[LST] Gender roles: When women dare to outearn men | The Economist

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Gender roles
When women dare to outearn men
Dec 18th 2012, 16:58 by C.O. | BERLIN
OF THE many glass ceilings constraining women's careers, one is
particularly important yet often overlooked: the wage of the husband.
In a new paper, Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica (both University of
Chicago) and Jessica Pan (National University of Singapore) show how
thick this ceiling really is.

In a country like America, in which men on average earn more than
women, it follows almost naturally that the wife often earns less.
However, the pattern of relative income of men and women at young(ish)
ages in a marriage is striking: there are many young couples in which
the wife earns slightly less than her husband, or just as much, but
far fewer as relative income reverses, that is, when the wife earns
more. And this pattern is not driven by older couples; the researcher
only use couples around the time of first marriage (22-34) for this
part of the study. Despite some progress in recent decades, the social
norm "men should earn more than their wives" seems to be alive and
well.

That is not only a curious fact; it has consequences, too. The
researchers show that women with the potential to earn more than their
husbands quit their job altogether more often than otherwise similar
women in comparable families. If they do work, they use their earnings
potential to a lower degree. That's bad news for the economy.

The paper offers some hints as to why women who could outearn their
husbands choose not to work at all, or to work less. For instance,
norms affect the division of household chores, but economically in the
wrong direction. If a husband earns less than his wife, she might
rightfully expect him to take on some additional responsibilities at
home. In reality, however, if she earns more, she spends more time
taking care of the household and their children than otherwise similar
women in comparable families, who earn less than the husband. One
wonders whether such women feel compelled to soothe their husbands'
unease at earning less.

For the couples themselves, the dynamic may be a problem. As long as
the woman earns less, her income does not cause trouble in the
marriage. Once she earns more, however, marriage difficulties jump and
divorce rates increase. Interestingly, it does not seem to matter
whether she earns only slightly more, or substantially more—an
indication that it is not female income per se, but the mere fact of
earning more, that causes trouble.

Economists may wonder why people with "rational expectations" enter
such a marriage at all. The answer is: many do not. The marriage
market, as economists bluntly call it, clears much less often in
regions in which more women have the potential to outearn men, the
paper shows.

The authors are careful not to overstate their conclusions. But even
if some of these results are merely descriptive, they point towards a
tricky future for the gender pay gap and for an economy that can
hardly afford to waste female potential. Norms are stubborn things.
Changing norms requires a long breath, and potentially the support of
targeted policies. One such policy could be a parental leave
exclusively for fathers (as in Sweden and recently in Germany), to
shift focus away from the male bread-winner model. But even these
policies take long to change norms. The marital glass ceiling may
prove the hardest to break yet.

* Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan (2012), "Gender
identity and relative income within households", forthcoming

Correction: This article initially said that the number of couples in
which earnings between partners are roughly equal drops rapidly with
age. In fact, couples in which men outearn women are much more common
at all ages.

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