{"id":50948,"date":"2012-09-13T11:00:01","date_gmt":"2012-09-13T16:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/familyinequality.wordpress.com\/?p=4674"},"modified":"2012-09-13T01:42:53","modified_gmt":"2012-09-13T06:42:53","slug":"the-end-of-men-richer-sex-reality-check-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/09\/13\/the-end-of-men-richer-sex-reality-check-6\/","title":{"rendered":"The-End-of-Men-Richer-Sex Reality Check #6"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Family Inequality<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2010, 28% of wives were earning more than their husbands. And wives were 8-times as likely as their husbands to have no earnings.<\/p>\n

I still don\u2019t have my copies of\u00a0The End of Men<\/em>, by Hanna Rosin, or The Richer Sex<\/em>, by Liza Mundy. But I\u2019ve read enough of their excerpts to plan out some quick data checks.<\/p>\n

Both Rosin and Mundy say women are rapidly becoming primary earners, breadwinners, pants-wearers, etc., in their families. It is absolutely true that the trend is in that direction. Similarly, the Earth is heading toward being devoured by the Sun, but the details are still to be worked out<\/a>. As Rosin wrote in her Atlantic<\/em><\/a> article:<\/p>\n

In feminist circles, these social, political, and economic changes are always cast as a slow, arduous form of catch-up in a continuing struggle for female equality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which is right.\u00a0So, where are we now, really, and what is the pace of change?<\/p>\n

For the question of relative income within married-couple families, which is only one part of this picture — and an increasingly selective one — I got some Census data for 1970 to 2010 from IPUMS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I selected\u00a0married couples (called “heterogamous<\/a>”\u00a0throughout this post)\u00a0in which the wife was in the age range 25-54, with couple income greater than $0. I added husbands\u2019 and wives\u2019 incomes, and calculated the percentage of the total coming from the wife. The results show and increase from 7% to 28% of couples in which the wife earns more than the husband (defined as 51% or more of the total income):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(Thanks to the NYTimes Magazine<\/em><\/a> for the triumphant wife image)<\/p>\n

Please note this is not the percentage of working<\/em> wives who earn more. That would be higher \u2014 Mundy calls it 38% in 2009<\/a> \u2014 but it wouldn\u2019t describe the state of all women, which is what you need for a global gender trend claim.\u00a0This is the percentage of all wives<\/em> who earn more, which is what you need to describe the state of married couples.<\/p>\n

But this 51% cutoff is frustratingly arbitrary. No serious study of power and inequality would rest everything on one such point. Earning 51% of the couple\u2019s earnings doesn\u2019t make one \u201cthe breadwinner,\u201d and doesn\u2019t determine who \u201cwears the pants.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking at the whole distribution gives much more information. Here it is, at 10-year intervals:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These are the points that jump out at me from this graph:<\/p>\n