Now for the 411 on “the new economics of marriage” –Â a Pew study that is making its way through the media: To me the study is a good follow up on Heather Boushey’s “the new breadwinners” in A Woman’s Nation: The economic status of women has changed irrevocably, and our society generally accepts it. We rely on it too – women are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in 63 percent of families; and 43 percent of family income is from women.
Thanks to Pew, we see what this means for marriage and the balance of power and status. While 40 years ago, 96 percent of men earned more than their wives, today that number is 78 percent. Men out-earn wives, but less so than in the past. In terms of education, back in the day as today, married couples are most likely to have the same amount of education. But in 1970, whenever there was a difference in education, it was more likely to be men with more education (3 out of 10 marriages). Today, only 2 out of 10 marriages have men with more education…and 3 out of 10 have women with more education.
The question everyone is asking is how does this influence the “psychology of marriage”… by which I mean the principles that bind couples together, and the things that make marriages more likely to be happy and to last. The old wisdom is that traditional gender roles hold marriages together: in the past marriages with a more traditional structure were more stable. But that was in the past. With changing economics and culture, so the glue in marriage has changed too.
Well, it has been changing for quite some time. In the 1970s the research showed higher rates of depression for wives who were staying at home. By the early 1980s the more depressed wives were those who were doing a second shift–paid work and then work at home. More recently there has been evidence in how much more stable and satisfying are marriages where partners share housework–I mean really share housework, not this “helping” notion–but real sharing of responsibility for childcare, housework, and the administrative things of family life like list making, event planning, and gift giving. That’s the other change: men have been participating in their marriages differently, being more engaged at home.
The numbers show us that we are talking about narrowing the gender gap–at work, at home. This is a story of narrowing the gap between men and women, not of anyone losing ground–at least not men or women losing ground to each other. I did a radio call-in show with Joy Cardin this morning on Wisconsin Public Radio and the callers were talking more about their embattled families than any war between the sexes:Â Where we aren’t narrowing the gap is figuring out how to create public policy–health care, day care, family leave, paid sick leave, paid vacation, or even reasonable banking policy that doesn’t sustain all sorts of inequalities that are bad for families (but I digress)–that gives these men and women the freedom to keep doing their jobs at home and at work without high levels of stress. The new economics of marriage is also the new psychology of marriage, and it has been around for a while. We’re talking about it more now, and creating more egalitarian marriages. Soon perhaps our public policies will catch on and help families as they really are out more.
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NICE WORK: what’s the big deal about men earning less? | Girl with Pen — June 16, 2010
[...] about the “troubling impact” on the changing economic status of men and women. See this post for background in the “new economics” of [...]