More women are bringing home the bread.
The share of married women who are earning at least as much as their husbands has more than tripled in the last five decades. Now, wives are on equal or even greater financial parity in nearly half of U.S. marriages.
Husbands were the breadwinner in 55% of marriages in the U.S. last year, while 29% of couples earn about the same and 16% of wives make more than their spouse, according to a new report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.
“Women are gaining economic influence within their marriages,” Carolina Aragão, a Pew research associate and author on the latest research, tells Fortune. About 45% of wives are earning either the same or more than their husbands—nearly three times the rate it was in 1972, Aragão says.
Jessica Goldenberg is one of those so-called breadwinner wives. The Pennsylvania mother works as a part-time contractor in clinical research and earns about 65% of the family’s income. Goldenberg, who is comfortably upper-middle class, attributes at least some of the disparity to the fact that she’s in pharma and her husband is in academia.
When it comes to being the breadwinner, Goldenberg says it's not a sensitive subject with her or her husband, but it's a sensitive issue in the “outer world” thanks to other people’s perceptions.
She’s not wrong; about 48% of Americans believe married men would prefer to outearn their wives. Far less, 13%, report husbands want to earn the same as their wives, while only 3% of Americans believe men want women to earn more, according to a separate Pew survey of 5,000-plus U.S. adults conducted in January.
Although far fewer men are the sole breadwinner for their family these days, husbands typically still earn more. The median income for wives was about $35,000, while husbands earned $65,000 across all heterosexual marriages in 2022, according to Pew’s analysis of Census data. Only about 6% of marriages are headed by a wife who is the sole breadwinner.
Getting an education and having fewer kids has helped propel women’s ‘economic influence’
In the 1970s, husbands were the breadwinner in about 85% of U.S. marriages, according to Pew. In many cases, the husband was the sole provider. But as more women joined the workforce and two-income families became more popular (the share of husbands who were the sole breadwinner fell from 49% in 1972 to 23% in 2022), women’s financial contributions have increased.
Part of the rise in women’s earning power can be attributed to smaller family sizes across the board. As research consistently shows, birth rates in the U.S. have steadily dropped from the 1970s to 2022.
When women are breadwinners, they tend to be more concentrated among those who don’t have children, Aragão says. About 20% of married women without children out-earned their husbands, compared with only about 15% of married mothers. And the more children, the less likely women are to be driving the family income. Among couples with at least four children, 69% of the husbands were the sole or primary earner.
“When people have children, the division of home responsibilities becomes more gendered,” Aragão says, adding that the data shows women tend to do more of the caregiving and housework tasks than their spouses. Juggling more of those responsibilities can, of course, make pursuing career ambitions and higher pay more challenging.
Education is also playing a role in the rise of breadwinner wives. In more marriages now, women are more educated than their husbands, Aragão says. In fact, women have been out-educating men for quite a while now—women have been the majority of college graduates each year since the 1980s. And while that education boost hasn’t closed the gender pay gap, it has helped many women get into the workforce and boost their earning potential.
But working women are still carrying much of the household burden
Even when a married couple works equal amounts, their non-working hours are spent differently: Pew finds that married women tend to spend more time on household chores and childcare, while husbands spend more time on leisure activities. The only scenario where husbands devote more time to caregiving than their wives and evenly divide housework occurs when a woman is the sole breadwinner.
That is, of course, just an average and many couples like Goldenberg have a more equal split.
“My husband takes more of the household chores than me and an equal amount of the caregiving. When it comes to things like doctor's appointments, following up with insurance—that's where I put a large amount of time in,” she says.
“It’s refreshing,” she adds. “I see a lot of peers where they're working a full-time job and doing the majority of the housework and the childcare.”
Even when there’s more equity around the workload, it’s still tough to balance. Goldenberg went part-time after her son was born prematurely and, now at 4 years old, has special needs. “The state of childcare, the state of health care, a lot of it is really not great,” she says, and those challenges made it very difficult to work full-time and balance her son’s medical needs.
“The healthcare in this country makes it so that parents have to miss work if they have a child who has a lot of doctors/providers they see on a regular basis.”
Even simply getting a doctor’s appointment is a time suck for Goldenberg, as many Americans can attest. One of her son’s providers, for example, only books appointments for new patients at 8:15 a.m. on Wednesdays, which means if there are no openings, parents need to repeatedly call back. And that was just one of many doctors, specialists, and therapists.
Stepping back from her career to focus on her child’s health hasn’t hurt her financially, but Goldenberg is concerned that it may be detrimental to her long-term job prospects in terms of professional growth and opportunities.
But right now, Goldenberg says the move feels right. And if a potential future employer doesn’t understand that, then maybe it’s not the right fit anyway.
