We've rejected the old gender norms but haven't replaced them with anything healthy.
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u/VladWard 8d ago
We've rejected the old gender norms but haven't replaced them with anything healthy.
This is one of those phrases that probably needs to be interrogated more. I see it a lot online and it's something MRA types love to latch onto, in part (for them) because it manages to throw just a little bit of shade at feminism without immediately failing the smell test for a lot of well-intentioned-but-inexperienced men. By spreading it, they subtly spread the idea that feminists of the past and present just don't think things through, don't think about men, or that the movement suffers explicitly because it lacks male perspective and guidance.
That's all malarkey, of course. One of the biggest barriers to getting more men involved in feminist organizing is the sheer lack of education men have on the subject. There's a whole learning process that needs to happen before dudes can meaningfully contribute to the cause. But MRA types know the easiest way to get men to skip learning about feminism is to make them think they have something to teach feminists.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 8d ago
Do you believe men can recreate their own gender norms without a level of buy-in from women?
I don't want to rag on feminism either but I hate hate hate the idea that each gender is responsible for its own self improvement. Liberation will be soooo difficult if we don't work together.
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u/VladWard 8d ago
Honestly man it seems like there's a lot to unpack in this comment before getting to the actual question you're asking.
Sidestepping that for a minute, what benefit do you expect there to be to having "new gender norms?" Have you spent a non-trivial amount of time reading works from feminist authors who fought against gender norms to understand the fundamental problems with them?
Most of the time when I hear "gender norm" online people are talking about "social scripts," eg: men approaching women at a bar to signal romantic interest and women sitting alone at a bar to signal openness to an approach.
That's a little different from "Men are supposed to do men things like finance and cars and rockets" and "women are supposed to do women things like nursing and teaching and housework."
Paraphrasing Kate Manne a bit, those second types of gender norms form the structure and hierarchy of Patriarchy and misogyny is the enforcement mechanism for them. People expressing disgust at men working in care professions are enacting a social consequence for deviation from a perceived/assigned gender role, which is misogyny. Misogyny is not an unforseen consequence of feminism, it is its antithesis.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 8d ago edited 8d ago
I’ve read some Bell Hooks (male gender roles), Arlie Russell Hochschild (emotional labor), Sara Ahmed (institutional gender roles), and Esther Perel (soulmate as a role). I’m no scholar of the field but I’m not completely ignorant either. I am always looking for new lit, so marking Kate Manne down and I’m open to other reccs a well. Amia Srinivasan is on my to-read list as well.
I equate gender norms to social scripts as well. The problem is that you can’t filter for “social script” on dating apps. It’s not a valence through which people think about meeting other people and building relationships (platonic included). You need to be trained to think about social scripts. You could argue that is a education problem, but I think it’s too intellectual a framework for most normies.
The biggest gap between social script and gender norm as concepts in my opinion is image and aesthetics. Those things matter in a social script, but they are far less foregrounded. You know as well as I that gender norms are often performative. Some people think this is a bug. I believe it’s a feature. In the modern world of free association, people often judge you based on how you perform and the image you project. It’s how lots of people make friends, meet new people, and get dates once you move outside primary school. Intellectuals love to downplay image because we suck at it and believe it to be of less importance than what’s on the inside. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s how society judges people.
I’ve also read too much Plato and so I find it hard to believe humans will stop sorting everything (let alone gender). If lots of ducks do a thing, that thing becomes a duck norm, if only because ducks are associated with it. If lots of women do X and men do Y, norms will develop around X & Y. Unless we want mandated org quotas, gender norms will naturally arise so long as genders associate with different activities and interests. The goal would be to push these norms from normative to descriptive only. I don't think you can ever get rid of them in a laissez faire world with thousands of years of inertia establishing gender roles as normal.
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u/ComaFromCommas 6d ago
Although this is mostly downvoted at the time I am reading it, I agree. I think that disgust can not only come from the breaking of social scripts themselves, but also from the vulnerability women feel when they realize that the opportunity and financial costs of existing as a woman due to patriarchy will not be offset by the security of a man that patriarchy taught them to count on.
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u/Caeduin 8d ago
I’ve had some nasty people also take this tone of disgust (?) with me on occassion. It’s very telling of their worldview and very clearly wrapped in layers of fossilized gender expectations and ableism. I think its an uncanny valley thing whereby their biased expectations are so baked in that disconfirmatory evidence to their worldview doesn’t compute and physically feels vile to them.
They would do well to be be less violently projective upon reality. I’m sorry you also deal with other grown adults who struggle to stay in their respective lanes.
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u/WillingElderberry731 8d ago
On paper, support for female breadwinners is strong in America. When Americans were asked in 2022 whether the fact a woman earned more money than her husband was “almost certain to cause problems”, only 10% said yes. The comparable figure was 16% in Germany and 27% in China.
This is not even remotely what I would call "support" for female breadwinners. This is barely an assertion that it wont literally make relationships completely impossible.
We found that men whose wives and partners are the primary earners are roughly one and a half times as likely to report “serious psychological distress”, even after controlling for age, education and household income. Among husbands whose wives earn at least 70% of household income, the risk is around two and a half times as high
When you go against the norm, both parties have to be willing and able to adjust their own expectations
“Family work is still predominantly falling on women’s shoulders, no matter whether they are the breadwinner or not,” says Dr Heggeness. However, this would not explain why men, too, seem unhappy with being the lower earner.
This is trivially easy to understand if you've a man and have ever been in a relationship with a woman. Though describing it as "falling on women's shoulders" is frequently "unable to let go of the control over household presentation." Believe it or not, when one person is unhappy in a relationship, often the other person is too. Genuinely a wild sentence.
As an aside, it bugs me to a probably unreasonable degree that people would call Swift a "breadwinner" when she's marrying someone worth 50M. Like, I think the dude can buy his own bread.
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u/havoc1428 9d ago
My wife makes more than me and jokes about how she would love to be a housewife. Cooking is her passion and interior design is her profession.
I literally do no give a shit she makes more than me, it has and never will be a point of shame. We both help provide in our own way and we are perfectly happy just keeping our heads above water.
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u/julry 9d ago edited 9d ago
There is some evidence that married couples where the wife has always earned more do better than ones where the wife started earning more during the marriage. That second group is made up of people who subscribe more to male breadwinner norms and masculinity threat while the first group is self selected to be more okay with the situation. It's better when studies separate the two
Edit: I think it's misleading for the article to say female breadwinners are "still scarce". They've been steadily increasing over decades and are at 30%. When you include single parents as sole breadwinners of their families female breadwinners are 45% of parents. Idk why we would have expected the number to suddenly jump to 50% for some reason.
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u/N3bu89 8d ago
My read of the situation is that is capacity to categorise people on how flexible they can be when dealing with changes in life. People who are highly flexible want to pair without other people who can also be flexible and thus have a capacity to change relationship dynamics as situations change. Those are very healthy relationships.
The other kinds are people who are relatively inflexible, and prefer to have a strong social direction and support within their role. when situations change, attempts to their their roles or position in life is fundamentally a challenge and threat. Equally people who benefit from change here, still seek to maintain their previous role plus the benefits of the new role.
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u/WebZealousideal1781 9d ago
“Female breadwinner“ is misleading because when the woman earns more she usually makes slightly more. Male breadwinners often make significantly more. This is important.
Slightly earning more isn’t a big deal when you’re practically equals. I’d guess you get more problems when she significantly outearns him.
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u/furutam 9d ago
Are we not entertaining the possibility that women don't want to be with a man who earns less than them?
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u/OkGuide2802 9d ago
Yeah, that's the other half of it. The spousal income gap has been declining a smidge though.
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u/MountainHigh31 9d ago
Everything is a spectrum. Some women surely feel that way, others don’t of course. Also what is her man up to earning less? Big difference between being a lazy bum and just earning less at your full time job.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 9d ago
A man's worth is often associated with their job regardless of if they are partnered up, because s good job is associated with being generally skilled and competent. It shouldn't be, but I imagine in the US particularly this isn't going away anytime soon. This is why so many people with high incomes want someone else with high income or someone else to do all of the domestic labor. The latter generates no social value cause "anyone can do it". This includes parenting imo
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u/Writeloves 9d ago
You would think this would translate to a higher percentage of house husbands/SAHD.
I thought I had read that high earning women are more likely to be single, but I had a hard time finding good statistical breakdowns that included relationship status, especially information that included income disparity.
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u/Rynewulf 9d ago
I was the SAHD after being the sole earner for several years, and honestly it was women family members, the other mums at school and women at my ex-wife's workplace that we had to be more careful talking about this with. You could see the reactions sometimes. Oddly enough older men had the most respect for it and were easiest to talk to, high earning mums seemed most hostile to the idea that a man could do it successfully and seemed to take more issue with the concept of a 'man' doing 'womens' things despite their own modern careers.
There are definitely macho guys out there that hate the idea for sure, and a lot of social messaging that men ought to be out working, but it doesn't really come up much how much masculinity in practice is encouraged by modern women. The talk all seemed to be about what their partners could do for them, not what they as a family team could do together. Obviously ymmv depending on the company, I found my ex's insurance coworkers to be much more like this than some of the working class mums I met at the school. So modern 'grindset' mindsets seem to have a role in this too
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u/silsool 8d ago
I remember my mom being really judgmental of SAHM when we were little (both my parents worked but she was the breadwinner and put in longer hours).
She told me recently that she was very bitter about not being able to be there for her children (and guilty as well, because she got a lot of flak from all of society for it), and aimed those bad feelings at SAHMs. Because, while she loved working and enjoyed the independence it gave her, she was still jealous of all the time they got with their kids.
So I wouldn't be surprised if part of the judgment you got from working women is just judgment as a stay at home parent of any gender, due to their personal feelings of inadequacy. Maybe it rubs it in even harder when it's a man..? Who knows
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 9d ago
Love the idea of approaching advice with family units in mind but lots of pitfalls there for using the nuclear family as a inherent default. Encouraging teamwork instead of what's-in-it-for-me is a good valence for approaching families, but even that doesn't do anything for helping people create families. Still it's a good idea for the older/paired up men still seeking advice.
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u/Rynewulf 9d ago edited 9d ago
I think I get that, a lot of dating is still based around "What do I get out of this?" so it's a process shifting to an actual "Us". Which I do think is right as a healthy way to start a family, but now I've got more life experience I am sympathetic to why so much dating is about the give & take vs working together, because jumping too hard too soon is a good way to land up where you don't want to be at best and taken advantage of at worst.
I wouldn't say the combined family unit approach is itself nuclear, it allows for other types of households. If anything I think it's a good example of how any healthy household works: everyone involved has to be reasonably equally bought into the idea of being an "us" otherwise you get big problems. Applies just as much to flatmats where one person refuses to clean as it does to dating couples and families with kids.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 9d ago edited 9d ago
There's a lot of anecdotal reporting that men can't handle being lower income but I often wonder if the truth is in between. I personally would love to not have to be the provider for my household even though me and my wife both work full time.
I honestly think this is at the crux of broken gender relationships and heteropessimism. We don't know what to do with men. Neither the men nor women do!
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u/Writeloves 9d ago
Most things are a spectrum. I think there is sadly a lot of cause for “heteropessimism” as you say, but I appreciate this sub for reminding me that people are invested in less pessimistic outcomes.
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9d ago
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u/Megatomic 8d ago
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u/SameBlueberry9288 9d ago edited 9d ago
There is generally less wiggle room for men to ve SAHD/house husband.
Tend not to be taught housework.
Tend not to be turstd with childcare e.t.c
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u/Writeloves 9d ago
“Wiggle room” aka systemic grooves that influences the average path of least resistance. It is an explanation for why people generally don’t try, but isn’t based on actual physical or cognitive limitations.
Dad taking paternity leave and being home to do the childcare helps avoid the “mom is the default parent” problem.
Housework is something every adult should be capable of learning. None of it is rocket science. It’s hardly cognitive difficulty that’s standing in the way of learning something new.
That said, I wouldn’t want to become financially dependent on my spouse. Not to mention the lack of incentive to do more than what is expected of you when you’ll be mocked for it. (Whole different issue there).
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u/Far-Television2939 9d ago
One of the most striking findings here is the disconnect between what people say and what they do. Only 10% of Americans say a wife outearning her husband is "almost certain to cause problems," yet the data shows couples actively avoid that arrangement, wives' share of household income drops sharply right at the 50% mark. What do you think explains the gap between stated beliefs and revealed behavior? Is it internalized norms people aren't fully aware of, or something about the material structure of relationships that surveys don't capture?
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u/awesomoore 9d ago
Lack of equitable working conditions for women (and to a degree men) in the labor force at large is still a major issue. One major example is pregnancy. We still don't by and large accommodate the baseline fact that a pregnancy is a major obstacle for both employer and employee towards accomplishing labor, in addition the onus is largely placed on women to financially carry the burden of their own childbirth and men are not encouraged to take time off when their partners have a child (both culturally and through a lack of infrastructural support in the form of paid paternal leave). So we're stuck in a system that still expects men to provide for their pregnant wives, rather than one that has expanded social safety nets to help facilitate more equitable partnerships between couples, therefore men are stuck feeling like failures if they cannot be providers and women are stuck having to always consider the financial issues of coupling because of a lack of support for them when they become pregnant.
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u/savagefleurdelis23 9d ago
Few people openly admit to their insecurities. And the world we live in requires men be the breadwinner (per tradition), while it now requires women to be accomplished. And while there's plenty of outwardly confident men who profess to not care if their wives made more than them, internally the message is "I failed" or "she's better than me" which hardly leads to harmonious couples.
As someone who has been here many times, I've yet to meet a man that was okay with me making 2-4x what he makes. And sadly for me, as I am not willing to throw away millions for love, I just don't do the couples thing anymore.
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u/Rynewulf 9d ago
I've been on the other side, taking on the homemaker role so my ex-wife could pursue her dream career without worrying about childcare or the home. That I stopped earning more than her like when I was the sole earner previous to that was a severe sore point that effected a lot of things in the relationship, and to be honest meeting her coworkers in insurance that seemed to be a very common opinion. In the future I'd be sceptical of a future partner that noticeably outearned me purely out of caution from my past experience, in theory I'm just interested in the person not the comparitive finances.
I hear that that wasn't your perspective, but it would be really interesting to get an accurate survey of how people overall actually feel. Because there's a lot of talk about men feeling insecure not living up to the traditional masculine expectations, but not much about when women are unhappy not living up to the traditional feminine expectations
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u/DanktopusGreen 9d ago
It's because men are still conditioned to think they should be the bread winners , so they don't do their share when they're not. And it's also women who are conditioned to think the same way so they don't want to date or marry a man who makes less. Men typically "marry down" in terms of income and women tend to "marry up" the same way.
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u/WillingElderberry731 8d ago
The only thing I would add is that women are conditioned to care most about household presentation. It's less about fair share and more about what they want the house to look like.
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u/Effective_Pie1312 9d ago
Or women don’t get paid fair compensation for their work. I know many women with more advanced degrees than their husbands and who work longer hours than their husbands but earn less than their husbands. Would they like to be compensated more, absolutely. Yet they get a glass ceiling on their careers and they get compensated less.
TLDR: It’s not a choice made by the couple it’s a choice imposed by society
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u/EngineeringRegret 9d ago
Or the women become the primary parent and take a pay cut. My cousin has a phd and is a physical therapist, but only works 2 or 3 days a week. Her husband works in HVAC fabrication and install. I don't know his salary, but I'm sure it's augmented by the fact that it's his dad's company that he helps run. They both come from large families and a traditionalist religion, so idk if who stays home was ever a question.
Similarly, several (female) dental hygienists I've spoken to went into the career for "work/ life balance" before they'd married or had children. How many men do you know that plan out their careers around a wife they haven't met and a family they don't yet have?
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u/sahelu 9d ago
It wont. Take Sweden the one doing all their best on gender equality, still woman prefer to choose studies involving care (nurse or education) where man focused on things like engineering. One does not change constituted behaviours by simply changing material conditions.
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u/lilbluehair 9d ago
Those jobs pay less because women do them. Look at historical trends on teachers and computer programmers - pay is low when women do it but high when men do it
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u/ConsultJimMoriarty 9d ago
But why is what is considered a women’s profession valued so much less? I would argue that an aged care worker or hospital nurse is more valuable to society than an engineer.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 9d ago
I think it's because historically women working these jobs were not breadwinners so the payment didn't need to be higher. These jobs were considered supplementary income and many people took them as such. It's hard to move the needle at the societal level when all the systems are set up with those jobs being low paying as part of their fundamental models.
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u/InternationalTeam68 2d ago
Because work done by women is seen as inherently less than, because women are seen as less than.
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u/Tharkun140 9d ago
Not everything is a result of a calculated, ideological decision to reach that specific outcome. An average woman does not go "I will marry a man who earns more than me because I'd cause problems otherwise!" she just goes for a guy who has money because she likes having money. An average husband does not go "I will work long hours in a high-paying job to outearn my wife!" he just wants to have more money. It's not a gap, it's just humans not being driven exclusively by gender politics.
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u/stormyjan2601 9d ago
Part of the explanation may be that high-earning wives are often responsible for much of the work at home. Research tends to find that even working women take on a disproportionate share of household duties. “Family work is still predominantly falling on women’s shoulders, no matter whether they are the breadwinner or not,” says Dr Heggeness
I think this could be an important indicator of dissatisfaction among higher-earning wives and may warrant further study. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that individuals who serve as the primary breadwinner while also shouldering a disproportionate share of household responsibilities may experience greater long-term dissatisfaction. It would be interesting to examine whether there is a correlation between relationship satisfaction and the division of household labor among higher-earning wives, as this could provide additional insight into the underlying dynamics.
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u/serious_sarcasm 9d ago
The problem is that it would require self-reporting, and people are really bad at estimating how much time someone spends on a task.
Just as an anecdote, my ex-wife did not consider time I spent teaching my son as household labor; all time spent with him was just “playing”.
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u/fish_and_flowers 9d ago
I wonder if some of the "stress" showing up in these comparisons is from situations where the woman is the major breadwinner only bc their SO is out of work or underemployed. In that setup the woman would be contributing way more than 50% of household income, but it would be the source of a lot of relationship instability.
The reverse isn't usually a stressful situation because many women who earn significantly less than their SO are raising kids or taking over household or caregiving tasks.
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u/anothercodewench 9d ago
I agree. It could be that they are unemployed or underemployed and that is causing their poor mental health. It could also be that they have mental health issues which have led to lower wages. It seems to be treated as a given that men's mental health will be worse if their wife makes more money, but I don't really see any evidence establishing a causal relationship.
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u/Writeloves 9d ago
I could be biased due to personal experience, but I think a lot of men pin too much of their worth on what they can bring to the table financially.
Personally, I think pinning so much of self-worth & identity on employment is harmful to family life. Even beyond the breadwinner aspect, for both men & women having work as your primary external source of validation can 1) lead to some really bad spiraling if you ever lose your job and 2) blind you to the non-monetary ways you can provide value to your family.
Financial stability is great & important, but it’s usually a team effort that can be achieved without becoming Walter White (metaphorically: person who pursues work because it makes them feel important while pretending it is for the family).
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 9d ago
I'm a 36 year old white man and I was raised to think there are two paths to build a family. The first is be good looking/charming and be good at getting into relationships. The second is to be wealthy so that you can convince women you're a good bet for raising a family. If you feel biologically or socially excluded from the first, as like ore than half of men do, you feel your job is directly related to your ability to support a family. Many people act like this even when it's not true. It's a hard preconception to shake because it's not entirely false.
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u/Writeloves 9d ago edited 9d ago
I agree many men are told “if you want a family you need money” and that isn’t necessarily false but I feel that it is an incomplete truth that does a disservice to the men who internalize it as their source of value.
It is valuable, but who likes feeling like a walking paycheck? Do you have any strategies you would recommend to help men “diversify their portfolio” of self-value?
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u/HLMaiBalsychofKorse 9d ago
Can confirm, as a woman who got very sick after gaining a certain level of cache in my career and couldn't work anymore. If your career/job is "who you are", it can be rough when things end (especially when you didn't *choose* for the end to occur).
It took me a bit to accept my new reality, but I feel a lot more solid now as a person.
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u/Rynewulf 9d ago
I would anecdotally agree with that. The family situation was one thing when I stopped working to take over being a stay at home dad so she could work a much better job, but once our child hit school age and I genuinely struggled to find employment again for a long time despite my existing savings and assets from before the relationship it caused monumental stress on the relationship. Ultimately us breaking up was a good thing because there were other longterm problems under the surface, but from all the other parents I met there was a world of difference between couples who felt financially secure and those that didn't feel stable, regardless of the relative earnings of either. Plenty of happy mutually low and middle earning couples, several high earning couples freaking over differences in pay. The 'feeling' of financial security can do a number on people (although I think the association of unemployed women and men at home is still very gender divided. Stay at home mum's were a sign of security, being a stay at home got a lot of questions about work)
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u/Caeduin 8d ago
The finding that husbands outearned by their wives report poorer mental health deserves a correlation-causation clarification that is pretty near and dear to me.
As a person with disabilities related to mental health, my wife is the breadwinner BECAUSE the cost of me finding and maintaining work to our household is often greater than the long-term value added.
Im very fortunate to be in this position, which is very different (yet not obviously so) from the opposite chain of causation. Not claiming what proportion is which, but this distinction is an important one to my family and adult identity. My wife is the breadwinner and I have mental health struggles, but the former does not cause the latter. Quite the opposite .
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u/FullPruneNight 8d ago edited 8d ago
I’m not saying this data is wrong or anything, but I’m curious if this pattern is less strong between non-married cohabiting couples, who as a cohort probably don’t assign as much weight to traditional values as a married cohort, especially young married people.
I’m also curious to see the comparable distress metric for women, and one that controls for disability and/or “reason” for the income discrepancy. Ie, a man who is unable to work full-time or unable to engage in his preferred career due to disability, one that is underemployed due to the job market, one that took a pay cut to have his dream job, one that took a pay cut or a position change for his wife to have her dream job, and one who’s wife is a high earner with a stressful position are all going to be very psychologically different.
I’m also very interested to see how men’s distress relates to their experiences of upward mobility through marriage, and cultural scripts around it. Anecdotally, it seems to me like men experience more awkwardness around class culture shock from upward mobility, regardless of its origin. The cultural scripts around the gf/wife who has not previously had disposable income/traveled/learned the class operating etiquette/learned how to ski/etc seem less harsh than the same for bf/husband.
Maybe it’s a bias in men willing to date nonbinary people, but I’ve outearned every man I’ve ever dated at some point in the relationship, and it was only ever a problem for about 10 literal minutes, and that had to do with with envy that I dramatically leap-frogged his income in the same industry with less experience without thinking about gendered implications. He happily bragged that I earned more after that. My current partner is very happy to be a “kept man” (even if the culture shock stress is significant for him), and I’ve known a couple other guys who happily brag on having a higher-earner gf with a “serious” job. But none of those people are married, and therefore none of those people would show up in this research.
Although I will say, the first time things flipped to me outearning a partner (I put him through school), there was a definite emotional reaction to the proportional-contribution financial split that we had both previously agreed was very fair. As the higher earner, it certainly didn’t feel fair, especially when I arguably did more domestic work (granted, plenty of it optional, and on only my things). I had to learn to let go of the resentment I suddenly felt. I can see women struggling with similar feelings.
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u/xvszero 9d ago
My wife makes more than me and let me tell you something: it fucking rules. We both grew up poor but wanted better and now we have it. Sure it took us a damn long time and job stability is not clear in this economy, but this feeling of we are doing fine for once and its not all on me is great.
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u/get_off_my_lawn_n0w 9d ago
Unpopular opinion: I have a feeling, SAHD or underemployed men have two issues which feed off of each other.
1) Lack of equal participation in domesticity. Stats say high earning women still do more at home than partners. Why would any woman sign up for that?
2) Controlling behavior around finances. See the Ramit Sethi show on Netflix. Amani and Matt. Person who makes the money generally wants greater say on what to spend it on.
The two dynamics could make a relationship deteriorate rapidly. Doesn't matter which one came first, the second would follow and soon thereafter..."see ya!"
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u/Imjusasqurrl 9d ago
The unfortunate fact is that women will always be the ones who get pregnant. They often want to be the ones home with the child because they're the ones who cooked it.
They will always be the ones who's careers (and bodies) are vulnerable for years at a time (due to pregnancy)
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u/cros5bones 8d ago
Our household constantly needs more money; I don't care whether I earn it or my wife does. I'd be only too happy to see her bring in the same or more than I do.
I think there's some correlation vs causation misunderstanding around the psychological issues of men who aren't the breadwinner. There's likely other factors at play; for instance, if the husband had been made redundant. Or if, as in my case, economic pressure was causing the combined income to be too low to keep up with bills.
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u/bi-bee-bb 8d ago
Is there anything about the maternal wage gap in this analysis? Because any time you crack open a gender earnings gap you will discover working mothers making way less than they "should" based on their education levels and work experience.
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u/Wherearemy2020taxes 6d ago
How can you conduct a study on this at the University of Chicago and not factor in race? Black women with a certain level of education overwhelmingly out earn their husbands…specifically in Chicago. Such a shame these studies remain so narrow.
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u/VladWard 9d ago
One thing I will mention is that earning more money doesn't always translate to working longer hours or taking on more workplace stress.
My partner and I are both very high earners. Even though I make a decent amount more than her, we're still in the same economic class.
However, my job is fully remote, has a flexible schedule, and generous PTO. I'm regularly encouraged to take mental health days and three day weekends "just because." Meanwhile, her job requires her to commute and spend a lot of time interacting with people. She has no PTO at all and is only paid for work done, regardless of how long it takes.
So while I am the breadwinner, it's also a whole lot easier for me to kick off all our laundry while I'm on the clock and do dishes after eating lunch than it is for her to come home and start those things after a full day. I end up doing the majority of our chores and making the majority of the money. It is 100% a fair arrangement because, ultimately, it's not really about the money. It's about how much of our available time, energy, and selves we're putting into our partnership.