The husband emailed me this earlier with the message, "Don't shoot the messenger" attached.
LONDON - Married men earn more than bachelors so long as their wives stay at home doing the housework, according to a report on Wednesday from Britain’s Institute for Social and Economic Research.Academics Elena Bardasi and Mark Taylor found that a married man whose wife does not go out to work but is primarily responsible for the cooking and cleaning earns about 3 percent more than comparably employed single men.
But that wage premium disappears if wives go out to work themselves or don’t do most of the housework.
“It has been fairly well documented that married men earn more than single men,” Taylor, a labor economist, told Reuters.
“However, our research established the wage premium is related to the wife doing the chores,” said the academic who teaches at the University of Essex in eastern England.
He said analysis suggests there could be two explanations for the results:
A marriage might allow a husband and wife to focus their activities on tasks to which they are most suited. Traditionally, this would result in the man concentrating on paid work enabling him to increase productivity and in consequence his wages.
Taylor said another explanation could be that marriage may increase the amount of time a man has to hone work-related skills which could trigger higher wages.{...}
Have no fear, my devoted Cake Eater Readers, the husband will be live and well for quite some time. I can't shoot him: he's the breadwinner.
Heheheheheh.
All kidding aside, though, this doesn't surprise me one bit. I learned long ago that no matter what I did, or how brilliantly I did it, he will always make more money than me. While I don't dismiss out of hand the possibility that I, someday, could overtake him in the money department, I don't think it likely and it's simply because he has a different skill set than I do. I have a Liberal Arts---would you like fries with that?---degree; he has a Business---we need to be thinking about the P/E ratio---degree. He's also heavily interested in and has been working in IT for years now. I haven't. Hence, he's made himself highly marketable, whereas I haven't. It makes sense, then, to spend my time working on my stuff, whilst doing stuff around here to clear his schedule. While I'm sure some bra-burning, hairy-armpitted feminist thinks I'm subjugating myself to his will, that's not the case. It makes more sense, financially speaking, to maximize his potential and if that means taking care of the chores around the house, well, so be it. If the situation was reversed, it would make an equal amount of sense for him to take care of the chores.
What would interest me, however, is if someone did a study to see how marriage affected a woman's earning potential when her husband was the one to stay at home.
Posted by Kathy at June 22, 2005 01:35 PMKath,
Here's my question regarding this that remains unanswered:
Isn't it possible that said man earning a decent wage already, by right of experience, education, etc. earns enough that they can afford for the wife to stay home? Conversely, isn't it possible that lower wage earning man is less experienced, less educated, less intelligent, or less ambitious than married man?
I see too many obvious red flags to agree that this study was thorough. Your point about the woman wage earning and Mr. Housewife is apt. But I still say that the high wage maybe the cause of the stay-at-home wife, and not the effect.
Posted by: Phoenix at June 22, 2005 03:28 PMYou make a valid point, and certainly it's possible, but, just speaking from experience, this is a snake eating its own tail. I don't know that we'll ever know for certain what the cause and effect is in regards to this.
I haven't worked for going on five years. And, yes, one of the reasons I stayed at home to work on my writing was because we could afford it. But there were lots of things that I hadn't thought about before I did stay at home. And many of them are benefits. One is that the husband has time to relax in the evening if we're not splitting chores. This makes him more rested in the morning. Another is that I'm not spending money getting to and fro work, on work clothes, etc. I may not be earning a salary, but I'm also not jumping us into a higher tax bracket, either, hence we have a higher disposable income. I know plenty of women whose salaries simply pay the taxes on their husband's income. I also take care of the household errands, where maybe if he was working at a job and was single, he'd have to take time off from work to accomplish them and an employer would frown on that and would penalize him for it in performance reviews.
See what I mean about the snake eating it's own tail? A higher salary may allow a wife to stay at home, but it's what happens after that matters.
Posted by: Kathy at June 22, 2005 04:21 PM