Breadwinning Wives Alter Marriage Equation
By Amy Goldstein Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, February 27, 2000; Page A01
Susan Goldmark works on energy projects for the World Bank, putting in 11-hour days, shuttling to Latin America and drawing a salary in the top 2 percent of Americans' income. Her husband, Kai Bird, spends his days writing in the study of their Adams-Morgan house, working for years at a stretch on historical books that have earned favorable reviews from critics.
Praised as his biographies have been, Bird says, "my wife will be quick to point out that they don't sell." After 25 years of marriage, including 18 in which she has supplied most of their money while he has produced three books, "I might have a bestseller, and I'd still not be able to pay back the years of dependency on her."
Their lopsided economic relationship once would have been rare. But Bird has noticed that several of his male friends also have wives or girlfriends with paychecks bigger than their own. Economists have noticed the phenomenon, too.
In a striking rewriting of the age-old compact between husbands and wives, the proportion of couples in which the woman is chief breadwinner has been increasing so markedly that nearly one in three working wives nationwide now is paid more than her husband, compared with fewer than one in five in 1980. The trend is particularly pronounced among the most highly educated women, nearly half of whom have incomes higher than their spouses, according to the most recent federal data.
The financial attainments of this army of U.S. women--some 10.5 million earned more than their husbands in 1998--are, in turn, testing traditional gender roles in ways far more concrete than the feminist movement of a generation ago. According to economists, sociologists and couples themselves, wives' heightened wages have unbalanced other aspects of the equation of marriages: housework and child care, economic power, egos and expectations.
"This guy and I have worked out something that is very special for any kind of relationship--we each have areas we have expertise in," said Debra Judelson, a 48-year-old cardiologist in Beverly Hills whose husband never has held a full-time paying job, except for a stint when he was on her corporate payroll.
Judelson earns more than $300,000 a year. Over the years, her husband, AJ Willmer, has designed high-end stereo speakers, developed an early expertise in computers, won election to their local school board, invested her income in the stock market, and been the main parent in charge of raising their two daughters, now teenagers. They've been together since they were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"My male friends found it the most uncomfortable, and some found it disturbing," says Willmer, 45. "Almost none understood. . . . I've enjoyed my lifestyle."
"The wage-earner label," says Judelson, "has been more of a joke with us than anything else."
Wives' rising incomes are an outgrowth of underlying social changes since about the time Judelson's medical career began. According to Richard B. Freeman, a Harvard economist who has studied couples' earnings, these include a dramatic change in education habits (by the 1990s, U.S. colleges and universities were graduating one-fifth more women than men), combined with other well-known trends: women's increasing tendency to work full time, to divert little time away from their jobs to raise children, and to join an array of occupations that were dominated by men a generation ago.
The effects of these changes have been so widespread that roughly 30 percent of working wives of all ages--from their 20s to their 60s--are paid more than their husbands, according to Freeman's analysis of data from the most recent federal population survey.
Widespread as they have become, many couples nevertheless say that the new rules of family income remain out of sync with their ingrained notions of marriage. "In a place deep down inside that I don't like to visit very often," Goldmark, 46, says, "I think I expected him to earn more than me--and in some sense still [do] today."
She and Bird met in 1972 as student volunteers knocking on doors for George McGovern's presidential campaign. Married three years later, they traveled around the globe with backpacks and a typewriter, collaborating as freelance journalists. When they returned to the United States, she took a graduate degree and gravitated toward Third World development, while he edited and wrote for magazines before signing what seemed to be a lucrative contract for a first book, on Cold War figure John McCloy. He thought the project would take perhaps 2 1/2 years. It lasted a decade.
Today, Bird, 48, is the family cook and the "soccer mom" to their 7-year-old son, Joshua. His wife comes home from the office late and, often, tired. "Money can be a sore subject in any relationship," Bird says. "It's the one thing over all these years we've had serious arguments about. It forces us to be much more sort of partners than in traditional marriages where the guy . . . earns more money and makes all the big decisions. That just doesn't happen."
Women's earning power can demolish convention entirely. As Willmer, married to a well-paid cardiologist, points out, "I almost never have had the responsibility of having to report to work." More typically, though, wives' rising incomes are bending--but not breaking--the ways couples divide responsibilities.
Since the 1980s, for example, husbands have been doing more housework, but a housework gap persists. In couples with full-time jobs and no children, wives devote an average of about five more hours per week to chores than their husbands do, according to a 1997 national survey sponsored by the New York-based Families and Work Institute. In families with children, the gap for chores and child care widens to about 17 hours per week.
The more money wives earn, University of Washington sociologist Julie Brines has found, the more chores husbands tend to do--up to a point. Intriguingly, her work also suggests that couples are more likely to cling to traditional gender roles when wives' earnings disrupt the old balance too much: Once a wife's income actually surpasses her husband's, Brines has found, he tends to pitch in less and less at home the more money she makes.
Carolyn Moore, 53, has felt some of the domestic shift firsthand. The first member of her family to graduate from college, she was astonished about five years ago when she took a job as vice president of engineering at a small Rochester, N.Y., software firm--with a salary matching that of her husband, Paul, 55, who had spent decades working for Xerox. She was equally astonished one evening when she told her husband she was tired and he replied, "Well, you work as hard as I do."
"He'd never ever said that before," Moore recalls. "A little light went off in my head: 'Oh, now I make what you do, I work as hard as you do.' " And whether it was related to her rising income or not, Moore noticed that even before her husband retired in 1998 and they moved to Clayton, N.Y., he was starting to toss in loads of laundry without being asked.
"I'd say, 'I need to vacuum today.' " she remembers. "The next thing I know, he'd be doing the vacuuming."
The size of spouses' paychecks can be a delicate matter, because money, research has shown, traditionally has been an engine of economic power in many marriages, giving the biggest breadwinner the greatest say over family financial decisions. But now that main breadwinners more often are women, there is evidence they are not assuming the same power.
When men earn the most money in a family, research has shown, they typically consider their careers more important than their wives'. When women earn the most, on the other hand, they usually say their careers are "equally important" as their husbands'.
"I'm hyperconscious of not making the person who makes less money feel like they have less of a say," says Joanne Zmolnak, 31, an attorney at the law firm McKenna and Cuneo, whose salary is about three times that of her husband, a special education teacher and football coach at Montgomery County's Paint Branch High School. Her husband, Eric Sampson, 30, says, "My ego is not in need of any support from a paycheck. I'm happy to bring home a victory for one of our athletic teams."
Statistically, marriages in which wives bring in the most income are not significantly more likely to end in divorce. But Kathy Meyer, director of the Business Enterprise Trust, a national organization based in Palo Alto, Calif., that promotes corporate responsibility, says that the "financial disparity" with her ex-husband was "a major reason our relationship did not survive."
Her higher income "was so unusual at that time," recalls Meyer, 51, who married in 1971 and, together with her husband, enrolled at Stanford University a few years later to get an MBA. Armed with their degrees, he ventured into low-wage nonprofit work, she into well-paid corporate jobs.
"Consciously, we were feeling, 'Well, aren't we the pioneers?' " she says. But he was troubled by the teasing of his friends, and she felt she was shouldering too much of the burden. "We underestimated how we had been brought up and [the power of] traditional roles."
Yet even among couples such as Goldmark and Bird, who have friends in similar circumstances, women say their incomes are accompanied by unfamiliar pressures--pressures that traditionally have fallen on men. Goldmark is stimulated by her work at the World Bank. She knows the overseas trips she loves are easier because her husband is home with their son. Still, recognizing that his book advances and foundation grants can't cover their mortgage payments, she says, "I've always felt I don't have the luxury other [women] have not to have any income. I don't want to quit my job, but I'd like to have the option."
Bird shares her ambivalence. His work is satisfying. He knows his books make his wife proud. Yet, he says, "I'm frustrated at times at not earning more." Immersed in his latest book proposal, he thinks about how quickly he can get this next project written, how many copies it might sell. "I keep telling her my next book is going to be a bestseller. There's always hope."
Wives' Earning Power
A woman's age doesn't much affect her chances of being paid more than her husband, but how much education she's had makes a big difference.
Percentage of wives earning more* than their husbands
By age, in 1998
20-29: 31.4% 30-39: 31.0 40-49: 27.4 50-64: 28.0
By education, in 1998
Some high school: 24.4% High school grad: 22.8 Some college: 29.3 College grad: 35.5 Grad school: 43.5
*In hourly earnings
Number of wives earning more than their husbands, in millions (This chart was not available)
SOURCES: U.S. Department of Labor; Bureau of Labor Statistics; National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard University, based on data from 1999 Current Population Survey