The Persistence of Wives' Income Advantage

Recent reports using cross-sectional data indicate an increase in the percentage of wives who outearn their husbands, yet we know little about the persistence of wives' income advantage. The present analyses utilize the 1990 - 1994 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (N = 3.481) to examine wives' long-term earnings advantage. Although a significant minority of women outearn their husbands in 1 year, considerably fewer do so for 5 consecutive years. The presence and persistence of wives' income advantage vary by demographic characteristics, economic and human capital measures, and over the individual and marital life course. The findings suggest caution in interpreting women's relative economic gains as signaling absolute progress toward eliminating gender inequality within marriages. Key Words: fairness and equality, family economics, income or wages, marriage and close relationships. In recent years, wives' earnings relative to their husbands have received considerable attention in both the popular press and academic research. Media outlets have been most interested in the subset of wives who apparently defy traditional family roles and earn more than their husbands (Conlin, 2003; Morris, Munoz, & Neering, 2002). Research reports using cross-sectional data indicate an increase in the percentage of couples in which the wife earns more than her husband (Bureau of the Census, 2003; Raley, Mattingly, & Bianchi, 2006; Winkler & Rose, 2001). Although such analyses reveal aggregate changes in husbands' and wives' relative income (defined here as wives' income as a percentage of couples' total), they cannot tell us whether individual couples retain the same earnings arrangement from year to year; that is, although wives may be increasingly likely to outearn their husbands in a given year, researchers know little about the extent to which individual women maintain this earnings advantage for a period of several years. The present analyses address the limitations of previous cross-sectional research on husbands' and wives' proportional contributions to total income by utilizing panel data to examine the persistence of wives' income advantage. Specifically, I seek to answer the following questions: 1. Does the apparent earnings advantage experienced by a growing proportion of wives persist over a period of years? How much does longitudinal data add to our understanding of wives' proportional contributions to couples' total income? 2. How do wives' short- and long-term income advantages vary by demographic characteristics, economic and employment-related factors, and key life course measures such as age, marital duration, and parental status? Recent decades have witnessed dramatic changes in men's and women's public lives. Women are now the majority of college and graduate school enrollees and degree recipients (Jacobs, 1996; National Center for Education Statistics, 2003). Among the candidates for the most sweeping change to occur in American society in recent decades has been the dramatic movement of women into the paid labor force. Whereas just 38% of women age 20 years and older were engaged in paid labor in 1960, over 60% were employed for pay in 2004 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005a). Moreover, the majority of female workers are employed full time (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005a), and women are increasingly represented in high-status occupations (Wootton, 1997). At the same time, men's wages have declined and polarized (Bernhardt, Morris, & Handcock, 1995), so that the gender wage gap-which held fairly steady at approximately 60% between 1955 and 1980-stood at 76% in 2003 (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Mills, 2004). These shifts in men's and women's employment experiences are changing not just the gender wage gap but the shape of American families. Dual-earner families are now the norm (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2002a), leading some, most notably Jacobs and Gerson (2004) (see also Moen & Sweet, 2003; Pixley & Moen, 2003), to assert the importance of studying working time and employment experiences from the perspective of families. …