Rich wife, rich life?
Husbands whose wives earn more than two-thirds of the household income are far likelier to report mental distress than those who are breadwinners, a new study has found.
The study from the Economist featured an analaysis of 17 years of data on young, working couples and found that only 30% of heterosexual couples feature wives who out-earn their husbands, despite a shrinking pay gap.
Relationships with such an income dynamic can reportedly present emotional challenges for the husbands.
Among husbands whose wives earn at least 70% of household income, the risk of “serious psychological distress” is almost two and a half times as high, the study found.
For cohabiting couples where the woman earns more than half of the household income, men were roughly one and a half times as likely to report distress, even factoring in age, education, and income, according to the study.
The study found that women who are the primary breadwinners were also more likely to report lower satisfaction with their relationships.
This could be down to a perception that women are often responsible for more of the work at home, even if they earn more than their husbands, according to Dr. Misty Heggeness of the University of Kansas.
“Family work is still predominantly falling on women’s shoulders, no matter whether they are the breadwinner or not,” Dr. Heggeness told the Economist.
The study seems to support earlier work from 2015, which found that wives’ share of household income drops sharply after 50% in terms of frequency.
In other words, wives are more likely to report earning slightly less than their husbands than slightly more, according to the study from Marianne Bertrand, an economist at the University of Chicago.
A more recent French study found that couples in which women earn around 75% of household income are around 30% more likely to split up than more evenly-matched couples.
The latest study appears to show a disconnect between people’s stated preferences and their actions.
Only 10% of Americans believed that men being out-earned by women was bound to cause problems in 2022, the most recent year of data.
That was lower than any other country featured in the study, including Germany (16%), and China (27%).
It also represented a sharp drop in concerns about such pay disparities in recent years.
In 1998, by contrast, more than a third of those surveyed thought a woman out-earning a man was certain to cause problems.
