timezonein: Women Making Money

“We’d joke about it,” said Jennifer, 39. “We made a lot of jokes about how it’s very common to find couples where you’ve got a lawyer and teacher, but usually it’s the other way around.”

For most of their relationship, Jennifer has been her family’s breadwinner. At home, while Jennifer prefers to clean, Brendan, 37, does all the cooking and even the sewing. They’re equally involved in raising their 3-year-old son. “I knew the choice I was making when I chose to get involved with Brendan,” she said. “I think we’re just comfortable with who we are."

Over the past year, a slew of highly publicized studies touting “the rise of wives” have confirmed that the Volks are a growing breed. In a fifth of marriages, wives now out-earn their husbands. More women are graduating from college than men. The workforce now skews female, and men have been hit harder by the recession, forcing women into the breadwinner role.

Several of these tipping points have been celebrated as a move toward greater equality and a boon for men, who gain more economically from marriage. And indeed, the Volks represent the best of these new norms—the ideal—with each spouse happily pursuing his and her preferred path. Yet almost three decades after Mr. Mom parodied such role reversal, many couples still struggle emotionally with their “new” identities, often in ways they’re ashamed to admit. Ways that society could better address, say marriage experts.

“A lot has changed in marriage and gender in the last couple of decades, but there’s still a sense—on the part of both men and women—that men should be the providers,” says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, housed at the University of Virginia. “We haven’t come to terms with the fact that we’re facing a whole new social moment, in which women are doing better than men are. We need to encourage men to find other outlets for masculinity.”

Recent research is troubling: Husbands with kids at home are 61 percent less likely to report that they’re “very happy” in their marriages when they work fewer hours than their wives, according to the National Marriage Project. Men who are economically dependent on their female partners are significantly more likely to cheat. And soon-to-be published research out of Stanford University reveals that male unemployment increases the odds of divorce.

“We haven’t come to terms with the fact that we’re facing a whole new social moment, in which women are doing better than men are.”

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Perhaps even more alarming, Kristen Springer, a sociologist at Rutgers University, has found that high-earning men in their 50s whose wives make more money than them suffer from more health problems. The reason, she believes? The “stress of expecting to be the breadwinner but not living up to this ideal.”

While few comparable studies exist on female breadwinners, marriage experts report that women, too, experience their share of angst when the stereotypical roles are reversed. Deep down, even many professionally driven women feel that opting out is a “birth right, or something they’re entitled to,” says Joshua Coleman, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area and co-chairman of the Council on Contemporary Families. And they, too, cling to stereotypes about manliness.

With nontraditional families on the rise, by choice and by circumstance, these growing pains prove a threat to marriage. The question is: What separates the Sarah and Todd Palins from the Courteney Cox and David Arquettes?

Cornett added that there have been very few discussions between the city council and the Lingerie Football League, and that the league did not ask permission before making the announcement of its expansion on Tuesday.

“There are ways to go about these things, and they haven’t chosen the right way,” Cornett said.

He acknowledged that there are other avenues the league could try, but that he will not allow them to play at the Cox Convention Center or Oklahoma City Arena. He added that bringing the controversial league to the area would cause unnecessary issues.

“There are too many problems to list,” Cornett said. “There are so many that I don’t want to gravitate to just one.”

There seems to be a lot of problems with Cornett’s arguments as well, too many to gravitate towards just one. The inclusion of the Satanists is rather humorous (especially coming from the libertarians at Reason), but Cornett and OKC had no choice there. If they have leased the city facilities to other organized religions, then they would have been sued by the Satanists had they been denied. However, if the issue is that scantily-clad women will perform athletic maneuvers in public, well, that horse has already left the barn in OKC. In fact, even with its obvious prurience as a draw, the athletic value of the LFL seems to outstrip (pardon the pun) that of the Thunder Girls’ grinding.

The real problem, though, is that the LFL didn’t think to ask permission before deciding to locate its franchise in OKC. Cornett wanted them to spend money and create jobs “the right way” in his city, which apparently involves some sort of ring-kissing. That’s the real “nanny-state” issue in this story.

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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Women Making Money

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