When the Wife Out-Earns the Husband - Building Gender Balanced Business

With more women with higher education levels and the wage gap narrowing or even reversing for certain age groups in certain industries in certain cities, wives out-earn their husbands in nearly a third of US households, a figure on the rise there and in many other parts of the world. But how to deal with a novel situation? Marie Hartwell-Walker, a psychologist and marriage and family therapist, notes the following trends in such families, and offers advice:

• Almost a third of working women in the US now out-earn their husbands.

• While men rarely if ever do as much housework as their wives, the amount husbands do rises along with the woman’s paycheck — until she makes more — when it drops back toward traditional levels! Indeed, in such households, traditional gender roles reassert themselves.

• “Perhaps women still need to think that they can rely on men to take care of them. Perhaps men need to feel that they are still the “head of household” to feel like a man. The issue merits further study.”

• Couples where the wife makes more than the husband need to be aware of how they are pioneers, and work to move beyond traditional gender assumptions about income, power and decision-making.

• Both members of the couple need to focus on how it is the hours worked, not the income, that is critical in determining how the household needs to be run.

• Keep communicating: Given the novel nature of such couples, it is critical to monitor together the situation, lest disagreements over a single task turn into arguments about the overall unfairness either or both partners feel.

• Cooperate and discuss fully money matters, for reversion to a traditional situation in which the highest earner makes all the decisions or fumes about expenditure will only lead to trouble — as is, reasonably, the case with all families, only worse.

• If you need it, get professional help, and sooner rather than later. A counselor can help sort out disagreements and restore the couple’s cooperative spirit.

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