Kristen Springer, a sociology professor at Rutgers, presented some very cool research on men’s health at the recent Council on Contemporary Families conference, and a related paper in the journal Gender & Society (abstract only) is out now. She was looking at men who earn less than their wives. You need to know what she discovered next time you are trying to figure out what to make of those articles in the New York Times or wherever about the “troubling impact” on the changing economic status of men and women. See this post for background in the “new economics” of marriage.

Springer asked if men who earn less (specifically less than half) than their wives have worse health than men who earn the same or more. The simple answer: yes. But hold up! Don’t go yet. There’s more, and it is important.

Because Springer asked why. She looked at whether it was because of who gets to make decisions in the couple, and came back with the answer NO.

She looked at whether it was because of marital unhappiness among these couples, and came back with the answer NO.

In other words, there weren’t couple issues or any kind of home front “war between the sexes” being played out here.

No, it looks like, instead, there is a war within the sexes going on.

She looked at a high fallutin’ but also very powerful concept that folks in the biz call “hegemonic masculinity” — that is, the “most honored way of being a man” in a given society (see Connell and Messerschmidt 2005 if you wanna read up).  In the US, men’s breadwinning is a central component to this. This means that men’s earnings puts them on top of the heap, over other men (as well as over their women).

Here is what she found: For men who were not earning less, the more money he and his family earned, the healthier he said he was. This is your basic wealth equals health situation. (In the figure below, this means the blue bars are higher at the rich end, lower at the poor end.)

But for men who were earning less than their wives, the guys at the top of the heap were the only ones to report significantly worse health relative to guys earning the same or more than their spouse. The guys at the top, for some reason, were especially stressed by the inequality. The study didn’t have direct measures of men’s beliefs about the situation, but it looks a lot like only for men of the upper ranks is there a sense that earning less than their wives constitutes a failure. (In the figure the red bars are lower for the rich guys.)

Springer’s key graph looks like this:

(click here for the full version)

What’s the take home from this? First, beware of stories that bemoan what is happening to men in the face of women’s growing presence in the job market and the economy. The health hardships for the men at the bottom of the ladder are not about gender inequality, they are about the hardships of inequality, full stop (the blue bars). Second, recognize that when we are anxious for men (or they are anxious for themselves) about being breadwinners this isn’t about being a man; it is about social class. It is almost as if the better-off can “afford” to have gender strife, just as in decades past they could afford to have a stay-at-home wife when everybody else required two earners. Finally, don’t be taken in by the notion of the immutable organization of gender in families (nor by the notion that social class doesn’t exist or doesn’t have a meaningful cultural as well as economic impact).

Springer recommends a whole bunch of policies that create more economic justice for all by creating more family friendly policies that can in the end help to eradicate “hegemonic masculinity.” Well that won’t be a slogan you’ll use with your Member of Congress, but just wanted to call it what it is.

–Virginia Rutter