When wives outearn husbands

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal summarized an informal study of married couples in which the wife earned more money than the husband. The results clearly point to the important role that money, power and tradition play in determining the division of labor in many American families.

According to the article about one-fourth of the nation’s working wives earn more than their husbands and about 2 million earn at least twice as much. Surprisingly however only about 15 percent of these women hold professional or managerial positions and less than half have college degrees. A close look at the statistic reveals that in about half of the cases where the wife outearns the husband it is because the husband is 

laid-off, retired or disabled.

The article says that for some couples the greater earning power of the wife has fulfilled dreams of equity and partnership in marriage. Some husbands even like to brag about how their wives’ success has liberated them from traditional wage earners burdens. But for many others a wife’s status as primary breadwinner creates anxiety and stress in the marriage. Divorce is a frequent result. Research finds in fact that the higher the woman’s earnings the higher the chance of divorce.

Why do marriages split up when the wife outearns the husband? An important reason according to the article is that the husband’s position as breadwinner and head of the family is typically based on the fact that he earns more - usually a great deal more - than his wife. Hence when the wife brings home the bigger paycheck the husband often feels threatened and insecure since his role and authority in the family are called into question. As one expert said, ‘The more money a woman makes, the more power she has in the household.’ another remarked ‘Money is the key to understanding authority in the family.’ The result then is that some husbands have difficulty allowing their wives to have the additional authority in the family that goes with a bigger paycheck while the wives are apt to believe they deserve a greater say in family decisions and feel frustrated if they don’t get it.

Besides authority a second issue that comes to play when the wife outearns the husband is the allocation of housework. Interviews revealed that some husbands willingly do more of the household chores such as shopping, cooking and laundry in recognition of their wives’ heavy time demands at work. Others however balk at taking on these tasks and do relatively little of the housework even in situations where the wife works full time but the husband remains at home for most of the day. A number of women interviewed for the article said they resented the fact that their husbands did not do more of the housework but that they preferred to do it themselves rather than risk family turmoil by bringing up the subject.

The article concluded that when a wife outearns the husband the marriage is almost always significantly altered sometimes for the good and sometimes not. The couples most likely to successfully adjust to their role reversal tend to fall in one of the three groups - couples with similar education levels and occupations, wealthy couples who can avoid the conflict over household chores by hiring help and couples who start out in marriage with the wife as the primary breadwinner.