{"id":1517,"date":"2018-08-06T07:00:40","date_gmt":"2018-08-06T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/?p=1517"},"modified":"2018-08-06T07:00:40","modified_gmt":"2018-08-06T11:00:40","slug":"gender-norms-are-hard-to-change-when-women-earn-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/gender-norms-are-hard-to-change-when-women-earn-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender Norms Are Hard to Change: When Women Earn More"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tI remember when my spouse and I decided to move in together and share our lives. Both self-employed, we agreed that I would be the primary breadwinner while he fixed up our house and got a new business started. Then one night his mother called to chat, and his father shouted loudly from the background, \u201cTell that bum to get a job!\u201d My partner struggled to keep his composure for a few hours afterward. His father had pulled the \u201cman card\u201d to make it clear that a real man would never let himself be financially dependent on a woman.\nTara Siegel Bernard of the New York Times<\/em> notes<\/a> that gender roles in the United States have become more egalitarian over the past half-century. She points out that women now outnumber men in college and collect more degrees. In addition, the number of women earning more than their husbands in opposite-gender relationships has been slowly rising, and men are taking on more responsibility at home. Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times<\/em> supports<\/a> these observations with statistics from a recent study by the Census Bureau, which shows that about one-quarter of women now earn more than men in opposite-sex couples in the United States, up from 18 percent in the 1980s. However, both authors point out that despite these shifts, certain gender-role expectations persist.\nMiller cites a recent study from the Pew Research Center that shows<\/a> 71 percent of people surveyed say that to be a good husband, men should be able to support a family. Only 32 percent said the same about women as wives. Bernard concludes that we have held on to the idea that men are supposed to provide but have loosened up on the idea that women have to be homemakers. One indicator of the stickiness of gender roles is reflected in the discomfort women and men feel about women earning more. Miller reports that in the Census Bureau study, in opposite-sex marriages, women understated what they earned while men overstated their earnings. The researchers called this \u201cmanning up and womaning down.\u201d\nMiller notes that the Census Bureau report had some other surprise findings about the 23 percent of couples in which women earn more:\n\n\n