The New Female Breadwinners – Celebratory Boon or Involuntary Boom?

By Gigi DeVault (Munich)

If Betty Friedan first showed women through a “room with a view” in the 60s, a Pew Report released this month has ever so gently closed the door to that room as well. The Pew report, The New Economics of Marriage: The Rise of Wives, explains why economic gains in marriage are now greater for men than they are for women. The number of men married to wives whose income and education exceed theirs has increased 18% since 1970.

Another gender trend reversal has been boosted by the current economic downturn; the employment of men has been hurt in this recession more than that of women, with men making up 75% of the decline in employment for prime-working-age Americans in 2008. If we call this phenomenon, where three out of every four people thrown out of work have been male the mancession, what tag can we hang on its corollary? According to the Economist, “within the next few months women will cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce.” Betty Friedan might have said it is about time. The Economist says this “quiet revolution” is a reason to celebrate.

An increasing number of women step across their thresholds in the morning, gamely suppressing any show of guilt or relief, having outsourced or insourced traditionally “female” household duties. If they are the primary breadwinners for their household, they may wave goodbye to a beloved husband or partner, who stands immobilized by a toddler tugging on a pant leg or an infant testing the burp pad draped over his shoulder. How couples feel about these arrangements depends on a number of variables, not the least of which is whether an implied contract between them has been violated.

Implied Contracts: Your Deal Or Mine?

The stock market crash in 1987, followed by the slide into the savings and loan debacle, generated readership for a book published the same year: When Smart People Fail. As unemployment soared, the implied contracts that corporate America made with hundreds of thousands employees became meaningless. As the authors of When Smart People Fail explain, implied contracts are not just the stuff of organizational psychologists.

“When a couple share a household, they strike an implied contract—a basic deal that determines who gives what and who gets what. This deal has both economic and emotional facets.” Over the course of a long-term relationship, most couples experience disruption to their implied or psychological contracts. Couples who are able to re-negotiate their contract usually navigate past the inevitable bumps and get on the road to a new deal.

But when both the economic and emotional parts of an implied contract unravel, it can be very difficult to get back on course. The authors of When Smart People Fail completed 176 in-depth interviews with once successful people to verify this phenomenon: “Both success and failure are equally disruptive to relationships insofar as they violate the couple’s implied contract.” How women interpret their stories as breadwinners may spring from how they come into these roles.

Doing the New Math – When Daycare Doesn’t Pencil

When small children are part of the equation, the case can readily be made for one partner to provide childcare at home. The breadwinner hand is typically dealt to the partner who earns the most and can provide health insurance benefits.

With the birth of twin boys, the number of children in Brian and Cynthia Walder’s household doubled instantly. Cynthia kept her job in marketing with an insurance firm. Brian quit his job in order to stay home with the children. “It was stressful,” he said. “If you’d asked me five years ago would I be in this spot, I’d say ‘No way.’”

Under the title “She Works. They’re Happy”—in the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times—a photo of the family depicts a convivial huddle of young, smiling faces that could be a poster for the stay-at-home-dad lifestyle.

A planned change—even one that occurs during the last months of pregnancy—affords a couple time and space to work on a redraft of their implied contract and begin the adjustment to their shifting responsibilities.

However, Andrea Doucet, a sociology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, author of Do Men Mother and a forthcoming book entitled Bread and Roses – and the Kitchen Sink, indicates that changing roles is “not as easy as you’d think it would be. You can’t just reverse the genders.” It’s complicated, to say the least.

The challenges of arranging and rearranging parenting and professional roles is not well-represented by the proverbial balancing of the scale; a better metaphor might be to imagine crossing an ice flow in the spring—while a couple can try to map out a plan, they had best be prepared to respond to the continual shifting underfoot. As explained by an executive in the financial services industry, who prefers anonymity:

“My husband is a full-time stay-at-home dad, so the hours of 8 to 5 were supposedly mine. I was challenging to not respond when our son was crying for food or a diaper change during those first few months. The hours of 5:00 to 8 pm during the week are my opportunity to be with our son, as are the morning hours of 4:30 am (yes, he gets up at 4:30 am!) until I leave for the office. That’s not a lot of time. I also travel for work to various spots around the country. It is difficult to be gone, but knowing that my husband is taking such good care of our son makes it much easier. I have had people on the plane give me a dirty look—one older woman actually scolded me—when I revealed that I had a baby at home and here I am, out on business. From that perspective, it is isolating. I only know of one other mom who is in my situation—and her kids are 4 and 13.”

Dr. Doucet studies couples in the U.S. and Canada in which women are the primary breadwinners. Her Breadandrosesproject.ca includes an online forum where women are invited to comment. One contributor, Jennifer Flory, Jennifer E. Flory, Ph.D., Esq., a Chicago patent attorney wrote:

“I guess my husband and I never really planned for our roles, they just sort of evolved this way. My husband was a successful manager of an IT department… I was a second year associate at my firm when I got pregnant…neither of us liked the idea of someone else caring for our child while we both worked. Moreover, I had a demanding job and could not be relied upon to consistently pick up our son from day care, etc. It also came down to who made more money and whether we could survive on one income. So, when our son was born, my husband quit his job. Quite unexpectedly, when my son turned a year old, we found out that I was pregnant again…with twins. We now have 3 children under 2 and, needless to say, my husband’s job is way more demanding than mine. So many diapers! We’re still working out logistics, but it’s getting easier…I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

When Is Turn-about Fair Play?

When a woman unexpectedly becomes a de facto breadwinner, as many women have in this recession, she experiences the daily pressure of providing for her family, capped by the emotional impact of a forced detour from the couple’s original life plan. The impact of becoming a breadwinner as a result of a change in her partner’s status is conditioned by the original implied contract between the couple. The authors of When Smart People Fail wrote, “In general, a woman’s success is more disruptive to the relationship than her failure, and a man’s failure is more disruptive than his success.”

Onto this 1980s based aphorism, overlay the effects of the mancession which, when it reaches into a household, can set up just this sort of double-whammy. Mutually held expectations may be dashed, dreams may no longer be aim stars, and the “currency” of emotional support may have changed hands. “It can be frustrating. I always dreamed of being the soccer mom who did not have to work outside the home and instead I spend all my time focused on work and keeping the roof over our head and food on the table,” said a business executive who asked be anonymous. “It can be draining to a woman’s spirit when she feels that she is alone and does not have the support and security men traditionally brought to the home.”

It is difficult to separate the economic and emotional contracts that are formed in a relationship, but if a couple is able to do so, they may find it easier to adjust to changing situations. In a society that increasingly promotes flexibility, partners can position themselves to be better able to enjoy their successes and to feel less threatened by their failures “by valuing the emotional contract quite apart from the economic contract.” This greater ease with each other and the changed economic roles of partners has had a positive effect; social research attributes these changes to happier, longer unions. As Stephanie Coontz, director of research and education for the Council on Contemporary Families and author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, said, “Women no longer need to marry up educationally or economically, so they are more likely to pick men who support a more egalitarian relationship.”

A flexible attitude can help couples figure out the day-to-day logistics, and just maybe how they can have it all without doing it all. The financial services executive whose son is now nearly two years old, writes:

“I still am the sole breadwinner for our family and that brings a huge feeling of responsibility. My status quo as of late has been work from 7:30 or 8 am until 5 pm. Go home. Have quality time with our son. Bathe him, put him to bed. Then log back online and work. That way I can feel like I’m able to address all of my work responsibilities and keep things moving forward. It is exhausting and I’m trying to figure out how I can get some more balance in my life. I’ve never had second thoughts or doubts though. I really enjoy what I do, and I feel that being able to do that allows me to enjoy my time with family more. My husband loves being a stay at home dad. This year, my focus is really going to be on how I can get some ‘me’ time without feeling guilty.”

We have only to watch a segment of Mad Men, the television drama about advertising executives in the early 1960s, to gain perspective on the most amazing social change of the times—“a change that affects the most intimate aspects of people’s identities has been widely welcomed by men as well as women.” Where women were once coerced by the business world into choosing between children or a career, they are now heading some of those very same firms that treated women as disposable workers. President Barack Obama spoke about the shift of power from men to women, telling the New York Times that construction and manufacturing “will constitute a smaller percentage of the overall economy,” to such a degree that, “Women are just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than men are today.”

What would Betty Friedan say? When she wrote her seminal book on the captive lives of women in suburbia, a phenomenon like the “rise of wives” could only have been a twinkle in her eye.