Philip Cohen, at Family Inequality, posted an interesting graph displaying 30-44-year-old women’s share of their household’s income by level of education:
The graph shows that, on average, women with higher levels of education have incomes closer to that of their husbands than women with lower levels of education. Cohen writes:
It captures nicely both how women’s earning power within married couples has increased, and how that shift has been much greater for women with higher education.
In other words, the figure suggests that efforts to close the wage gap between men and women have been much more successful at the top of the economic ladder than the bottom.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 29
marc sobel — December 5, 2010
Finally I understand the Tory policy of making university too expensive for everybody except the rich.
J — December 5, 2010
Thought I would comment on this, with regards to my wife. It is true that she contributes 37% of the household income. But there is a catch here. If you were to compare the time-line of our respective careers (we both work in the software industry), she would be far ahead of me. I had a head start of about 15 years and my education is in the industry. While she has had no formal education, and has reached a point in her career in 5 years, that took me 10 years to get to. Following that trend means that very soon, her income will surpass mine.
T — December 5, 2010
If you'll allow me to 'bracket' the issues related to traditional gender roles.... what this shows me is not something positive. It shows me that a household (i.e., family) MUST have two incomes to get by. This has always been the case in the lower economic strata, but it has become the requisite norm in the upper strata as well.
If the 50/50 or 40/60 split represented two spouses that worked *less than full time* I would consider this trend a very positive one. However, the issue here isn't the size of the tranche. It is the ever increasing size of the whole and needing to contribute to a shortfall. The second member of the family *must* contribute a larger amount of money.
Now all of this has various contributing factors (living beyond one's means, consumerism, stagnant real wages/inflation, retirement/pensions, healthcare, etc.) but none of the factors are "healthy" in my opinion.
Greg — December 5, 2010
Did they control for husband's education? The graph won't have the same meaning if more-educated women are marrying less-educated men, for example.
Krista — December 5, 2010
So one deeply annoying thing about this graphic is that it's deeply heterosexist and heteronormative. The only way that this makes sense is for 30-44 year old women who are 1) partnered and 2) partnered with men. Although I am a 30 year old woman, I am not partnered with a man. I am, therefore, not represented by the "women" they are purporting this graphic covers.
For god's sake, when we're talking about heterosexual or heterosexually-partnered people, is it that damn hard to SAY THAT?
b — December 5, 2010
Does this average in women with zero income (stay at home wives/mothers), or is this only taking into account women who do have outside income? Because if it's the former, it's hard for it to say anything at all about the wage gap since the entire effect could theoretically be caused by more women entering the work force.
observer — December 5, 2010
The Pew Research study earlier this month also showed that marriages that the more equal the marriage is, the longer it lasts.
KJ — December 5, 2010
Well, I can suggest some reasons. Careers that don't require higher education are often very gendered, with men's careers like construction worker and mechanic being paid at a much higher rate than women's no-higher-education required careers, like nursing home aide or school paraprofessional. Of course, some men work in nursing homes and some women in construction- but all in all, they are still careers with a strong slant towards one gender.
Scott — December 5, 2010
"[T]he figure suggests that efforts to close the wage gap between men and women have been much more successful at the top of the economic ladder than the bottom."
First of all I think it's difficult to compare personal education to the economic status of the entire union, especially since (from the Pew report):
"Men (73%) are more likely than women (63%) to marry more educated spouses in this group [as opposed to in 1970, when spouses generally shared the same education level]"
(http://pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/new-economics-of-marriage.pdf)
So I was confused by this but I did find an interesting tidbit in the report:
(from the table of full-time worker median annual earnings)
Women with less than high school make 98% what they made in 1970.
Men with less than high school make 79% what they made in 1970.
Men made 150% of what Women made at less than high school level in 2007.
Men made 188% of what Women made at less than high school level in 1970.
(Change is -38%)
Women with college degrees make 130% what they made in 1970.
Men with college degrees make 113% what they made in 1970.
Men made 141% of what women made with college degrees in 2007.
Men made 163% of what women made with college degrees in 1970.
(Change is -22%)
So actually, the lower education levels have been closing the gap faster, but there's a bigger gap. However, the pay gap used to be much larger for lower-education women, but the disparity has actually been closing between lower and higher-education gender pay gaps (25% disparity versus today's 9% disparity)
There's a lot of other crazy correlations between the two tables (full-time median annual earnings and median annual household income)- such as the fact that men with no high school diploma are making 79% what they were in 1970, yet their households are making 102% what they were in 1970...
nitpicker — December 5, 2010
I'm curious. Do we know how much of the inequality on the lower end of the scale is based on job type? If we assume the couples are matched evenly by education, isn't it true that men are more likely to take jobs which pay more due to danger or physical exertion than women? Construction, logging, the military and other job types which offer pretty good pay with only a high school education are still dominated by men, while teaching, secretarial work and receptionists have remained dominated by women.