The financial balance of power in American marriages is shifting.
A Pew Research Center survey released Tuesday found that 22% of men made less money than their wives in 2007.
By comparison, 4% of husbands earned less than their wives in 1970.
A shift in education patterns was a factor in the Pew report, which polled U.S.-born 30- to 44-year olds.
In 1970, 28% of husbands had more education than their wives. By 2007, that figure dropped to 19%.
Slightly more than half of spouses had the same education level in both 1970 and 2007, the most recent year for which data were available.
“For a long time, men didn’t need education to make a decent wage — they could go into manufacturing or other labor,” said Jenny Wittner, associate director of the advocacy group Women Employed.
“Women had to get an education to keep up, and over the years that has started to translate into a difference in wages,” Wittner added.
The report cited several societal and economic reasons for the jump. Marriage rates have declined across the board since 1970, and rates have gone down most sharply for the least educated.
The most educated are far more likely than those with less education to be married, and that gap that has widened since 1970. And since more education is linked to higher earnings, marriage especially boosts a household’s spending power.
Pew’s report was compiled from data collected before the recession hit, and said that the downturn will only exacerbate those trends as men have especially felt the job crunch.
The report cited government data that said males accounted for about 75% of the 2008 decline in employment among “prime-working-age individuals.” As a result, the percentage of women in the workforce continues to inch toward equilibrium, as women now comprise 47.4% of the total.
But Wittner noted “it may not stay a so-called ‘men’s recession’ forever, and that shift will hurt households as the woman’s income becomes more important.”
Unmarried adults and the marriage advantage: For singles at all levels of education, men’s incomes fared worse. In 2007, unmarried women had higher income than their 1970 counterparts. But single men without any college education saw their inflation-adjusted earnings decrease, and they did not have a wife’s wages cushion the decline.
Similarly, single men who did not complete high school or who had only a high school diploma had lower household incomes in 2007 than their 1970 counterparts — those with some college education saw income remain the same.
One exception to the marriage advantage: Married women without a high school diploma saw their inflation-adjusted household incomes fall 2% from 1970 to 2007, while those of their single counterparts grew 9%.
(Source: CNN Money)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
8 Responses
Big deal. Among the “best” families, that’s been the situation among Jews as far as anyone can remember. Only men who can’t “make it” as a scholar end up in the situation of making a large parnassah and being the primary support of the family (with the result that scholarship conveys higher social prestige than wealth). To understand our sociology, one should remember that “those that can, learn – those that can’t, try to get rich”.
Blah blah blah! Thank you CNN for all your theories.
The real reason the persentage of wives earning more than their husbands is climbing is because B”H the world of kollel where the wife works and the husband doesn’t is growing by leaps & bounds.
(also let’s not forget lots of heimishe yidden have their business’ in their wifes name)
Once again CNN chooses to ignore the positive impact frummeh yidden have on the world at large.
My goodness, you guys are getting real edgy over this article-;)
In the frum Torah world this may be the norm.
However this is is happening in the non Jewish world as well and the reasons are not so holy as
“husbands choosing to learn”.
The anti Torah feminism movement has for years been making an artificially unlevel “playing field (as they say)” where women are given unfair advantages through misuse of the law and
outright abuse of both people and of the ‘system’.
One example is that in U.S public schools classes are deliberately taught so grils are catered to in how they learn best while boys are ignored and when the boys get figity because they are not being taught properly anyway they get doped up on Ritalin which doctors say affects the brain in the same way cocaine does.
So the girls artificially get ahead just so they can take the jobs in the business world away from men.
This is only one method and one example there are many more and all being used to the fullest extent by the feminists.
Yeah and more divorce and more poverty!
#4 – Very interesting theory about the US public schools and Ritalin. I always suspected something was going on in those schools and now I know.
That’s not surprising. My high school education consisted of throwing spit balls at my teacher. Now I gotta work 14 hours a day for pittance
to ani oymer “The real reason the persentage of wives earning more than their husbands is climbing is because B”H the world of kollel where the wife works and the husband doesn’t is growing by leaps & bounds.” are you kidding me? are you that small minded to think the small percentage of kollel families affect this study?