Are married heterosexual couples under pressure to ensure that the husband earns more? Perhaps, but times are finally changing.
A new working paper from researchers at the University of Michigan examines how seemingly old-fashioned social norms impact our choice of partner. It looked at women who choose taller partners and used that as a jumping off point to ask whether women are under pressure from the rest of society to ensure that her husband earns more than she does.
Researchers began their exploration into these delicate income dynamics within marriages on the economic theory of marriage first proposed in the 1970s by economist Gary Becker. That theory suggests that marriage is transactional and that spouses choose each other if it gives them a better comparative advantage in life than other potential matches.
To illustrate the theory, the researchers first asked whether there was a social norm — or pressure from the rest of society — influencing women’s choice of men based on how tall they are. After examining the various heights for different married couples, the researchers found that, yes, on average wives were indeed rarely taller than their husbands.
Women don’t necessarily choose men who earn more moneyBuilding on this hypothesis that couples end up in marriages that based on certain societal expectations — in this case, choosing the taller husband over the shorter potential life partner, even if it’s not what they want — the researchers turned their attention to salary data for married heterosexual couples from the U.S. Census Bureau.
They revisited a previous study that suggested that a heterosexual couple was less likely to get together if the woman earned more money. Indeed, on first examination the new report’s authors found that there appeared to be far less likelihood for a wife to out-earn her husband than the other way around, suggesting that men sought out women who made less money (or vice versa.)
But when the researchers dug deeper into the data, they discovered a significant share of couples actually earned identical incomes. When they removed these couples from the equation, there was a similarly high probability that wives were, in fact, the primary breadwinners. That is, many couples bucked perceived social norm that husbands earn more than their wives.
Also see: The gender gap starts in ninth grade
The gender wage gap may keep old-fashioned social norms aliveThese findings don’t reject the notion society expects husbands to be the primary breadwinner. Indeed, a separate study released in July found that 38% of wives did earn more than their husbands as of 2015 but, in those cases, the couple was likely to report a lower income for the wife than what she actually earned and a higher income for the husband.
However, there are some logical reasons for some social norms. Men are generally taller than women. Similarly, the gender wage gap may lend support to an outdated social norm where people expect husbands to earn more. Indeed, the notion that the husband should be the breadwinner may be a relic of a time when women didn’t comprise such a large share of the workforce.
“Women’s labor market opportunities in the U.S. have increased dramatically in the last 50 years, yet substantial gender career and earnings gaps remain, especially in marriage,” the researchers wrote. “It is possible that labor market change has outpaced social change, and slow-moving gender norms play a key role in generating these extant gender gaps in marriage.”
Couples who earn similar amounts may stay together longerTimes are changing. A recent study in the journal Demography by Patrick Ishizuka, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University’s Cornell Population Center, found that couples are more likely to set up a life together when they earn similar incomes. And when each partner in a cohabiting couple or marriage earn similar amounts of money, they’re actually less likely to get separated.
What’s more, women bring at least half or more of the earnings in almost one-third of cohabiting couples in the U.S., up from just 13% in 1981, a report last year by the Pew Research Center found. “But in most couples, men contribute more of the income, and this aligns with the fact that Americans place a higher value on a man’s role as financial provider,” the authors said.
“Men are especially likely to place a greater emphasis on their role as financial providers,” they wrote. “While a nearly equal share of men and women say a man needs to be able to provide for his family to be a good husband or partner (72% and 71%, respectively), men are less likely than women to say the same about women.”
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