US marriages: more husbands and wives are earning the same, but women still do more work at home
Welcome to the bi-weekly update (#174) where we dive deeper into key topics, themes or issues specific to women and their lived experience.
Even as financial contributions become more balanced in marriages, women continue to shoulder the majority of household chores and childcare, whilst men spend more time on work and leisure care.
According to Pew Research (US):
55% of marriages today have a husband who is the primary or sole breadwinner
in 29% of marriages, both spouses earn about the same amount of money
and 16% of marriages have women are the sole breadwinner
black wives are significantly more likely than wives from other racial or ethnic groups to be the breadwinner in their marriage.
The only marriage type where husbands devote more time to caregiving than their wives is one in which the wife is the sole breadwinner. However, they roughly spend the same amount of time per week on household chores.
But the majority of Americans say that society values men’s contributions at work more than their contributions at home. Only 7% say society values men’s contributions at home more than those at work.
When it comes to women, about half of adults (49%) say the contributions women make at work and at home are valued about equally.
Married mothers with children in the household are less likely to be the breadwinner than those without children: 20% of wives without children out-earn their husbands, compared with 15% of wives with one or more children at home.
Today, wives in egalitarian marriages earn:
$60,000 at the median vs the husbands earn $62,000.
When the wife is the primary provider:
her earnings are somewhat lower than when the husband is the primary provider – about $88,000 a year (vs approximately $92,000).
In marriages where women are the breadwinner, this is often because they have more education than their husbands.
Despite the changes in how much women contribute financially to their marriage, about 50% of Americans think that men prefer to earn more than their wife.
And only 7% say they think most women would prefer to make more money than their husband.
Gender norms die hard, as they say.
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