Among married couples in the United States, women’s financial contributions have grown steadily over the last half-century. While men remain the main breadwinner in a majority of opposite-sex marriages, the share of women who earn as much as or significantly more than their husbands has roughly tripled over the past 50 years.
In 29% of marriages today, both spouses earn about the same amount of money. Just over half (55%) of marriages today have a husband who is the primary or sole breadwinner, and 16% have a breadwinner wife. See this in the chart below and learn more here.
Even as financial contributions have become more equal in marriages, the way couples divide their time between paid work and home life remains unbalanced. Women pick up a heavier load when it comes to household chores and caregiving responsibilities, while men spend more time on work and leisure.
This is true in egalitarian marriages – where both spouses earn roughly the same amount of money – and in marriages where the wife is the primary earner. The only marriage type where husbands devote more time to caregiving than their wives is one in which the wife is the sole breadwinner. In those marriages, wives and husbands spend roughly the same amount of time per week on household chores. See this in the chart below.
While wives’ financial contributions have grown significantly over the years, there remains an imbalance in the way leisure time, housework, and caregiving are divided within couples – even in marriages that are considered egalitarian in terms of earnings.
Gender disparities in time use remain when wives are breadwinners. Among parents in marriages where the wife is the primary earner, mothers spend about 13 hours on caregiving activities compared with an average of 8.9 spent by fathers.
In marriages where the wife is the sole breadwinner, wives spend about 40 hours per week on paid work. Husbands in these marriages have more leisure time than husbands in any other type of arrangement – spending 47.2 hours per week on leisure activities. There are no significant differences in the time husbands and wives spend on housework, but husbands spend more time on caregiving. This is the only type of marriage where husbands spend more time than their wives caring for others in the household (6.1 hours vs. 4.1). See this in the chart below.
So the following, according to this data, can be said about modern marriage today.
- Marriages have become more egalitarian over time, though marriages, in general, are in decline – as more Boss Babes become part of our modern society.
- Where women are the primary breadwinner, they tend not to get the same output in effort from men when the roles are reversed. In these relationships, men have gained more leisure time. This obviously becomes problematic for a lot of women.
Evidently, it’s not easy to be a Boss Babe. As our culture gets more woke, one has to wonder if this trend does not play into the phenomenon and has some type of correlation. Today’s society has rejected historical traditional male and female roles to be norms. Come to think of it – women increasingly don’t even exist nowadays – modern society can’t seem to define what a woman is anymore.
By Tom Williams
