When women have less time available for household tasks because of long hours on the job, they attend to their own health issues and reduce their attention to reminding their husbands of their health responsibilities, the study found. At the same time, the husbands fail to assume this responsibility for themselves. As a result, if a wife works more than 40 hours a week, her husband's chance of being in good or excellent health declines by more than 25 percent over a three-year period. Men Lack Childhood Training Existing literature on health behavior of men and women suggests that boys are taught counterproductive health habits, ignoring obvious signs of injury and illness, and engaging in risky behavior, Stolzenberg explains. All these things are not great for health.
Girls get a lot of training in taking care of themselves and others.
So, a woman who is working very long hours still has exposure to all of her skills and training in these areas. But when she's at work, her husband doesn't have exposure to this training. Working Wife's Impact Stolzenberg says that based on volumes of existing research, he hypothesized that there are three basic mechanisms by which husbands and wives affect each other's health. One is assistance in health maintenance. It's the encouragement for good health habits, Stolzenberg says.