CCF Research Director and eminent expert on the history of marriage, Stephanie Coontz reflects on the blurred meaning of marital status in Single or married: Does it really matter anymore?, an opinion piece for the Washington Post.
History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family Life
Brief: It’s Not Just Attitudes: Marriage Is Also Becoming More Egalitarian
By Christine R. Schwartz
Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
cschwart@ssc.wisc.edu
Husbands and wives who share similar levels of education now enjoy a lower risk of divorce than those in which husbands have more education—a trend consistent with a shift toward egalitarian marriages.
The prevailing view for the past several years has been that the gender revolution stalled in the 1990s. In that decade, there was a flattening or slowdown in many trends associated with progress toward gender equality: women’s labor force participation, women’s entry into male-dominated occupations, reductions of the gender pay gap, and egalitarian gender attitudes.
But recent research throws doubt on the conclusion that the gender revolution has stalled. Through the 1990s and 2000s, for example, one trend that did not slow was women’s increasing educational advantage over men.
This has created a major shift in marriage patterns: Men once tended to have more education than their wives, but it is now wives who have the educational advantage. This change in spouses’ relative education has been large: Only about 35 percent of couples married in the 1950s who had different levels of education were ones in which wives had more education than their husbands. For couples marrying in the late 2000s, the share had risen to over 60 percent.
And during the 1990s – the era of the stall in many trends – couples forming these marriages became less divorce prone. Up until the 1980s, marriages in which wives had more education than their husbands were more likely than other couples to end in divorce. But among marriages formed in the 1990s and later, this was no longer the case. Instead, couples in which wives have more education than their husbands are no longer at higher risk of divorce. And husbands and wives who share similar levels of education now enjoy a lower risk of divorce than those in which husbands have more education. This trend is consistent with an ongoing shift away from the breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage toward an egalitarian model.
Data on attitudes also suggest people are increasingly tolerant of relationships in which women have higher status than their male partners. In 1997, a Pew Research study found that 40 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “It’s generally better for a marriage if the husband earns more than his wife.” That percentage had dropped to just 28 percent in 2013. In addition, as the new paper by Cotter et al. shows, the 1990s may have been a temporary rather than a long-term stall in egalitarian gender attitudes.
But these findings provide no basis for complacency. Despite continued upward trends in some markers of gender equity, progress in one realm can be offset by the shoring up of male dominance in other realms. For instance, wives who outearn their husbands may compensate by deferring more to their husbands’ authority and doing more housework. (However, other research casts doubt on the finding that wives do more housework when they outearn their husbands, so the jury is still out on the issue.)
Finally, it is possible that, while wives’ educational advantage no longer appears to be associated with divorce, wives’ higher earnings are, despite the growing number of people who now accept the latter arrangement, in principle. Perhaps couples are now willing to ignore a wife’s educational advantage as long as her husband still earns more. In other words, the “line in the sand” that triggers a threat to men’s gender identity may have moved from a wife’s educational advantage to her earnings advantage. Research on the relationship between spouses’ relative earnings and divorce has been primarily based on marriages formed in the 1980s and earlier, and thus whether there has been change or stability in these relationships remains to be seen. But the attitudinal shifts in men’s stated tolerance for these relationships suggests that even the “line in the sand” for wives who outearn their husbands may be shifting.
The new findings suggest that the evidence for a stalled revolution may not be as uniform as it once seemed, but why the trends vary calls out for explanation. Social scientists are still exploring why some trends move together and others do not and what changes represent real progress toward gender equality and which are offset by compensation in other areas.
References
Cotter, David A., Joan M. Hermsen, and Reeve Vanneman 2011. “The End of the Gender Revolution? Gender Role Attitudes from 1977 to 2008.” American Journal of Sociology 117:259-289.
England, Paula. 2010. “The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled.” Gender & Society 24:149-166.
Gupta, Sanjiv. 2007. “Autonomy, Dependence, or Display? The Relationship Between Married Women’s Earnings and Housework.” Journal of Marriage and Family 69(2):399-417.
Ridgeway, Cecilia L. 2011. Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schwartz, Christine R. and Hon Han. 2014. “The Reversal of the Gender Gap in Education and Trends in Marital Dissolution.” American Sociological Review. 79(4):605-629.
Tichenor, Veronica Jaris. 2005. Earning More and Getting Less. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Wang, Wendy, Kim Parker, and Paul Taylor. 2013. “Breadwinner Moms.” Pew Research Center, Washington D.C. (May 29) http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/05/Breadwinner_moms_final.pdf, accessed 7/21/2014.
CCF Civil Rights Symposium: Women’s Changing Social Status since the Civil Rights Act
Overview: Women’s Changing Social Status since the Civil Rights Act
Remarks by Stephanie Coontz
Today the Council on Contemporary Families releases the third set of papers in a three part symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. The first two sets of papers described changes in America’s religious and racial-ethnic landscape in the half century since it became illegal to discriminate on the basis of religion, skin color, national origin, race, ethnicity or gender.
It’s appropriate that we turn last to how women have fared since passage of the Civil Rights Act, because the addition of the word “sex” was a last minute addition to the bill. Opponents hoped — and supporters feared — that threatening to make discrimination on the basis of sex illegal would kill the bill, and when it passed anyway, few policymakers took the sex provision seriously. Although the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission immediately moved to ban job ads that specified a particular race, it refused to do the same for the sex-segregated want ads that were the norm in 1964.
Not until 1968 did the New York Times eliminate its “Help Wanted: Male” and “Help Wanted: Female” sections of the newspaper, and not until 1973, in Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations, did the Supreme Court rule that printing separate job listings for men and women was illegal. Since then, however, the changes in women’s social status, legal options, and economic opportunities have been dramatic, as Max Coleman of Oberlin College describes in his report, “Civil Rights for Women, 1964-2014.”
As the Civil Rights Act was being debated, a Gallup poll found that only 55 percent of Americans would vote for a qualified woman for president. At that time, women made up just two percent of the U.S. Senate and less than four percent of the House of Representatives. Since then female representation has grown tenfold in the Senate and fivefold in the House. Today 95 percent of Americans now say they could support a female presidential candidate.
Things have changed in the home as well as the House. In 1970, one survey found that 80 percent of wives felt it was “much better” when “the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” Today 62 percent of all Americans, and 78 percent of young women, prefer a marriage where husband and wife share breadwinning and homemaking.
Women’s wages as a proportion of men’s have climbed steadily since outright wage discrimination was made illegal. In 1963, full-time working women earned only 59 cents for every dollar men earned. Today, women earn 84 percent of men’s hourly wages. Among workers ages 25 to 34, women’s hourly earnings are 93 percent of men’s. Nearly 40 percent of working wives outearn their husbands.
Women have also made impressive progress in entering high-status fields formerly dominated by men. In 1963, less than three percent of all attorneys and just six percent of physicians were women. Women held less than one percent of all engineering jobs. Today, almost one-third of attorneys and more than one-third of physicians and surgeons are women, and women occupy almost 30 percent percent of science and engineering jobs.
In 1964, not a single woman had served as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Today, women run 23 Fortune 500 Companies.
But women have not shattered the glass ceiling. In law firms, only 15 percent of equity partners and five percent of managing partners are women, and women comprise less than five percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. In her contribution to the symposium, “Dilemmas Facing High-Achieving Career Women,” Joan Williams (University of California, Hastings College of the Law) calculates that at the current hiring rate, “it would take 278 years for equal numbers of men and women to be CEOs.” Williams describes four distinct patterns of gender bias that high-achieving career women encounter.
Up until 1980, the average female college graduate, working fulltime, earned less than the average male high school graduate. That is no longer true, yet at every educational level, Coleman reports, women earn less than men with the same credentials.
Women in low-wage jobs and women who lack a college degree experience a lower gender wage gap than their more educated and affluent counterparts, but they are much more economically vulnerable, and they have been losing ground in relation to high earners of both sexes. Most women still work in traditionally female occupations, which pay less than traditionally male jobs requiring comparable skills. In fact, working-class jobs are as segregated today as they were in 1964. Women are more likely to live in poverty than men, and they constitute 62 percent of all minimum wage workers.
A key source of wage disparities and discrimination against women today is motherhood. In 1978 the Civil Rights Act was amended to make it illegal for employers to exclude pregnancy and childbirth from sick leave and health benefits. But the United States is still the only industrialized country that does not guarantee subsidized, job-protected leave for new mothers. As a result, many women are forced to quit or cut back on work when they give birth, creating a lifetime earnings penalty. Even mothers who do not cut back are regarded with suspicion by employers, who are less likely to hire such women, and, if they do, offer them lower wages than other employees.
Men do not face the same automatic discrimination when they become fathers — and some actually receive a fatherhood bonus — because employers assume that men, unlike women, will work even harder after they become parents. But new research shows that men face similar penalties to women when they request leave or flex time in order to meet their family obligations. This suggests that a future goal for equal rights advocates and pro-family activists might be eliminating discrimination on the basis of caregiving status as well as continuing the battle against racial, ethnic, religious, and gender bias.
For Further Information
For more detailed information about fifty years of changes in civil rights, read today’s papers papers (on civil rights for women and career women) in the CCF Civil Rights Online Symposium on Women’s Changing Social Status since the Civil Rights Act (links on right top sidebar). Stephanie Coontz was convener and editor of this symposium. The authors along with Stephanie Coontz are available for further information.
About CCF
The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.
The Council helps keep journalists informed of notable work on family-related issues via the CCF Network. To join the CCF Network, or for further media assistance, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Co-Chair and Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.
The Wrong Route to Equality: Men’s Declining Wages
By Heidi Shierholz
Labor Market Economist
Economic Policy Institute, Washington, DC
hshierholz@epi.org, (202) 775-8810
In the late 1970s, after a long period of holding fairly steady, the gap in wages between men and women began improving. In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement – more than a quarter of it — happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains.
With the exception of the period of labor market strength in the late 1990s, the median male wage, after adjusting for inflation, has decreased over essentially the entire period since the late 1970s. Between 1979 and 1996, it dropped 11.5 percent, from $19.53 per hour to $17.27 per hour. With the strong labor market of the late 1990s, the median male wage partially rebounded to $18.93 by 2002. It then began declining again; at $18.03 per hour in 2012, the real wage of the median male was 4.7 percent below where it had been a decade earlier.
This cannot be blamed on economic stagnation. Between 1979 and 2012, productivity – the average amount of goods and services produced in an hour by workers in the U.S. economy — grew by 69.5 percent, but that did not translate into higher wages for most men. Over this period, the real wage of the median male dropped 7.6 percent. This is a new and troubling disconnect: In the decades prior to the 1970s, as productivity increased, the wages of the median worker increased right along with it.
Furthermore, looking at the median wage understates the losses many men have experienced since the 1970s. For men with a high school degree, real wages have fallen by more than 14 percent. It is not the case, however, that men’s wages have fared poorly since the 1970s because men do not have the right education or skills. In the last 10 years, even workers with a college degree have failed to see any real wage growth.
Nor are men’s losses are due to women’s gains. The forces that were holding back male wage growth were also acting on women’s wages, but the gains made by women over this period in educational attainment, labor force attachment, and occupational upgrading, along with greater legal protections against discriminatory pay, initially compensated for adverse forces. In the last decade, however, women’s wages have also dropped.
Unlike the postwar period, when economic policy supported the expansion of good jobs, for the last 35 years, the focus has been on policies that were advertised as making everyone better off as consumers through lower prices: deregulation of industries, the Federal Reserve Board’s prioritizing low inflation over full employment, weakening of labor standards including the minimum wage, a “stronger” dollar — which costs manufacturing jobs by making our goods relatively more expensive around the world and imports relatively cheaper to US consumers — and the move toward fewer and weaker unions. The decline in unionization alone explains about a third of the rise in male wage inequality (and about a fifth of the increase in female wage inequality) over this period.
Together, these policies have eroded the individual and collective bargaining power of most workers, depleting access to good jobs. In other words, these policies have served to make the already-affluent better off at the expense of the rest.
Men against Women, or the Top 20 Percent against the Bottom 80?
By Leslie McCall
Professor of Sociology and Political Science
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
l-mccall@northwestern.edu
It used to be that the most economically successful women earned no more than the typical man, even when they had more education and held more highly skilled jobs. In 1970, the average woman in the top of the women’s distribution (between the 85th and 95th percentiles) made less than the average man who fell in the middle of the men’s distribution (between the 45th and 55th percentiles). The average female college graduate also earned less than the average male high school graduate.
But gender is no longer so predictive of earnings. Being at the top now outweighs being a woman. In 2010, high earning women made more than 1.5 times as much as the typical man.
This shift reflects the rising importance of socioeconomic status in determining life’s chances and complicates the struggle for gender equity. The equalizing effect of the Equal Pay Act and other measures that removed the most blatant forms of gender discrimination has been to some extent countered by the growing economic divide between the affluent and everyone else. As some women have made significant progress in breaking into the top tiers of business and the professions, they have pulled away from other women, and even from men, in the middle and at the bottom.
Recent attention to the extraordinary gains of the top one percent and to women’s underrepresentation among these titans of industry can sometimes obscure the divergence in the economic and broader life experiences of women.
Although we do not yet have reliable information on the gender breakdown of the one percenters, we do know what’s happening among the rest of Americans. Since 1970, when my analysis of the March Current Population Survey begins, women’s earnings at the top grew faster than those of men at the top in every decade. For instance, in the decade from 2000 to 2010, these women’s earnings grew 14 percent while men’s grew 8.3 percent, among full-time workers. These elite women are making strong absolute gains, even as they face obstacles to keeping up with men of the same qualifications, who started their gains from a higher base.
By contrast, the median earnings of full-time women workers were flat over the last decade, just as they were for men. This marks a historical reversal of the healthy gains in earnings of nearly all women for the past several decades.
My analysis of a larger group of women in the middle (between the 45th and 55th percentiles of women’s distribution) and at the bottom (between the 5th to the 15th percentiles) shows that the earnings of both groups lag considerably behind those of women at the top. As Figure 1 shows, inequality among women is steadily marching upwards. It closely tracks the more well-known rise in inequality among men.
In short, with most of the growth in women’s earnings concentrated among top earners, the benefits of gender equality have been uneven. And the majority of women are now beginning to face some of the same kinds of economic challenges that have hampered the economic progress of men over the past quarter of a century.
The advantages of being a top earner are spilling over into advantages in family life as well, in two principal ways. First, as the marriage rates of most women declined, the average marriage rate of women with high pay increased — from 58 percent in 1980 to 64 percent in 2010. The most economically successful women are now more likely to be married than are other women, whereas the reverse was true in 1970.
Second, top-earning women often form dual-income households with top-earning men. So high-earning women and high-earning men double their earnings advantage when they marry, while the lower the earnings of a woman, the more likely she is, if she is married at all, to be with a low-earning man. The rise of income homogamy in marriage reinforces the widening gap in earnings.
As Figure 1 shows, even in 1970, inequality among women was nearly as high as it was among men. But for those concerned about gender discrimination this fact was overshadowed by the high degree of gender inequality. Today, we have a more complex mixture of trends toward gender equality and socioeconomic inequality. Women in the top echelons of society are improving both their economic and family status. But socioeconomic inequality is beginning to undercut the economic progress of large numbers of women.
Sexual Mystiques – Do we still like it old school?
Americans have rejected most of the stereotypes and double standards that prevailed 50 years ago. Very few relationships are organized on the principle that men and women are opposites, with totally different capabilities, needs, and duties. We no longer believe that a happy marriage requires a man to be the breadwinner and decision-maker and the woman to take care of all the emotional and nurturing work.
But the last bastion of the feminine mystique may be a sexual mystique. Like the feminine mystique before it, the sexual mystique relies on the fantasy that men and women live in different worlds, and that these differences must be maintained for everyone to be turned on and sexually satisfied. According to this mystique a happy sex life requires a macho man who is in control and a woman who is charged up with desire, yet submissive and teachable.
Think about the appeal of Fifty Shades of Grey, seen by many as a daring exploration of up-to-date, high risk sex. In fact, the domination/submission theme in the book not only misrepresents BDSM (bondage, discipline/dominance, submission/sadism, masochism) communities, but is based on a very traditional sexual script: man in charge, woman submitting. The protagonist’s turn-on is that the bright, feisty, but innocent young heroine submits to him; hers is that this dangerous, powerful, commanding man will eventually take care of her. From the sexual mystique point of view, Fifty Shades isn’t kinky or risky at all. Instead Fifty Shades’ link to sexual fantasies is safe, familiar territory, catering to very old fashioned anxieties and desires.
These mystiques linger in real life as well. On the one hand, research shows that men and women are much more likely to share housework than in the past and that sharing makes their marriages happier. But a new study from Julie Brines and colleagues looked at what kind of housework couples share, in terms of “feminine” or “masculine” tasks (think doing the dishes versus mowing the lawn). They found that men and women who share housework in more traditional ways seem to have more sex than those who share housework without regard to traditional notions of what are men’s versus women’s tasks. In other words, these new-school housework-sharing couples found that following old-school gender scripts fueled their old-school sexual scripts.
Other social science research tells us the same story. Despite the significant decline in the double standard about the desirability of virginity for women over the past 50 years, Paula England and colleagues found that among college students, there is an orgasm double standard. Men have more orgasms than women in straight couples, and this is especially true early on in the relationship.
Pepper Schwartz and her colleagues surveyed 70,000 people about their relationships for their just-released book, The Normal Bar. They found that although the sexual fantasies of men and women were more similar to each other than in the past, men still reported more active fantasy lives, with a third more men than women imagined seeking another partner if they could. Times have changed since the 1980s, when Schwartz found that men were threatened when women initiated sex “too much.” But even today, sexual fantasies of freedom and pleasure still bear traces of traditional gender stereotypes.
The old feminine mystique has been banished from most homes and workplaces. But it still remains in the bedroom. People should not be judged for their sexual fantasies, but if we could bring our sexual desires more in line with the equality and flexibility we now expect in other aspects of our relationships, we might reduce some of the frustrations and misunderstandings in contemporary relationships. Ultimately, attitudes towards sexuality and gender are changing, and this is something that should be lauded.
