The Forecast for Female Breadwinner Households is Bleak

Sex Roles are Not a Social Construct They are Primal

Suzanne Venker  

 

 

In a recent article entitled “Female-Breadwinner Couples Are Still More Likely to Split Up,” we learn that marriages in which the wife earns more than the husband have risen from about 5% of married couples in 1972 to roughly 16% today.

“This trend is likely to continue,” writes Rosemary L. Hopcroft, “as young women outnumber men in universities and increasingly dominate many professional occupations.”

Unfortunately, this is not something to celebrate. Female-breadwinner households—defined as those in which the wife earns more than 60% of the couple’s total income—are precarious at best. Yet there’s been a collective silence on the matter.

To be clear, some female-breadwinner households do fine—particularly if the imbalance occurred slowly, over a long period of time inside a marriage. Or if two people met and married later in life. I know several couples in this very boat.

But for the average modern couple, the data is clear. Female-breadwinner couples are 36% more likely to separate than male-breadwinner couples—and this next part may surprise you: in every country except Hungary and Cyprus.

What’s more, this outcome persists even in countries that fully support or even encourage egalitarian marriages. In other words, it doesn’t matter what a country’s people think, want, or believe about gender roles. Human nature trumps all.

This is such an important caveat because those who push for so-called sexual equality claim the reason couples struggle with role reversal is due to ingrained and backward attitudes and beliefs.

This new research proves that argument false. In fact, the association between female breadwinning and relationship instability reflects “enduring psychological predispositions, rather than simply social norms.”

In other words, sex roles are not a social construct.

They are primal.

The science of human mating

These “enduring psychological predispositions” represent the way we humans are made. Humans select mates based on centuries of biologically programmed needs and longings. We can, and we have, made modifications to our thought processes and behaviors. But we cannot erase human desire. It is fixed.

“We have not escaped the powerful forces of sexual selection over the six million years or so since we split from our common ancestor with chimpanzees,” write evolutionary psychologists David M. Buss and David P. Schmitt.

They add, “Women’s preference for men with economic resources has been abundantly supported by dozens of studies… (a) status and economic resources for herself and her children, (b) physical protection for herself and her children, and (c) enhanced mating success of her children as a consequence of social and material benefits.”

In other words, women know instinctively that if they want to get married and have children, they need a man who is capable of and willing to protect and provide on behalf of his family.

And men want to fill this role. The reason they aren’t is because we’ve refused to accept this exchange between the sexes as a net positive for everyone. Instead, we denigrate and dismiss conventional gender roles as something horrible and oppressive—and encourage young people, women in particular, to build their lives as though they will never want or need a man. As though they will not, at some point, deeply desire marriage and family.

Yet most of them will. Even today, 69% of young adults ages 18 to 34 who have never been married say they want to get married one day. But when women around look for a husband, they find few options in sight.

That’s because we’ve outright rejected men’s desire to provide and to protect. “Women can do everything themselves!” we said. Men heard that message, and as a result many stepped back or even out altogether.

Men need someone or something to work for. A wife, who becomes vulnerable once she’s pregnant, and children provide that incentive. Without it, many men will not see the point of working hard. Some will be industrious with no incentive but money (and for some, power), but most will not.

And that is largely what we have today: men who feel they have no one to live for or to work hard for. Men who lack purpose and drive.

The stubborn nature of sex differences

When we began trying to eradicate sex differences, many decades ago now, we didn’t anticipate their stubborn reassertion into modern relationships. But it almost always happens.

For one thing, men and women do not look for the same things in a mate. Men’s preferences are different from women’s. Most men are not intuitively looking for a woman with economic resources, and they’re certainly not looking for her physical protection.

Marriage-minded men scan primarily for beauty and fertility. (Of course men want more than that in a wife; I’m simply referring here to instinct.) The money and protection part men view as their department.

Men and women also don’t respond to breadwinning in the same way once they become mothers and fathers. When this happens, our respective biological propensities show up in spades.

Men view breadwinning as their primary duty, their offering if you will, for everything women go through to carry and bring new life into this world— and for the amount of work that’s involved in raising babies and young children. Male breadwinning, in other words, is done largely in service to women.

Women do not work out of a desire to provide for a husband. They work because they feel they must for financial reasons, or they work because they want to. They either like their job or they like the autonomy it offers. But they absolutely do not work out of a desire to provide for their man.

To wit, most wives don’t turn their paychecks over to their husbands the way husbands so often do to their wives. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “What’s yours is ours, and what’s mine is mine.” I don’t share this mindset, but it perfectly encapsulates a common belief wives (and even husbands!) harbor.

When wives earn money, or even inherit money, they view it as theirs. Husbands do not, as a rule, share this same mindset. Why? Because they deem themselves to be providers and protectors of women, and this offering extends to whatever monies a man brings to the table.

There’s more. When a child arrives, a husband’s desire to provide ramps up, whereas a wife’s typically ramps down. Because of this, it is practically inevitable that when a primary-breadwinning wife has a child, she’ll become resentful if she feels she must take on both of these tasks—mother and provider—simultaneously.

There are two logical reasons for the resentment these women feel. One, performing both of these tasks at the same time is simply too much for any one person to do. It is too much to ask, and it is certainly too much to expect. Wanting to work for pay at some point and in some capacity as a mother and being responsible for one’s family’s financial welfare are two entirely different things.

It is not a new mother’s job to put food on the table; that’s a father’s job. A woman who has endured pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding has done more than enough—and the real work hasn’t even begun! The demands on her body, and on her entire being are about to become massive. The more children she has, the more this will be true.

Which means: Every new mother actually does need a man on whom she can rely financially, at least for a specified period of time. This gives a mother and her family options. It also gives her peace. When she doesn’t have it, resentment creeps in.

“The analyses show evidence that [the association between women’s socioeconomic advantage and relationship dissolution] is stronger among couples with children in the household, suggesting a potential work–family conflict mechanism.”

This is why the forecast for female-breadwinner households is bleak. There is no way for a mother to take on a father’s role in addition to her own without storing up resentment. She’s going to blame someone for her predicament, and it will almost always be her husband—even if she originally agreed to their work-family arrangement.

As unfair as that may be, this is the new reality for countless couples today as a result of America’s forty-year silence on sex differences and how these differences manifest when men and women become mothers and fathers.

I can’t tell you the number of couples I hear about who are married with a baby on the way, and Mom wants to stay home but can’t because she’s her family’s primary breadwinner.

You have to ask yourself, Why would a couple have set their lives up in this way? Women certainly didn’t do this in the past.

There’s only one answer: They were wholly and completely ignorant, genuinely ignorant, of the ways in which women change over time once they become mothers. How dramatically their priorities shift and how desperately they want to be with their babies.

And the reason they (and their husbands) were ignorant is because we’re not allowed to tell the truth. We’re supposed to pretend that men and women are “equal,” as in the same.

This political game, this charade, is apparently so important it’s worth trapping women and men into having zero choices when it comes to the inevitable work-family conundrum.

Stop treating men and women as interchangeable beings

How to resolve this problem?

Stop treating men and women as though they are interchangeable. As though having a baby isn’t going to radically alter whatever arrangements a couple made and bring sex differences to the forefront. As though it doesn’t matter who earns what in a marriage. As though it’s normal to expect a woman to have a baby and continue on with her career as though her world didn’t just turn upside down.

Stop encouraging women to create lives that put career at the center with no added dialogue about its implications down the road.

Of course female-breadwinner couples are more likely to split up. Most of the conflict they endure centers around the enormity of a mother’s two tasks and whose job it should be to do this or to do that.

In male-breadwinner homes, mothers do the bulk of the household labor and child care because that’s the job. That’s why these mothers are there. There’s little reason to have conflict over who’s doing what because such couples are not in competition.

And therein lies the rub. Female-breadwinner households create competition in marriage, which is the last place competition belongs. Again, wanting to work for pay at some point and in some capacity as a mother and being responsible for the family’s financial welfare are two entirely different things.

The research couldn’t be clearer. Female-breadwinner couples, wherein a woman walks into a marriage earning more than her man, have a significantly higher risk of marriage breakdown or dissolution.

This is what forty years of feminism hath wrought.

It will take a second revolution to turn it around.