New research has revealed that women who out-earn their male partners in heterosexual households report lower levels of relationship satisfaction.
The study, published in Sex Roles, surveyed more than 500 people in straight marriages to find that men who earned less than their female partners reported feeling more inadequate and less masculine, and that those feelings may forecast lower relationship quality.
Women who out-earned their male partners reported feeling increased levels of discomfort because of their subversion to traditional gender roles, suggesting that such traditional views about who should be the higher earner in heteronormative marriages are still firmly entrenched.
Researchers also surveyed more than 2400 members of the general public to assess their views on the stability of a heterosexual relationship where the women earned more than their male partners.
The conclusion? Even outsiders viewed these partnerships as less stable, less satisfying, and more likely to end in divorce. The survey participants were presented with a scenario about an average, married couple who met at work and who share the same hobbies.
Half the participants were told that the man earned more than the woman, while the other half were told the woman out-earned the man. When the woman was described as earning more, participants rated the relationship as less satisfying and more likely to end in divorce, indicating that many people still attribute marital success to a man’s role as the financial provider.
The researchers described the traditional views as “western heterosexual scripts” that “dictate that women and men should occupy separate but complementary social roles.”
“Men are expected to be agentic, dominant, and powerful in their romantic relationships with women, all characteristics that support their prescribed role of provider within heterosexual relationships,” they said.
“Women are expected to be communal, nurturing, and kind in their romantic relationships with men, all characteristics that support their prescribed role of caregiver within heterosexual relationship. As such, while heterosexual scripts are nested within broader gender-role expectations for men and women, they also prescribe a narrower set of context-specific and gendered expectations for caregiving and provider behaviors within heterosexual relationships.”
Researchers also analysed 94 newspaper and magazine articles on female breadwinners (with headlines including Are Female Breadwinners a Recipe for Disaster?, Female Breadwinners Pay a Cost for Career Success – Marital Stress and The Danger of Being a Breadwinning Wife to find that media framed relationships where women earned more than men were often perceived as abnormal or problematic.
Women in such relationships were portrayed as disruptors of traditional gender roles, while men in these relationships were cast as emasculated individuals. In one article they studied, the following questions were posed: “Marriages could break up. Is it worth it? Is making a substantial salary worth losing your husband?”
“By using this narrative device, the articles created the impression that breadwinner women’s gender-nonconforming ambition and pursuit of career success was foolish and hubristic, and hence they ultimately deserved the infidelity or divorce they suffered,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers believe that such scripted media portrayals not only reflect our contemporary cultural norms, but help reinforce them too.
“Such scripts comprise mutually agreed upon social conventions that help people to make sense of romantic relationships between men and women by organising sequences of behaviours into coherent stories,” the researchers explained.
As the gender gap narrows incrementally, more and more women are becoming the primary earners at home. In Australia, despite growing numbers of women out-earning their male partner, they still earned an average of $246.30 less per week than men.
In the US, between 31-37 per cent of women are the primary breadwinners in their romantic relationships. In the UK, it is estimated around 31 per cent of women out-earn their partners while in Canada, just over a quarter of women earn more than their male partners.
Image: Shutterstock
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