According to data published by the Pew Research Center in 2010, the wife now earns more than the husband in 22 percent of married couples, compared with only 4 percent in 1970. And the salary differences can be substantial: The 2010 U.S. Census reports that over 4 percent of wives make at least $30,000 more than their spouses. Once you add to the “wife outearns” group the 25 percent of couples whose incomes are pretty much equal, it’s clear that the guy is now just barely in the majority.
Even a Match.com survey of men ages 26 to 36 found that 87 percent thought it would be “sexy” to date a woman who earned more money than they did. Experts note there’s a new breed of men who not only aren’t threatened by a woman’s larger paycheck but are grateful for it. An increasing number of men are happy being outearned, he says—not only because gender roles are changing but also because of our sluggish economy: Three quarters of those who lost their jobs in 2008 and 2009 were men. “This is not your grandfather’s Depression, because men aren’t the sole providers,” notes Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, whose specialty is the study of masculinity. “So men’s losing their jobs hasn’t been the calamity for the family that it was in 1931.”
Experts see this as a period of transition. “The general data indicate that gender norms are changing but that there’s also still some ambivalence,” observes D’Vera Cohn, senior writer at the Pew Research Center, which recently released several reports on gender and money. For example, she says, 67 percent of men and women polled in a 2010 national survey said a man needed to be prepared to support a family before he married—but only 33 percent felt that women had the same responsibility. And yet the change in attitudes has been huge. In the late 1970s, Cohn says, 48 percent of American men and women believed that the most satisfying marriage was one in which both partners worked and shared chores and parenting; by 2010 that figure had jumped to 62 percent.
Even if the economy rallies, the new gender economics is likely to continue because we’ve reached a cultural tipping point. “Gen X and Gen Y men assume their wives are going to work—and work hard,” Kimmel says. And women can now choose a husband not because he’s a good provider but because he’s a good guy.
Source: www.More.com, March 2012
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