What Happens When Men Marry Up

Women are 15 times as likely as men to become top executives in major corporations before the age of 40. Women are paid more than men in over 80 different fields, and a female investment banker’s starting salary is 116% that of a male. Men who have graduated from college, but stayed single, and who work full-time make only 85% of women with the same degree and marital status.These are the numbers cited by Warren Farrell in his new book, “Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap – and What Women Can do About It” (Amacon). Dr. Farrell, a self-proclaimed “masculinist” who made his first back splash in publishing with “The Myth of Male Power,” might be suspected of some fancy slicing and dicing of statistics. According to the Government Accounting Office, working women earn an average of 80 cents for every dollar made by men.But Mr. Farrell does have a point. Although on national average the pay gap continues, individually more and more women make more money than men.That means collectively more and more men are likely to marry women who bring home more bacon than they do. This shift in relative financial weight is bound to have some impact on a marriage. As the therapists say, how does it feel?When this therapist posed the question to one man whose wife had consistently out-earned him in the last decade of their marriage, he admitted sheepishly, “It’s the rare male that can deal with it appropriately without feeling diminished.”When men earn more than their mates, they tend to believe that a bigger paycheck entitles them to more power in financial decision-making. Women who make more money than their men typically vote for democracy in home economics.This doesn’t mean that the money personality each spouse was born and reared with changes with the balance in earning power. On the contrary. The way we regard money is forged in a highly resistant fusion of culture, family, and early life experience. One high-powered executive wife carefully peels the prices off the deli-wrapped ham and Swiss she pays for before her husband can inspect the packages. He was born and raised a comparison shopper. She was not.It is not only the male who may feel diminished when he marries up, or when unequal career trajectories land the wife ahead of the husband. It is just as likely that the wife has trouble accepting that the man she married did not turn out to be a knight cloaked in greenbacks or even a prince. Or if he was a prince, that he turned out to be a pauper. The truth is that many women still, in the deepest part of their unreconstructed hearts, would like to be saved more than they themselves want to save.At least financially. A joint project between the National Endowment for Financial Education and AARP studied women and money. Their “Money & Women Program Incubator” reached several conclusions: Women tend to feel more anxious about money than men, to the point of immobilization; they find it more difficult to manage their money; they are less prepared for retirement than men; and they are more conservative investors.Instead of saving money for the future, women tend to save people – their children, their friends, their parents. Women on average spend 10 years away from work for every year that men do – mostly due to pregnancy, childcare, and care giving. For every year a woman stays out of the workforce, it takes her five years to recover lost income, pension coverage, and career advancement. This time away from work is part of the real reason for the pay gap.These numbers are bound to change as women share some of the care giving and as they continue to enter lucrative professions. Women start nearly 50% of new businesses, one-third of all lawyers are women and women now form 50% of first-year medical school classes.Earning inequality in a marriage does impact the balance of power, albeit in a subterraneous and surprising way. Sometimes the influence is not so subtle. The father of one man whose wife out earns him two to one gave this advice to his son when he heard that the couple was bickering: “Do yourself a favor. Don’t fight so much, she earns more than you.”Ms. Bailey is a writer and therapist in New York. She can be reached at ebailey@nysun.com.

What Happens When Men Marry Up

What Happens When Men Marry Up

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