One part of traditional marriage isn’t under attack
Americans still prefer men to put bread on the table.
Just over 70 percent of adults say it is very important for a man to be able to support a family financially to be a good husband or partner, but less than one-third say it’s very important for a woman to do the same to be a good wife or partner, according to a new survey of nearly 5,000 adults by the Pew Research Center , a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. “As women in the U.S. have increased their labor force participation and earning power, their contributions to household incomes have grown,” the report concluded. In 1980, only 13 percent of married women earned more than or as much as their husbands versus 25 percent in 2000.
Marriage rates are indeed closely linked to socioeconomic status, according to a separate recent analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by Pew. In 2015, among adults ages 25 and older, 65 percent with a four-year college degree were married, compared with 55 percent of those with some college education and 50 percent among those with no education beyond high school, it found. Twenty-five years earlier, the marriage rate was above 60 percent for each of these groups. Never-married adults who have not completed college are more likely than college graduates to say they don’t plan on marrying.
Men’s egos may not fare so well when if they don’t earn as much as their wives. The risk of divorce was 32 percent higher when a husband isn’t working full-time, according to a study of more than 6,300 couples by Alexandra Killewald, professor of sociology at Harvard University, published last year in the “American Sociological Review.” As Julia Baird wrote in Glamour magazine of those findings: “Oh, how fragile is the ego of a man. We must never let him feel like a bonsai in a grove of California redwoods — no, he must always see himself as a towering tree, magnificent in comparison with his female partner.”
Other gender roles have changed over the last 50 years, however, as more women have gone to work. Fathers are more involved in their children’s lives. In 2015, fathers reported spending, on average, seven hours a week on childcare — almost triple the time they provided back in 1965, previous research by Pew found. What’s more, fathers put in about nine hours a week on household chores in 2015, up from four hours in 1965. Mothers still spend more time with their children — about 15 hours a week on childcare and 18 hours a week on housework in 2015.
And wealthy women put more focus on a man’s earning power, although wealthy men look for other things in a mate. Men with higher incomes showed stronger preferences for women with slender bodies, while women with higher incomes preferred men who had a steady income or made similar money, according to another survey of 28,000 heterosexual men and women aged between 18 and 75. The study was conducted by researchers at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and published in the January 2016 edition of the journal “Personality and Individual Differences.”