Income inequality between husbands and wives has decreased, suggesting some success in women’s empowerment but also highlighting the cultural changes to which society has yet to adapt.
Among married couples, wives now out-earn their husbands nearly 30% of the time, up from 15.9% in 1981, according to recently released data from the Census Bureau.
“Men’s wages have stagnated in the past decade or so, in part because the economy has changed, moving from manufacturing jobs to more service-oriented professions,” said Sarah Jane Glynn, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-of-center think tank.
Two major factors in the rise of female breadwinners are that women have made up a majority of college-educated adults for almost four decades now and that societal, cultural shifts in the past few decades have given women more economic freedom and helped narrow the wage gap.
Male-dominated industries have also taken a hit, lowering the inequality between husbands and wives.
“The financial crisis of 2007, oftentimes known as the ‘man-cession,’ where lots of jobs that were male-dominated like finance, construction, manufacturing, real estate, etc., were hurt,” said Farnoosh Torabi, a financial writer and the author of When She Makes More.
“Simultaneously, there was growth in other industries, like healthcare, education, and these are industries more attractive to women. We have more women who are teachers and nurses, for example,” said Torabi.
A majority of new jobs in the past few years have gone to women, said Torabi, but many of them are not particularly good jobs that are high-paying or secure. One of the reasons the wage gap between husbands and wives has gone down is because today, women who have low-wage jobs are typically married to men who also work similar low-wage jobs.
Still, it appears the country is nowhere close to fully accepting the development.
A recent study by the Census Bureau discovered that, in homes where women earn more, the wife generally tends to underreport her income, while the husband is more likely to overreport his in an attempt to conform to traditional gender norms.
Additionally, according to the Institute for Family Studies, 41% of women who are breadwinners still do more housework than their husbands, which leads to lower satisfaction in their relationship.
Men, on the other hand, are more likely to get stressed when their wives make more money than they do, according to a study on male partners’ mental health last year. Torabi said such distress is due to the entrenched belief, unconscious at times, that men must be the breadwinners for their family.
The politics of women’s rights over the past few decades, Glynn pointed out, ranging from efforts to promote equal opportunity to conversations about promoting women in the workplace, have played a role in the wage gap in households decreasing. She highlighted, however, that the wage gap between men and women at work has persisted.
“I see this is as super awesome thing, in some ways, for women to have economic freedom and independence, but we shouldn’t take these data points in isolation that the gender wage gap doesn’t exist and that American families don’t need help and support,” said Glynn.
