Romance recession? It's not lazy men, it's misalignment between earning power and other household contributions
The mismatch hypothesis
This week The Cut has an article (hat tip Stefanie O'Connell) about women paying for their boyfriends’ lifestyles, and hesitating to take their relationships to the next level as a result. From one woman with two jobs, and a boyfriend with none:
It wasn’t a big deal that he couldn’t buy Naomi dinner at Le Veau d’Or. But she didn’t like how he used money as an excuse to shirk basic responsibilities. He never planned dates and didn’t even get her a birthday present. “If you can’t afford something, write me a love letter,” she said. “He could have literally made me Kraft mac and cheese.” They talked about moving in together, but Naomi couldn’t justify the cost. “If I wanted to finance a human being,” she says, “I’d have a kid.”
While these men defend their lack of earning power by saying it’s part of their anticapitalist politics you might not be surprised by the twist that this does not extend to rejecting traditional gender roles. Later in the story:
While their boyfriends struggled to chip in for groceries, they also seemed strangely reticent to contribute in other ways—like, you know, doing the dishes or handling the laundry.
I have a paper about this called “Winning the Bread and Baking it Too.” In it, we advance the idea that the cratering marriage and birth rates around the globe are linked to an increasing disconnect between the relative earning power of men and women and their contributions at home. Before you yell at me, I am not saying that men are lazy! There has been a lot of hay made recently over a study by right-leaning family think tank IFS that shows moms and dads do roughly the same amount of total work in a household on average (hat tip Brian Page CFT™ AFC® Fair Play). I have some small quibbles with this conclusion, like that moms get consistently less leisure time, and although time sleeping for women has been increasing, I’d argue with “back to sleep” and extended breastfeeding that quality of sleep is probably way down, but I basically think the graph below is a reasonable representation of the average.
So what are we taking issue with in “Winning the Bread and Baking it Too”? It’s that this work distribution does not always appear to be well-paired with relative capacity. That is, women do much, much more home production whether or not they make more money. We’re currently revising the paper, and here is the latest “wow” graph. When you restrict to joint earners, the distribution of housework by gender in the household is almost the same whether or not the male or female partner earns more. As my coauthor said, “It’s like we just recolored the bars.” Women’s housework time goes down slightly when she’s the higher earner, due to outsourcing, but men’s doesn’t go up. We compare to gay and lesbian couples, who divide things much more equally (An earlier version of this graph launched my infamous joke that being a lesbian is an “evidence-based decision.”)
What we argue is that when men are not the higher earner, they are not contributing to the same degree at home as women who are the lower earner, which makes these particular types of relationships lower value. Again, the argument is not that men are lazy. Check out the frankly disturbing pattern in the graph below, where when a woman’s wage is 4 times that of her male spouse, he still works substantially more hours than she does (shown in the right panel, while the left shows housework hours).
He’s working hard, just potentially at the wrong thing! If your wife earns 4 times as much as you, being at the office 45 hours a week is an own goal for the family! Doing the dishes so she could pick up an extra shift would make the whole household better off. (We show this is even true for couples who are both hourly workers, where this kind of schedule adjustment would be possible.)
We think this might be linked to both the “romance recession” and “baby bust.” For many women, those who can expect their potential husband to still earn more money than them, marriage might still be a “good deal” even if he doesn’t do all that much at home—he’s making up for it in his contribution to market work. But, for women in marriage markets where their potential husbands might earn less than them, it doesn’t add up as much. We show this directly in the paper by looking at different ethnic groups in the US, and showing that when women earn more and ethnic norms are that men don’t contribute to housework, marriage rates decline.
My econ hero Claudian Goldin has a working paper out this month that gives a great name to this phenomenon: mismatch. The issue isn’t men on average—the issue is the specific men who aren’t able to contribute sufficient earning power to have a more traditional division of labor, but also aren’t willing to violate gender roles and restock the sponges or meal plan. I’ll let Claudia put it more bluntly:
What else?
Have you gotten your copy of Stefanie O'Connell’s The Ambition Penalty yet? Packed with data and ways to change the old, tired conversation we have about women and work.
I saw The Odyssey and loved it, and want to do a deep dive with anyone who wants to talk. But, my wife convinced me to see it with our 9yo in a 4DX theater. Have you tried one of these things yet? They are insane. We were stuck on the boat with Odysseus and crew. If you’ve seen the movie or tried a 4DX theater please share your thoughts! I was haunted by the message of how individual greed can break the very fabric of cooperative society, and enjoyed my friend Natalia Antonova 🇺🇸🇺🇦’s take about the Laestrygonians.
If you’re going to be at the Academy of Management, I’m going to be participating in a panel on “What’s next?” in academic careers. Please say hi! There’s also going to be a great panel on writing a trade book with fellow academic authors Katy Milkman, Dolly Chugh, Katina Sawyer and others!
What’s bringing me utility today?
My one-year-old lost her Aflac duck that was wearing an “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports” t-shirt. We’re big women’s sports fans in this household, so we told our friends at Stoop Pigeon PHL where we’d gotten the duck originally to see if they had any extras. They put out a call for help on instagram, and the next thing we knew THE DAWN STALEY recorded a video for my daughter promising her a new duckie. We DIED. Aflac and Togethxr sent us a package that, in addition to the “Everyone Watches” duck included this duck dressed up like Dawn Staley. Cutest conclusion ever to a missing stuffy!
I’m Dr. Corinne Low, an author, economist, and professor. I teach at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. If you liked this post you might like my book: Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours. Thanks for reading Femonomics, and I hope you find your “All.”
I loved the ambition penalty.
One fun caption of Figure 2 (ATUS bar graph): Underpaid women significantly outperform husbands in understanding comparative advantage.